Financially savvy kids are future leaders!
The PBS cartoon "Arthur" that aired when we were kids had some real life lessons to teach us, and we never really appreciated it.
I have been wanting to address an important part of my professional life on this blog, but I've never found the appropriate time to do so. I'll get more into the details of how I
Metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, alliteration, hyperbole, personification, and more!
If you've ever considered adding reader's theater to your reading block but thought it would be too much work, check out this guest post from Sarah Wiggins!
This blog post explores innovative and engaging lesson plans for any novel unit... ranging from task cards to book instagram pages to a novel podcast project. Student choice is key here, and students can find something they would like to complete in order to convey their reading, comprehension, and
Read Who is that describing people esl matching exercise worksheet by classmateterrero on Issuu and browse thousands of other publications on our p...
In today's post, I'll share 10 quick, meaningful “follow-up” activities that you can use in your guided reading lessons - all materials are FREE!
These online tools and poetry collections provide guideposts and inspire children to write and read poems in a broad range of styles.
You spend hours marking and commenting on student work, and then they don't even read your feedback. The solution is all in how you time it.
Anchor chart inspiration for elementary teachers. Use my Not-So-Pinteresty Anchor Charts for Reading, Math, Grammar, and Writing.
Wondering how to teach contractions to your child? Teaching contractions might seem complicated, but these helpful tips can make this concept easy to teach!
This is a great activity to practice reading comprehension. Students read the statements, look at the picture and determine whether the statement is true or false.
Teachers like starting the school year feeling well-prepared and confident. Read about 5 Strategies for a Solid Start to Your School Year
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In this blog post, read about my best teaching strategies to teach writing narrative endings. Grab all the freebies to help you teach.
It’s always so much fun listening and watching our young readers figure out those “longer” words. Many of our little ones are pretty solid decoding one-syllabe words and are now ready to learn strategies for decoding multisyllabic words. So, really, what is a syllable? Simply put, a syllable is a unit of pronunciation containing a […]
It's that time of year! Magic e! I love teaching my kids about the magic e because it means they have really grown as readers! I know th...
Whether your little one is a new reader or into their own chapter books, starting your own book club for kids is easy with these tips and tricks!
All students want to feel part of their classroom community. Here are four activities to help them feel welcomed and comfortable.
Cultivate lifelong reading skills.
Learn about the three branches of government with this worksheet as you search the Constitution to color code the powers of each branch.
Books Are Friends That Never Leave
I'll reveal an embarrassing fact about myself. The people that work at the print counter at Office Max know me. I'm mean really know me. I coached the new guy on how to find the right barcode in his binder, so I could check out the last time I went. (Yesterday.) As in, they even recognize my husband because I send him over there a bunch to pick stuff up for me. (I have a nice husband.) I'm at the print counter at Office Max waaaaaay too often. Here's the thing, though. You know how you see a poster at the teacher store, and it's almost what you want? And you're thinking to yourself, "Gosh, if it just said _____________ instead, it would be perfect!" This happens to me often, especially with writing. We use Lucy Calkins' Units of Study for writing, and let me tell you, there are no Lucy Calkins teaching posters at Lakeshore. Yes, I could make it on chart paper. But I can't. Because I expect my posters to look like this: I Do, We Do, You Do The First Grade Parade Working for the Classroom The Inspired Apple And they never do. Ever. So what's an OCD girl to do but make them herself on the computer? If you have the newest version of Word, you can do some snazzy stuff. Check out this post I read on Teaching Blog Addict that tells how to use Word to make a blog button: Blog Button in 3 Tutorials. You can make some good looking graphic work. I didn't know about all this business in the newest Word, but I do have Printshop. I even recently downloaded Photoshop Elements. I love it, but it's a bit of a time commitment to figure it out. So go create your 11x17 file in one of these programs and get to the next step. Moving right along. At Office Max or Office Depot, you can upload a file to their website (or bring in a flash drive), and they'll print out an 11x17 color poster on nice, glossy card stock for you. For less than $2. Seriously. It works like this: After that, you put in your name/number/etc. and then select which store you want to pick it up from. Office Depot's process works EXACTLY the same, except you also have the option to pay online. I'm sure Staples has something similar. Sadly, no Staples near me. Try it out for yourself! Here are two posters I've made: Plot Poster Love **To download, click on the name of the file (shown above the image). The link will open and just click download. Voila! Happy poster making!
Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!
Cultivate lifelong reading skills.
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