Spread the Sunshine!

I briefly mentioned Sunshine Notes before.  Now, here's some more!  (Do you like my rhyme? :p)

One of my fabulous grade-level teammates gave me this idea and the slips for it.  Big thanks to her!

This pic certainly wasn't taken on a Friday.  That thing is overflowing by Friday!

When I introduced Sunshine Notes, we talked about how they are a way to say thank you when someone has filled your bucket and a way to fill other's buckets.  We also talked about how specific things fill our buckets better than "you're nice" or "you're a good friend" and brainstormed some specific things.  For the most part, the kiddos are writing great, detailed notes.

Writing Sunshine Notes is one of their options when they finish work early.  We read some Friday afternoons and then just pass the rest out. The kids leave clutching their Sunshine notes like they are made of gold! It is such a great note to end the week on.   I'm keeping a close eye out for students who consistently aren't getting any, but so far no kiddo has gone more than one week without getting at least one.

I love how much classroom community this builds with such a small amount of class time used!

Writing Wednesday - Snapshots, Talkshots, and Thoughtshots

Since I love writing so much and feel like it is one of my strongest teaching areas, I'm going to try to regularly write about what we are doing in writing.  I already posted a bit about writing here.

In my district, we don't have a set writing curriculum.  It's a bit of a hodgepodge, do-what-you-want sort of thing.  Our Language Arts curriculum, Treasures, has writing in it.  A few years ago (before I was there), they did 6 Traits of Writing trainings.  I have the materials they got at the trainings.  We each have a teacher's edition and half a class set of Write Source.  Using any of these as the set curriculum  does not prepare students at the right time of year for the three district-wide writing assessments and certainly won't get our 4th graders ready for the state writing test in March.  

So we just do what we want, basically.

Right now, we are working on narratives.  Our first district assessment, which is mid-October (yikes, that's soon!), is fictional narratives, but we start with personal narratives and then move into fiction because it's easier for kiddos to put details in about something that has really happened.

Last week and the beginning of this week, we worked on Snapshots, Talkshots, and Thoughtshots.

For each one, my lesson went the same way:

1.  Read a published example from books most students know (Harry Potter and Rick Riordan books to the rescue!).  

2. Have a class discussion about how they felt as readers (they make you feel in the story) and what kind of information they got from the excerpt. 

3. Take notes.  I do my notes under the document camera, and they copy.  We have a special section in our writing notebooks for notes.

4.  I model from the story I'm working on with them.  I pick out a scene from my Backwards S (our picture mapping) and then do think-aloud writing on the document camera.  I make sure to talk a lot about how I don't remember every exact detail, but I make up reasonable details.  They just watch and listen. Some try to give me ideas.

5.  I tell the students that when they get back from lunch, they will do what I just did from one of their own Backwards Ss. I remind them they need to come in silently.  

6. We have lunch.  I write a reminder of instructions on the board.

7. They come back from lunch, and 99% of them silently get to work.  It is far and beyond the best transition time of my day!

8. When writing time is almost over or I see them getting antsy, they share their work with someone.  We do elbow partners, face partners, stand up - hand up - pair up, and back partners on different days to mix it up.

9. The next day, we start writing by reviewing the most important things about a Snapshot/Talkshot/Thoughtshot to make our mini-poster for our writing wall.  I laminated these before hand and used whiteboard makers, so I'll just be able to erase and use them next year!

We're starting to get good at writing for longer and longer!  Half an hour is my goal for them!

I'm hoping we get through our full personal narrative unit in the next two weeks.  I think for fictional narratives this year, we'll write spooky stories to read on Halloween!

How do you teach writing?  Do you have a curriculum?

Math Strings

What are Math Strings?
They're groups of mental math problems that build on each other in some way.

How I Do Them:

• The kiddos sit "theater seating."  Everyone's chair faces foreword (which involves everyone moving their chair because of how my groups are set up) and they have nothing in their hands.
• On chart paper, I write a problem.
• When kiddos have an answer, they make a sign-language letter a, putting their thumb on their mouth (I don't know how to better describe it!)  This shows me they're ready and helps them to not blurt out the answer.
• I call on one kiddo for the answer and write it down, not saying if it's correct or not.
• I ask everyone if there are any other answers and write those down too.
• I call on kiddos to explain how they got their answer and record on the chart paper what they did, putting their name next to it.
• I have 3-5 kiddos give explanations.  The more difficult the problem, the more strategies I do.
• If the strategy I'm trying to get them to doesn't come up, I bring it up as my strategy.
• At the end, if I want them to know the name of a certain strategy, I tell them "what mathematicians call" the strategy some of them were using.  For example, "I want to teach you a new name for a mental math strategy.  Mathematician's call Kevin and Bryan's strategy compensation." (pointing to where I had written Kevin and Bryan's explanations earlier).

The blurred out parts are their names.  "M.F." means memorized fact.

Do you believe the kiddo who said 18 x 3 was a memorized fact?  No, me neither, but I still put it up!
At least no one said 48 x 3 was a memorized fact!

Although I knew about these last year, I only did it once or twice.  I'm doing them almost every day in math now and am getting FANTASTIC mathematical thinking from the kiddos!  

Bonus:  They LOVE it. The one day we didn't do it last week, they were asking why.  Every time I get their attention during math for a transition, they ask if it's mental math time.  I love the excitement!

Birthdays!

Outside of school, I LOVE birthdays!  In my house growing up, you had a birthday month.  Birthdays were big.

In the classroom, they tend to stress me out.  I think it's because I want to do so many academic things each day with the kiddos that taking even a few minutes for birthdays stresses me.

But, because I love birthdays, we still do a bit.

First off, I'm linking up with Blog Hoppin' for their Birthday Display Link Up.

Here is my display this year:

I love how all the different fonts look together.  I also adore the cupcake border that I inherited with my room.  I cut one strip up to go above each month.

I had originally planned to do the whole pictures of students holding up their birthdays for each month (I've seen it so many places, I don't know where to give credit!). But ... I didn't do it the first week because there were kiddos absent each day ...  the second week, I kept getting told I was getting new students in two or three days, so I waited ... and then it was Back to School Night, and I needed birthdays up, so I just wrote names and dates.  I'm sure some of you deal with that each year and still manage pictures, but it is very much not normal at my school!

 Each month's spot is big enough for a 4x6 picture, so I'm hoping to do that next year.

Our Little Tiny Celebrations:

• I write Happy Birthday, ________! on the board, and it stays up all day.
• They get a "birthday balloon pencil." My two kiddos who have had birthdays so far have been so excited with them!

I pick a pencil I think the kiddo will like from the literally hundreds of pencils in my prize box.

• We have a wellness policy that says no food for birthdays (yes, you read that correctly, not no unhealthy food for birthdays, NO food for birthdays).  If a kiddo wants to bring something, I have them pass it out as the bell rings at the end of the day.
• I usually have the class sing Happy Birthday, but I just realized we haven't for the two birthdays so far this year!  Opps!  One thing I learned from my wonderful cooperating teacher when I was student teaching was to ask the birthday kiddo if they wanted "cha-cha-chas" or not.  If they say no, no one is allowed to make those sounds at the pauses.  Most kiddos say yes, though, so the class goes crazy cha-cha-chaing at each pause!
• I also do "un-birthdays" for summer birthday kids on their half-birthday (or as close as we can get ... end of June's birthdays have their half birthdays during Holiday Break).  I will teach the kiddos part of the Alice in Wonderland Unbirthday song for us to sing (if I get on that singing thing again this year) and they will get an "unbirthday balloon pencil."

How do you celebrate birthdays?

Behavior Management

Natalie and Rachelle at What The Teacher Wants are hosting a behavior management linky.  I am so excited to link up because What the Teacher Wants was the first blog I started reading.  It is what introduced me to the wonderful world of teacher blogging! 

Last year, I felt like behavior management was my weakest link.

This year, I've put lots in place to make sure that doesn't happen again!

First, foremost, and number one is my clip chart:

Do you see the black clips?  Those two kiddos have already gotten to  Excellent Effort six times, so they got to take their old clip (now covered in six stickers) home and now have a black clip.  Next time, it will be a blue clip!  They are working toward the elusive glitter clip.  I know I got the colored clip idea from someone, but I'm not sure who. Let me know if it was you!

I didn't do a clip chart last year because I thought 4th graders were too old for it.  WRONG!  They love it, and it makes such a great impact.  The third day of school was first time I had a kiddo clip down.  Later that day, I told him he could clip up.  "Even though I clipped down before?" he asked.  "Yes!  You are making better choices now.  You're showing me you're ready to learn," I responded.  He happily clipped up and we had quite a while before our next issue (which is quite a feat with this kiddo).

I also have a class raffle, so sometimes I hand out raffle tickets.  I like to do this when kiddos are going above and beyond in some way, when a kiddo is already on Excellent Effort, but deserves another clip up, and with my math class (a partially different group of kiddos, so I don't have clips for everyone).  We pull raffle tickets any day that we are ready to go home before the bell rings.  It's a great way to make our afternoon routine go smoothly.

I am also going to start a class paper chain, but I haven't yet.  We don't seem to need it yet.  The paper chain will start at the ceiling and they will get a link when the whole class deserves a reward.  When it reaches the floor, we'll have a little celebration.

What do you use for behavior management?  Link up with Natalie and Rachelle to share!

Tell Me Something Good

I'm linking up with Rowdy in First Grade for her Tell Me Something Good Linky.  What a great reminder to focus on the positives, both at school and at home!

At School:
Well, just about everything about this class!  Their behavior is fantastic and when it starts to slip, I remind them that they can do better, and they do!  I think part of this is just the group of kiddos, part of it is better management on my part, and part of it is the classroom community we're building.  We have read and talked about being a Bucket Filler and have "Sunshine Notes" they can write to each other that we read on Fridays.  We're really starting to work as a team!

At Home:
I am making time for myself to read.  I stop working at least 20 minutes before bed and spend that time reading a book or magazine that is in no way, shape, or form school related.  Even this small amount of me-time is so much more than I did last year!

What's going good for you? 
 Link up with Rowdy in First Grade to share with us all!

Big Smiles and Writing Workshop

Big Smiles:

Even though I am exhausted at the end of the day, almost every day in our three weeks of school have had so many more great moments than bad.  I am having a fantastic year so far!  Great group of kiddos, and I know so much more about what I'm doing this second time around.  It feels great, and I can honestly say this year that I am LOVING being a teacher and am looking forward to work each day.  I am so happy!

Ok, so on to one of those great things going on in my classroom this year:  Writing Workshop

Now, I LOVE writing.  I was a creative writing major.  I was the kid with a notebook full of stories from the time I could write.  And this year's group (at least many) seem to be on that page with me.  Writing Workshop was the last part of our normal routine that I got going.  By Back to School Night, we had only done two days of writing and still about a third of my class wrote that it was their favorite part of 4th grade in their note to their parents.  My kind of kids!

I've been taught how to teach writing to kids by multiple people who have read and/or been trained in Lucy Calkins, so if you're familiar with her writing instruction, I bet you'll see pieces of it in mine!

We stared off making lists of important people, places, and events.  Lots and lots of lists.

Then we talked about Seed Stories and Watermelon Stories.  This lesson went FABULOUS!  They seemed to really get it, even my space-cadet kiddos!  I started by group brainstorming a description of a watermelon.  Then, I told them we were going to focus on two parts of it - that watermelons are big and have seeds (both of which were on our list).  I modeled the beginning of a boring watermelon story (it was about 2 minutes and we didn't even get to Disneyland in the story).  At this point, about eight kids were practically jumping up and down because they got it before I even talked about seeds.  So, I had one of them explain seed stories.  We wrote in our notes just a few things about seed stories and then worked together to find a few seed stories out of our watermelon ideas.  Last, students used the worksheet below to find the seeds in their watermelon ideas.  They wrote the watermelon idea on the rind and then seed ideas in each seed.  It worked great!  They "wrote" for 22 minutes that day - blowing our last stamina record out of the water.  I love that it validated their watermelon ideas and helped them realize they could write about so many different parts of their trip or memories.  I had to make extra copies because they want to keep finding seeds!

Font: Oh {Photo} Shoot by Kevin and Amanda
Watermelon: Coloring page from About.com (© Sherri Osborn - familycrafts.about.com)
Click the picture to go to my google doc!

Now we've mapped out our stories using pictures and started writing descriptive "snapshots."  The kids can consistantly write for about 15 minutes now!

My only challenge with writing is that they are so worried about doing it "right" that a million hands go up as soon as they start practicing.  I'm really trying to get them to just write, but I'm having a hard time getting the idea across to them that if they are writing, it isn't wrong!  Do you have any tips for getting this idea across?