Hello Again

Wow, I can't believe it's been over a month since I posted.  Over a month since I've really read blogs either.

So, hello again, bloggy world!

I've been super busy and haven't really wanted to think about school when I got home.  Major drama going on at my school.

The super busy is not subsiding.  Report cards are due one week from today.  Yikes!

The drama is somewhat subsiding, so I'm not running to hide from anything education related.

What better way to step back into (hopefully) regular blogging than to link up with Tara for a Monday Made It (ignore that it is Friday, please)?

I posted this summer about some professional development books I read (Book Whisperer, Notebook Connections, Daily 5).    I have been integrating those with our curriculum (Treasures) to make my own Reading Workshop.  One part of it is our reading notebooks.

I feel like I'm getting really good at teaching those lessons.  One day I teach the comprehension strategy.  Students practice when they read.  The next day, I teach them how we write a response using that strategy by modeling it with a text we all know.  Then, they write a response, either on the same topic as our model, on the same book but focusing on a different part, or on their independent reading book.

Then, during Reading Workshop, they are supposed to write a response on any book using any of the strategies we have learned.

"We were supposed to remember how to do those?"

Well, yeah, I'd like them to, but if they've only done it once, I get that it'd be hard to remember.

Enter the Reading Response Strategy Binders.  There are two of these in our Work on Writing drawer for students to reference.

Instructions for setting up every entry.  Formatting matters, kiddos!

On the back of each instructions is a typed up copy of the one we wrote whole class when I taught it.

Do you want a copy of my oh-so-pretty (if I do say so myself ... I'm rather proud of these) pages?  Well, here they are!  I already need to add more strategies so check back soon for an updated version!

Happy Veteran's Day Weekend!

Posting Student Work - We're So Proud Board

I got this idea last year when we did a veteran teacher observation for BTSA.  I love it, the kids love it, and most teachers love it when they come into my room.

It's my We're So Proud Board:

The blurry parts are, of course, their names.
After many, many tries at fitting all 32 students' work here, this is the most space saving configuration boyfriend and I could come up with.

Every other Thursday, I make sure I (or our aide) has sorted all of their work (everything from homework to graded tests) in their mailboxes:

I know there aren't papers in their here, but it's the only pic I have of it!

They take their pile of papers to their desk and look through them.  It's the first time they've seen any of the grades, so they spend some time seeing what they got right and wrong and just generally reviewing their work.

Next, they choose one piece they are most proud of.  We have a list of reasons you might be proud that the kiddos came up with, including things like a good grade, doing better than normal in a subject, doing well on something that was really challenging, trying really hard, doing neater work than normal, etc.

Then, they fill out a "Smiley Slip" (that's those yellow papers you see in the corner of each).  They staple it to wherever they want on their paper and turn it in for me to put up.

I use the black and white version on yellow paper.

Click on either image for the google doc of both color and b/w!

Last, they return all of their papers to their mailbox to be filed later.  After our conferences in November, they will take most of this work home each time we do "We're So Proud" instead of putting it in their mailboxes, but I like to save everything until conferences!

How do you display student work?  How often do you change it out?

Currently and Writing Wednesday (err... Thursday with Freebies for you!)

First up, Currently:

Thanks, Farley, for hosting!

Okay, okay, so I know The Witches isn't really all that seasonal ... actually, no I don't know, as I still need to read it!  But, it is what I am most excited about right now.  One of my awesome teammates has a unit she does every year in October with The Witches.  My kiddos ordered enough Scholastic books with our last book order that I was able to get a class set of The Witches, so our two classes are going to read them at the same time this year and of course I'll be using her unit.  I am ridiculously excited!

And now, Writing Wednesday on a Thursday (don't you hate forgetting your camera at school?!?!?)

With our district narrative writing assessment window starting NEXT week and of course a million things trying to butt their way into our writing time, I'm having a hard time getting through all of the pieces of a narrative before testing them.  Never mind revising and publishing.  That's going to have to come after the district test!

So far this year, we had been brainstorming and writing "shots" (see post here and here, respectively) on whatever students felt like that day.  Many had worked on pieces of upwards of 10 stories!  But now that we want to be published in the next two and a half weeks, I wanted the kiddos to start focusing on one story.  We made this checklist of questions to help choose a great story for them to write:

After we had all chosen a story, we talked about what drafting actually is:

Next, we identified the problem and solution.  We talked A BUNCH about how problems don't have to be bad and how solutions don't always have to be happy and took some notes on that:

 

Each student brainstormed and wrote on a sticky note a solution to the problem of an alien landing in your campsite.  They LOVED it.  Many were not school appropriate (too violent), but some were super creative!

Then, we got back to work on our stories.  Once we figured out the problem and some possible endings, students worked together to choose a solution that fit the problem.

Click here for the worksheet!

And finally, we got to leads.  I "read" two leads - one from a Magic Treehouse book and one I said was from a rough draft of mine (I'm going to tell you about my airplane ride.  Great, right?).  Almost all of the kiddos seemed to get why the Magic Treehouse one was better.  Then, I gave them notes (it would have been WAY WAY WAY too much writing notes) and we glued them like so into our notebooks. We read over the notes, wrote an example for each, and outlawed some annoying  uninteresting "leads" (Hi, my name is _____ and I'm going to tell you about ____ is one of my biggest pet peeves!)  Last, the kiddos read the leads in their independent reading books and we talked about what made those interesting.

Click here for the notes. Fonts from dafont.com

And finally, today, we wrote leads!

Happy October!

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?