Coming Up for Air

Whoa!

I haven't written in three weeks! That should tell you what the beginning of the year has been like for me. I have been SUPER busy with my fantasy football team, TEACHERPROBS10 my plans for my students!

Here's an update on what's going on in my class....

Math: We are slugging through a review of multiplication and introducing how to multiply by three digit and four digit numbers. It's not required that they learn past two digit x two digit in my state because we are not Common Core, but after looking through the sixth grade standards and seventh grade standards, I realized that they NEVER actually learn it. How is that right?!?! It doesn't cost me too much time, and I am PRETTY SURE it's a life skill to be able to multiply large number, so I'm going to teach it!

Science: The Scientific Method is LIFE!! We started an experiment on how to dissolve eggshells using different liquid. Of course, as teachers, we all know that the answer is vinegar. Each year, however, I use vinegar, water (for a control), and one other new substance. Last year we chose apple juice...this year, we chose ginger ale. Holy moly! The ginger ale's carbonation cracked the eggshell and the yoke is now sitting OUTSIDE the shell. It's been an incredible opportunity for observation. They have really risen to the challenge. We have talked about how even though it's cool that the shell cracked, the fact that they can observe the sound of the eggshell still bumping against the jar, they can infer that there hasn't yet been chemical change in the shell itself, just a physical change.

In order from L--> R: Vinegar, Water (control), Ginger Ale (check out that YOKE!!)

History: We are about to jump into a review of the regions of Virginia. Honestly, I'm really hoping the kids remember this well, but when we did water features this week...**Crickets** Here's hoping they at least remember that we live in the Coastal Plains region @ sea level. We shall see...Why are we doing a review? In VA, students don't take a state test in fourth grade, they take it in fifth grade covering TWO SCHOOL YEARS worth of information. Can you say #workcutoutforme ?? We will add to the regions too, so it's not JUST review, they do get some new information in the form of products and industries that make our state economy turn. For this, I usually do sorts and color-coding. Lord knows I love a color-coded key!! :)

Reading: We are finishing up our "First 15 Days" of creating a classroom community. I'm kind of bummed because I really like to use the time to create a classroom community for writing as well, but we've had to put that on hold because of a new performance based task we're taking on this year. A couple years ago, the state took away our fifth grade writing test. They have implemented a new assessment in the form of these tasks. Their first task is to write a fairytale for a first grade audience. It's actually been a lot of fun, but it has been time consuming. I haven't had nearly as much time to use any of my awesome beginning-of-year Six Traits lessons. #merp Meanwhile, in reading, we are getting ready to start our guided reading groups. I'm pretty stoked to use our new reading program with my kids. I'm really hopeful that it's going to provide a little bit of what we've been missing! Only time will tell. I'm working really hard to get my students to start practicing a little metacognition. Do you do this in your classroom? I have taught them how to use sticky notes, and am in the process of reminding them gently to use, USE, USE them. They are responding several times a week whether in their Reading Response journals, or using KidBlog, or in their Reading Response letters. I think they are frustrated with how much they are being forced to talk about their reading, but I know it will pay off in the end!

Do you love finding cool anchor charts on Pinterest? I do...both of these are modeled after anchor charts I found online.

I'll try to add pictures later this week. I find myself forgetting to take them when I'm in the moment.So many of you other bloggers are way better than I am about it. I aspire to be more like you! I can't believe I remembered to take them today, and only ONE DAY after the original post. YESSSS....

Hope you are relaxing my teaching friends,

Brianna

Reading Graffiti

How many of you have read The Book Whisperer or Reading in the Wild?

I have read both and one of the things that I incorporated into my room last year OTHER than The 40 Book Challenge was to create a reading graffiti wall. If you don't know what this is, it's an area of the room where students can write their favorite quotes from the books they are reading. Here is one I found on the internet...

 

Last year, mine wasn't very successful. I had maybe six or seven quotes on it, and two of them were mine from our read alouds. Probably fortunately for you, I don't have a picture of it to show you, so you can't feel THAT bad for me. 

Needless to say, I still love the idea, and rather than throwing it out with all the trash I've been accumulating, I decided to try something a little different.

A really good friend of mine made me some of these last year...

With a piece of plywood and a jigsaw, really what CAN'T you do? #amiright

They are painted with whiteboard paint (that you can purchase from your local home improvement store...I'm pretty sure it's made by Rustoleum).  Last year I used a few of them on a bulletin board I created in the hallway outside my room, but they ended up being mostly decorations. 

SOOOOO....Why not combine the best of both worlds??

I started putting them up just to see how it looked and I liked it so much, I decided to do the whole door that way. 

Here is the whole door covered...

Then I thought to myself that it looked kind of plain so, see that marker hanging on the door? That's what I was originally using on the black paper. Now, I don't need it since the bubbles are dry erase, but that doesn't mean I can't use it in the meantime!!

I decided to spice it up a little bit!

I'm still not done yet. I think I'm going to back and add a little border or something. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, my intention is that hopefully the kids will WANT their quotes up there now, since there is limited space. The brilliance of dry erase is that if more kids have quotes, we can simply rewrite them a little bit smaller and make more room. Either way, this year it won't look so sad :(

How do you keep your kids invested in their reading?

Brianna

Reading/Writing Notebooks and a FREEBIE!!

Every year since I began teaching I have used a Reader's/Writer's notebook.

Every year I change it.

Some things work, some things don't, some things work only part of the time. It's frustrating. I desperately want to find something that work every year so that I can stop reinventing the wheel in THIS particular case, and begin reinventing the wheel in a different area !:p (Sidebar: when are they going to invent emojis for blogging??! #whoiswithme?)

The first couple of years I went with a five-tab model
1) My Stuff
2) Reading
3) Writing
4) Vocabulary
5) Response

My stuff was(/is) mostly like reading log, Daily 5 reminder posters, quick reference genre chart, and R/W Notebook rubric for when I grade it twice a quarter.

The Reading and Writing tabs were where we put all our mini-lesson work for those subjects. This, of course, was BEFORE I was introduced to Interactive Notebooks (INBs) and all their glory.

Vocabulary is self-explanatory.

Response was where I was having my students write their weekly letters to me. This year I have put them into journal format which you can read about and see more about HERE.
___________________________

The next couple of years I went with a three-tab model
1) My Stuff
2) Vocabulary
3) Writing

Everything was mostly the same, except since I had introduced INBs for Reading and Writing mini-lessons I eliminated them from the binder and left a writing tab only for drafts and other pieces student's were working on for a grade (for organization purposes). I also took out Response because I was having a hard time monitoring it and chose to do it in small group with "Think Marks" (More on this in a different post).
___________________________

This year I have settled on a four-tab model with the following format
1) My Stuff
2) Response
3) Vocabulary
4) Writing

All tabs from the three-tab model above have the same purpose, and I am still using INBs for Reading and Writing mini-lessons. Now, I have gone back to a Response tab, but since the creation of my letter journal mentioned above, I'll be using it a bit differently. My school wants students to be responding to their reading every day. Sometimes this can be difficult when you're only being given an hour to get all small group work done AND you favor a Daily 3 model which requires working through a variety of other components other than just independent reading. I have decided that this year, my students will respond with me IN small group twice a week (using their Think Mark) and respond in their notebooks on the opposite two days that they DON'T see me in the Response section of their notebook. I created a new Reading Response Record form for this purpose trying to combine all the elements of response logs that I've seen that I liked. Tell me what you think!

If you have read Word Nerds then you understand why I've got a Word Nerd Alert section. I am CRAZY PASSIONATE about kids being crazy passionate about words. I like for them to look for interesting/unknown/cool words every time they read. That section may be full or empty on a given day, but at least it's there for them to be reminded of their Word Nerd Mission!

If you're interested in it, click on the picture for a link to it.

__________________________

With all this reinventing of the wheel, I needed to update my rubric as well. It is featured as one of my freebies in my TPT shop right now so make sure you grab it! If you like the style and you want me to customize it for you, I'd be happy to do so! Email me and I'll see what I can do for you. Click the picture below to see it in my shop!

As with each year's changes, I get very excited that THIS IS THE ONE THAT WILL LAST FOREVER. Well, we'll see about that, won't we! How do you set yours up?

Happy Hump Day,

Brianna

Monday Made It!

Yay! **First Monday Made It Post** Yay!

Yay!!

So, for anyone who has been reading, you know that today was the first day I was allowed back into my classroom. You know what I made a lot of today?????.....

TRASH!!!

I cleaned....and I organized...and then I cleaned what I organized. Rinse. Repeat.

I made two of those huge, heavy-duty Christmas-Party-Chaos full to BUSTING!!

Too bad I didn't take a picture of it...if I had been thinking about this blog post when I left my room as I was while I was IN my room, then maybe I would have...but I didn't. I know...you're sad ecstatic you don't have to look at my trash!

Onto the real stuff...

I finally got to bind my Reading Response Letters. I originally got this idea from Ms. Leslie Ann over at Life in Fifth Grade...you can read more about HER idea here. Since nothing works for one teacher EXACTLY how it works for another, I decided to put my own spin on it. 

My students write letters to me once a week about what they are reading. I have a double resource day on Wednesday which gives me a weird 20 minute block right at the end of the day which is pretty useless since it's too short to do a lesson because of pack up/dismissal. This, I decided was the perfect time to do my letters. Additionally, every OTHER Thursday, I am pulled from my classroom at 2:15 for planning. My TA always needs something that the kids can do independently that actually interests them...**CUE READING RESPONSE LOGS**.

Here was the final product...

I know that the second and third photo are hard to see. Photo two is my prompt page. This is MY personal letter to THEM (reminding them of letter format first and foremost) giving them some ideas as to what I expect and what they can include, as well as some sentence stems. The third photo is my template for the letter. Depending on how experienced your children are with letter writing, they might just needs a blank piece of notebook paper. For my kids, however, they need a little assistance. 

My students have been reading and responding in letter form for several years, but only on a separate sheet of paper...therefore, I must admit, my format needed a little spicing up. I'm so excited to try them in JOURNAL FORM this year. So I took the time to redo the letter and prompt page in publisher and make it look all pretty. My templates are available on TPT here.

My third Monday Made it is another spin off creation. This one also comes from Ms. Leslie Ann. I have posted before about her Comp. Files. Today, I finally made my own. My school has a mandatory remediation block from 8:30-9:00 am every day. During that time, I pull my lowest students to review a skill they are either currently struggling with or scored poorly on a previous assessment. Meanwhile, the rest of my students are doing daily stations, one rotation per day. I figured that these Comp. Files were PERFECT for this because I can rotate them out each month. 

I decided to put ten passages in the file folder and the students will have the entire month to complete them. Ideally they will complete them two at a time, one set of two each week. I decided to do half non-fiction and half fiction. There were more nonfiction passages than fiction in her first collection, but that was okay. I was able to weed out a few passages that were content related to things we will do LATER in the year and will insert them as applicable. If you don't know about Comp. Files, you can check them out on TPT here.

Okay...I have one more Monday Made it...but it's more like a MONDAY IN THE WORKS so hopefully I'll be able to post about it next week.

Hope your Monday was as successful as mine!

Brianna