First Week Teacher Tired

Is this a hashtag yet? Tell me you don't feel it, ladies?!

It's Thursday and I have been met with, dragged around, called for help, given advice, drawn on for inspiration, admired, envied, and many, many more things in just this one tiny week. In a word: chaos!!!!!

As I have mentioned a few times, my district has adopted a new reading program. I went to a training for it ALL DAY yesterday. As valuable as I'm sure that time was for some people...I happen to luckily been born with two eyes and a decent understanding of technology. Therefore, it was a 7-hour waste of my very valuable pre-students time. I came back today feeling like I had a million things to do and still spent hours in meetings, planned and impromptu!

What did I accomplish today?

1. Nametags are finally taped and numbered on desks. 

I always wait until late in the week so that if I get any new students I can fill them in to the lineup in alphabetical order. I hate to have a random "John Bencher" at number 26...it just irks my nerves. Doesn't really even matter in the end because we all know we're going to get some kid later in the year with a last name that starts with C anyway! #amiright?)

2. Book baskets are done

I was expecting a students of mine from a few years ago to come and help out today, but I got an email early in the morning not to count on it. I was bummed mostly because I couldn't see her, but just a TEENSY bit because I was looking forward to her extra set of hands!! #imtheworst! She was going to be in charge of cleaning my book baskets and cutting out name-tags for them and tying them on with string. Either way, I got it done and they look adorable. If I remember, I'll take a picture tomorrow for you and post it!

3. Math plans finished

I updated my plans from the first week last year to include the new Place Value Detective activities I bought during the TPT sale. If you want to check them out, they are by Mary over at Teaching with a Mountain View and can be viewed on TPT HERE. Technically, in my state, place value is not an official fifth grade strand, but it's so important for them to continue to develop their understanding of place value, since it is the BASIS for all math calculation pretty much.

4. Pre-assessments for 5th grade reading and SMART Goals organized

I don't know how many of you know about SMART Goals, but they are BIG in my district. They stand for Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and  Timely. Do you write these? My school is currently acrredited with warning in reading. Because of this, our SMART Goals are going to be completely centered on reading, as is our 30 minute remediation block in the mornings. To have a remediation block the second week of school you need.......???? DATA of course. What better way to attain data than to give a pretest to students?! Naturally though, those pretests needed to be created. After our fifth grade meeting this afternoon where we analyzed last year's data and looked and fourth grade's data (to gauge where we're starting this year), we discovered that no one had a valid and reliable assessment to give us this data. I bit the bullet and made this my charge for the rest of the day, and I, "Got 'er done!"

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It was a productive day, and yet I still have so much to do. A teacher's work is never done. We'll see what Open House brings tomorrow! I'm getting excited!

Brianna

An Exploration of Genre

Hey everyone!

Happy Sunday...otherwise known as my last free-of-school-Sunday!! I head back to work tomorrow. I am both excited and terrified...probably also a little depressed. My summer was (as yours was) way too short!

Today, I've been going over my first 15 days of school I mentioned in an earlier post that my district got a new reading program. It offers a "First 30 Days" similar to "The First 20" of Fountas and Pinell. My principal feels that 20 days (much less 30) is far too many days to spend on classroom cohesion and prepping for the reading block for the year so we get a condensed NINE days. That means, roughly three mini lessons a day. I have no problems fitting this in because there is no small group reading during this time while we test the students to see what level they're reading at after the summer. Still, though, it's a LOT of information to try and squeeze into 20 minute blocks. Not to mention I am a Daily 5-er and I like to start my stamina building DAY 1, so I have to fit that in too!

In any case, to help get a leg up on the year, I also try to squeeze in a genre review during these first couple of weeks also. Since I use an interactive notebook for each of my subjects, Genre is the first thing to go into Reading.

Because this isn't actually a full blown unit, I needed to make something that got me the biggest bang for my buck. Fifth graders are expected to have a good understanding of genre already and I like to bring in some more sophisticated subgenres like memoir and the individual fictions instead of just going with the generic Fiction (realistic) vs. Nonfiction (informational).

First things first....the Genre Overview. For this I used a t-chart to do a broad comparison of fiction and nonfiction. I left room for notes as well as a listing of subgenres. I know not everyone makes as comprehensive list as I do, so I made two versions to suit.

Now we get into the specifics! I created a Fiction Overview and a Nonfiction overview to detail out each chosen subgenre...

I would use the one with with ALL my subgenres listed. This is the more generic version for those people who maybe wouldn't cover quite as much as I will. I did create similar versions of each that are not showing in the pictures above.

I then created two versions of Venn diagrams for each of the comparison subgerenes. I like to compare:

1) Realistic and Historical

2) Mystery and Adventure

3) Fantasy and Traditional Literature

Here are two examples...

You see that the first has a cut and paste (similar to the drag and drop option on our state tests!) and the second has an open-ended written response question based on a situation prompt.

I also created a page for Science Fiction where the student reads a summary and decides whether that IS or IS NOT SciFi and explains why.

For nonfiction, I made one organizer for all of it since most of the subgenres have many things in common. 

I'm excited to use these because I know that they are far more in depth than a lot of genre overviews out there. Using them as a quick reference guide will be perfect for my students when labeling book genres in their 40 Book Challenge log. If they have any questions, they can simply refer to these for help! 

If you like them, join my blog below and I'll send it to you for free for the next week! If you get to this post too late, fear not, there are in my TPT store HERE.

Brianna 

It's HERE!!

Yes, friends. Today was the day. I wasn't planning on blogging today, but I had to.

You know what I'm talking about.

I was on my way to tutoring when this sweet, delicate, feminine, HANDLE YO' BUSINESS, bad mamba-jawamba planner landed on my doorstep.

I was so excited, I.PUT.IT.IN.THE.FREAKING.CAR.WITH.ME.

I tried to remain strong. While my student was working independently I opened it, just to take a peek. I didn't mess with the tissue paper. I just teased myself by looking at the assortment of cute stickers and things I got with my invoice on top. I am a glutton for punishment. Ugh! It nearly killed me to wait until I got home to open it.

 Voila! Customized to my color selection. Personalized with my name. #teachersheaven

#tabsfordays #hellaorganized

I was super lucky. I ordered mine on the 29th of July, and having missed the Back2School sale, I was bmmed because this fresh slice of teaching necessity right here is costly. Lucky for me though, I Google'd "Erin Condren Coupons" and found one that worked 100% of the time thus far using code JULY25. I popped that into the "Promotions" box at check-out and PRESTO CHANGE-O, 25% off my order!

I got busy immediately...this is August so far. 

I bought the pack of perfectly sized sticky notes to place into my monthly calendars, BECAUSE OCD AWESOME! I even backdated stuff, just to feel MORE organized and successful. Have you ever done that? Made a To Do list that included items you had already completed, just so you could have something checked off? Don't lie...you totally have. 

I was thinking to myself that I was going overboard on the stickies and that I needed to ration them carefully when I realized that there are more stickies that I got for free in the back of my planner. They were even already conveniently labeled with things like "Fieldtrip" and "Assembly" and "Meeting," along with dozens of blank ones in an assortment of colors that Crayola would be jealous of! 

If you decide to buy one, click this link. You'll get $10.00 off your first purchase! Totally worth it!

Okay, I have to go. I need to get back to me (super appropriately named) Life Planner.

Life is good today, friends. Life is good.

Do you Erin Condren?

Brianna