It's Turkey Week!

First, this post has been going around and it's completely cracking me up.

Here's the original blog post:  {Date a Girl Who Teaches}

And here's the rebuttal:  {Don't Date a Girl Who Teaches}

Both of which make me giggle.  Maybe don't read the comments because it takes a sudden turn onto whiney street with a detour to complainville.  Just take the humor at face value.

This is the first time I've read Love, Teach's blog and I am loving it.  She has had me laughing out loud for a good portion of my day on (but day off) today.

We had one day of school this week.

You read that correctly.  One day.  We went to school on Monday only.  Monday.  Only.  Teachers reported today for a quick meet and greet and then we were off.  I don't know why we showed up today, but it doesn't really matter.  I was there.  I was comfy.  Now I'm home with the music cranked up as I dance around my house cooking and cleaning.  I'll let the reality of December School Days hit me on Sunday.

What do you do when you have a classroom full of students for one day sandwiched between a two day weekend and a six day weekend?  Thank goodness for my wonderful 4th grade team for jumping in and helping me out with yesterday's activities.  I bet you know what we did...!

My students took a little shopping trip to find their Thanksgiving dinners.  I wish I knew where my printables came from but....I don't.  Moment of truth: my lovely coworkers did all the planning and copied them for me and handed me this project and it was a small slice of Monday morning heaven.

"Can't we just buy the $69.99 Thanksgiving dinner and be done?"  

We all feel the same way, darling students.  

It will be so much nicer if you make it and buy it all yourself with the pretend $50 I'm giving you, but I like where you're head's at.  Great problem solving skills. 

They really worked very hard to shop for a nice Thanksgiving dinner for 8 people with $50, crunch some numbers, and create a menu.  Kudos to them.  It's hard to come in for one day a week and really focus on the job at hand- for both students AND teachers!!

We also did a little Think/Pair/Share about the Mayflower and the First Thanksgiving using some reading comprehension passages.  I with I had my act together more, because I probably would have had us doing something with this passage from Superteachers worksheets about {Presidential Turkey Pardons}.  I have ideas building right now.  Ugh, too late this year.  I'll save them up for next Thanksgiving!  This is my first year using {Superteachers} and I do love having it as an extra resource for reading passages and math homework!

I'll leave you with my favorite Thanksgiving song (the video isn't an official song video...).

Have a Happy Turkey Break! 

Book Project Menus and The City of Ember

I have been working with the above-level reading group during our Tier 2 support time.  Some call it RTI, we call it MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Support).  Don't ask.

The best part about our tier time is that we can meet with students at their level and keep things interesting for them.  I meet with this group 4 days a week and I love every second of it.  They love reading!  It is so easy to get them involved and excited.

If you want to skip ahead to my list of book menus and other great (free) resources, then take a little stroll to the bottom of this page.

To start, we all read The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau.  We have been talking about electricity in science and it just worked out perfectly.  Cross-curricular.  Boom.

A few had read it before but they had no problem jumping back in and rereading the story.  We worked through a few basic story element pieces.  Then I assigned each of them a level of the city depending on how far they were in the book and they created it on paper.

The bottom level fell apart, so it isn't pictured, which is too bad
because they made it three-dimensional and it was really cool!

When we finished the book, we developed games that corresponded with the story.  I loved seeing their game ideas.  Some chose game boards and others decided on other game variations.  They used details from the story to develop their ideas and there was so much higher level thinking!  They would have played their games all day every day if I let them.  I'm such a downer.

top left: Emberly, a city based on Ember, with game cards using details from the book
top right: City of Ember trivia game
bottom left: board game with main characters as game pieces
bottom right: I have Who has game

Some even continued with the sequel, The People of Sparks, and made their own dictionaries while they waited for the rest of the group to finish their games.

Yesterday I started a new project with them.  Probably not great timing the week before Thanksgiving when we only have one day next week.  Oh well.  They just read at so many different speeds that it was getting tricky to keep everyone together.  And then I thought...why am I doing that?  This group can work independently.

I'm letting the students pick any book they would like to read- within reason, although we haven't had any issues with this group.  I scoured the web and found a book menu that I really liked from the Round Lake school district in Illinois, so I thought I'd share it.  It had just enough complexity for our class time, but was also something they can work on independently with some guidance from me.

I put together a short list of my favorite book menus I found along the way.  I tried to find a range of age appropriate menus but most are probably for 3rd-6th graders, and all of them are free, so check them out!

 {the book menu I'm using right now}

{Book Review Black-Out}

{Complete Four}

{Book Report Menu for Multiple Intelligences}

{Book Report Choices}

{Mystery Menu}

{Meaningful Menus}

{Blog post about other menu ideas}

....and if you're looking for Scholastic's entire book entitled {30 Non-Fiction Book Reports}, you can find it {here}.  ...whoops.  Save that somewhere for future use!  Quick!

During my search I also found a book of forms for {Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom}.  It is really great if you have some higher level thinkers in your room!

Seriously check these out.  You won't be disappointed.

During group time we are reading and then they work on whatever project they chose.  Each student may be at a different point in their project, but that is the best part!  This way they have choice in their reading and what they are making and sharing.  Anything to keep them motivated.

Any more ideas for small group time (I have 12 in this group) to keep students interested and challenged?

            

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Blended Learning

I'm just dipping my feet in the blended learning idea to see what it's all about.  Here's what I'm finding... click on the pictures for more information.  I'm sure I'll find a ton more if I keep looking, but then I'd be up all night long!

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

What is Blended Learning? from The Learning Accelerator on Vimeo.

What do you think?  Do we already teach like this?  Do we need this emphasis?  Could we do more or less?  What age groups would be best to begin formal "blended learning"?  

            

Happy Teaching! 

Place Value & Number Sense Again (Still?)

Oh place value and number sense.  I'm just calling it 4.NBT.2 from now on because I feel like we've spent so much time on it that I am going to officially call it and every other standard that I have by its Common Core number just so that I can feel important when I'm speaking in my teacher language to people.

We actually already covered this at the beginning of the year, but I have a few that are still struggling just a bit.  They can name the place value just fine, but they are still mixing up the value or meaning of the place value.  It's such an important concept to really understand, especially in fourth grade when we start 2x2 and 2x3 multiplication and long division.  We have to move past the "magic zeros" that we bring down and really understand what that really means.

I found a wonderful little flip chart over the summer at {Lakeshore Learning Resources} that I grabbed for guided math time.  It's small and easy to grab for guided math.  I like to have the kids make up numbers to use for place value and number forms, practice reading it, and then do some number work with the number they chose.  I like the beauty in the idea that you can pick whatever number you want and this will work.  Just a little bit of math ownership.  It also gives me an idea of how confident they are with the concept.  They sometimes struggle with coming up with a number, so this has been great.  Nothing earth shattering, but helpful all the same.

Awhile ago I blogged about how I conveniently lost my hundred thousands card for my bulletin board display so I took it upon myself to just create a new one.  You can find it {here} or click on the picture below.

I'm so glad I did this!  The kids refer to it all the time and my old one didn't have the ones, thousands, and millions period markers and we use a ton!  Whew.  Good call on my part.

Finally some of my struggling learners are getting this and we're starting to feel confident with it.  Yes!  Now we just need to work on capitalizing the letter I...

oh my goodness I love it!

I was also looking for center activities that would be challenging for those higher kids and I ran across this file from the {Virginia Department of Education on Numbers and Number Sense}.  I'm a bit of a scavenger when it comes to finding free materials for the classroom.  This was PERFECT!  I ran it off on colored paper, sliced and diced, and my centers and guided math activities are ready to go for now AND in the future when we hit decimal place values.   Check it out {here} or the link above.

Since we've already covered place value and number forms this year, I went ahead and made the above game into center activities during guided math time.  I also added my {spoons number sense game} and the kids are LOVING IT.  It took a few times to get into how to play quietly, but we got it and it has been fabulous.  They have requested a spoons game for prefixes and suffixes, so I'll be working on that soon!

            

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Just lots of meetings

This post really has nothing of educational value to it.  Fair warning.  I'm all over the place these days.

How many teacher meetings do you typically take part in over a three week period?

I feel like all I've done lately is sit in meetings.  A few weeks ago we had our convocation day (meeting #1).  We listened to some riveting speakers.  I'm sure they were really fascinating if it all wasn't so far over my head.  For this one we learned about the Law of Entropy and Anthropic Coincidences.

See.

Then he moved on to the Three Anthropic Coincidences.

But you already knew about this, right?

Here's what I learned on that slide:  That is a number that has a decimal, followed by 49 zeros, and a 1.  It's a very small number.

Don't get me wrong, this guy was a genius.  It's just that I'm not.  At least, not his level genius.  I can teach the dickens out of 4th grade multiplication and division though.

Except for the front tables where everyone was following along and listening intently and laughing at just the right hilarious science moments, the rest of us looked like this:

Teacher meetings the next day (#2).

I was pulled later that week to help train on guided math with our middle schoolers (#3).

Two IEP meetings back to back one afternoon (#4-5)

Conferences all day the next day (#6).

Then I escaped for a long weekend for my sister's wedding.  I didn't think about school once.  Not once.

Remember how I had a student teacher all first quarter?
This class might not even know if I'm their teacher.

Taught for two entire days.

Today I had a meeting (#7) all day today, but we finished early and now I'm home kicking up my feet and blogging.  Don't tell my coworkers.

That's seven meetings in the past three weeks.

Last year I was on a committee that looked over the new Common Core standards and located where every concept moved or was added compared to our previous standards.  This year I was asked to be on  similar committee that is going through the new social studies standards.  It's a little grueling but I'm so glad I am getting the opportunity (and the gift of time) to go through these new standards across grade levels and get really familiar with them.  Not every teacher has this chance, and none of us have that kind of time, so I'm really happy my principal recommended me for it!

Here's where I spent my day a few weeks ago.  And today.  And in a few more weeks I'll be there again.

I feel like I've just been collecting and organizing papers!  I love being able to be a part of so many different things and have these opportunities though.  No complaints here!  My organizational skills could use a brush up, though...

Only two weeks until Thanksgiving!  Holy guacamole!

I'll leave you with these exciting pictures from math class at Halloween.  Better late than never?  At some point I'll put this math review up on TpT for next Halloween.  So it will actually just be really early for next October...

Happy Teaching!

Non-Fiction Reading Website- with leveled text!

It's conference time!  I have been meeting with parents and giving them all the good news (and a few friendly reminders), but I've had a six hour break in between my morning conferences and my evening conferences so I've been busying myself with catching up with the internet.  I've also been home twice to switch my laundry.  Everyone here thinks I'm some kind of crazy laundry lady now.  Then I had 212 unread teacher blog posts on Bloglovin'.  No joke.  After I read 212 blog posts (no I didn't), I hopped over to my email and I came across the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Is sliced bread that amazing?  Sometimes I slice my own bread and I find it to be no big deal.

Regardless, I found the greatest website.

Sometimes I like to use {ReadWorks} passages for my guided reading groups because I can locate passages by Lexile level and use them for when I ability group my students.  It's pretty nice and it's totally free.  But that's not the website I'm talking about.

Today I was reading an article from {Sophia.org} that I found {here} and it led me to this little internet gem.  If you haven't come across {Sophia} yet, you should definitely check it out.  It's another one of my favorite internet discoveries.

dah-dah-DAHHHH.  Newsela. 

 I had never heard of it before.  It is awesome- especially if you teach upper elementary or middle school students.  It takes current event (non-fiction!!!) news articles and offers them at different Lexile levels.

It reads just like a news website.  You can click on the area of interest at the top and it will take you to current event articles.  Some articles have anchor standards already on them.  If you hover over the number by the anchor it will tell you what standard that article will help to teach.  

THEN you can click on the chosen Lexile level on the right.  They range from 4th-8th grade level.  The anchor articles also have quiz questions to go with them.  The Lexile level you choose will adjust the quiz questions that are presented.  I put an example below so that you can see the difference between a 4th grade question and an 8th grade question for the same article.  

It's pretty cool because once you create an account, you have access to a classroom code.  You can assign students readings to do and have them take the quiz at home.  Or you can do it together in class, or click on the handy-dandy print button and make copies for guided reading small groups.  

I became the happiest teacher.  I love when I find high interest non-fiction for my students that can be leveled and is FREE.  Free things are my favorite.

I have another non-fiction website that I like, so stay tuned.  It might be a few days because my sister gets married this weekend and if I'm blogging when I should be dancing, then we have a serious problem.  

            

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