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Friday, February 26, 2016

Five for Friday February 26, 2016

1)  Sharing our work with partners!
This week we had fun sharing our math thinking with appointment cards.  Sometimes it's easy for me to get in a rut with how I have the kids give feedback and share.  Lucky for me though this quarter I have a student teacher and I want to model some fun, effective ways for the kids to share their work.  So, I made the kids these "appointment cards".  After they completed their math work, we all came together. I passed out the appointment cards and then I told them to visit their first appointment and share their math thinking.  After a few minutes I directed them to their second, then third appointments.  They LOVED it.  I put accountable talk stems on the board to help guide conversations, had out our success criteria for word problem solving, and I walked the room to hear the conversations.  Eventually, I want to get them to the point where they make their own appointments, but for their first time, I chose the appointments for them.

2)  120th Day

Since our wonderful kinder teachers celebrate the 100th day with so many exciting things, our first grade team decided to celebrate the 120th day (since our firsties need to master counting to 120).  We had a blast.  They could bring in 120 things, dress like a 120 year old, or wear something with a 120 things.  As you can see above, these adorable kids got creative. In class we made rainbows with 120 fruit loops!  It was a fantastic day!

3)  Figurative and Literal Language Made Easy!
We are beginning our study of plants and we are using paired texts.  To go with plants we chose the book The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, such a wonderful story.  It is rich with so many things.  One of the great things about this book is the figurative and descriptive language.  I'm trying out my unit that I wrote for it right now before I post it on TPT and I was worried that this lesson would be tricky, but I am SO excited that it was a hit.  I have so many English learners this year that I knew I had to make this content comprehensible.  I love this little guys reaction. I'll post the unit soon!

4) Quote of the Month (for me)!
This is ringing true in my life so much right now.  Especially with my own kids who are trying so many new and exciting things, facing challenges, and overcoming.  I love how my little guy doesn't leave the basketball court after a game until he has shot every basket around the world.  I love how he faced going back to baseball after a tough last season. I love how he pushed through on his 2500 page reading log goal (even though he FIGHTS reading almost every day).  I love how my beautiful daughter is running each day to make track.  I love how she pushes through in physics and math, studying yesterday (even though she wanted to go to the beach).  I love how even after cheer practice she goes to the track to catch any time with coaches.  I also love how this quote is carrying me through my marathon training.  This quote is my motto this month!

5)  Gratitude!
To end my 5 for Friday I am grateful for so many things.  I am grateful for my loving kids, my parents, sister, brother, and friends who always seem to have my back.  I am grateful for my students who put up with (and embrace) our daily gratitude.  I am also grateful for all the little things like the heart garden I passed on a run in our neighborhood.  I am grateful for running and how it helps me stay calm, carry on, breathe.




Tuesday, February 23, 2016

The Important Business of Teaching Kids to Write

         I love to write.  I'm not the most artistic person in the world with crayons, paint, or a canvas, but give me a pencil and a paper and I am ready to create.  Words are my paints, the page my canvas, and the pencil my brush.  I wrote before I became a teacher.  I wrote in literary journals in college, for the newspaper, and I free lanced before I decided on making teaching my life path.  Even as a child I filled journals with ideas, thoughts, and in my teens I wrote each and every volcanic emotion down.  Writing, simply put, is part of my fabric.  
        However, when I became a teacher, I was surprised that many didn't share my enthusiasm for writing.  Looking back now at my first fourth grade class, filled with bright, enthusiastic learners, I can see how writing was a struggle.  For the majority of them, they were trying to express themselves with voice, fluency, and proficiency in a language that they didn't speak at home.  As a new teacher, I didn't know what to do.  We just kept writing, we practiced D.O. L. we talked about writing, and I modeled.  All fine strategies, but not enough. 
       After 20 years in the classroom, I finally feel good about how I'm developing writers.  After countless trainings on language acquisition, developing voice, teaching structure, syntax, mentor texts, common core writing, and many years in the classroom, I am seeing some wonderful success, especially with my littles, my first graders.  Some come in scared to write and scared to make a mistake.  Some come in bold, writing strings and strings of letters that translated, (by them to me), tell fantastic adventures.  Some come in writing beautiful looking simple sentences that tell me things in a matter of fact way.  All of these little learners come in with the ability to grow, change, put in hard work, and leave knowing writing can unlock so much.
       The purpose of this post is to share, in little snippets, some of the things that I have learned on teaching writing.  I have a student teacher this year and she asked me the other day, "How do you start to teach writing?"  She got me thinking.  It is such a process, such an adventure, and often an adventure that you don't fully experience in the credential program.  So, in a way, these posts are for her.  Since she came when we were already in full swing, I'll try to break it down a bit.  I'll start with the overview and then dive deeper into each area, hopefully hitting interventions as well.  Hope this helps someone!

What the day looks like (The writing parts of our day):

Power Writing- We start the day with power writing.  This is sort of a drop everything and write time where we build our writing stamina.  This is timed writing where we keep pencils moving the whole time.  We are up to about 15 minutes before we start to get the wiggles. Some want to go longer. Kids can always continue in our Daily 5 block.  This writing time is not just self- selected or prompt driven.  We brainstorm two topics.  Kids have choice and a spring board. 
Fiction/Non-fiction learning blocks- Both of these blocks contain daily writing as we used paired fiction and non-fiction texts.  We write all three text types simultaneously so we write them often.  The only way to do this is to write through most parts of the day. In these blocks we study structure, mentor texts, foundational skills, and much more.

Designated Writing Time:  This time is dedicated to developing and diving deeper into each of the text types.  We use an interactive writing handbook, do mini-lessons, focus on mentor sentences, analyze writing, and most importantly write.  This time especially highlights how to write all parts of a piece:  introductions, conclusions, facts/details, reasons/details, and events/details.  We also focus on individual writing goals. 

Daily 5:  My favorite part of the day.  Those of you familiar with Daily 5 know the power of choice.  This is our time to research, read, practice skills, and most importantly write.  I provide many opportunities for the kids to write during their work on writing time.  They can write narrative stories, informative, opinion, poetry, letters, lists, etc.  They can also write in different formats.  They can write books, big books, iMovie scripts, blog posts, and much more.  Technology has definitely sparked the kids love for writing in the last few years as there are many amazing apps that motivate and excite these little guys.  I'll be talking more about this when I dive deeper into this subject.

Feedback/Author's Chair/Movie Screenings:  Essential for growth, feedback is important to our class as we all strive to be better writers.  In first grade, feedback starts with a lot of structure, but eventually ends up natural and wonderful.  
It is my goal to try to share a little about each area and more in the coming weeks/months.  Sign up to the right on my blog to receive email updates when I publish new posts or just check back!


 Warmly,

Monday, February 22, 2016

Five For Friday -February 19, 2016

I am super grateful that in my job I get to see precious moments like these.  I love how my little firsties are so kind and sweet with one another.  This little guy wanted to walk his friend back to get her snack.  He smiled, grabbed her hand, and they walked to the class and back to the playground.  Be still my heart!




As a fun culmination to learning about what presidents do for President's Day, my littles wrote poems about what they feel presidents do and did some cute art to go with it. They absolutely loved presenting the information in poetry form!  We used the poetry mentor text Analysis of Baseball by May Swenson.  All of it is in my unit Being an American.  If interested the link is below. 
 
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Common-Core-Close-Reading-First-Grade-Being-An-American-1176650
 
I'm so proud of my students! They are really flying on their self-selected research.  The motivation is incredible!  They are taking notes and writing scripts for iMovies in this photo.  Our school is so lucky to have iPads! We have "movie screenings" when they are done.  In the scripts they are basically writing an informative piece with their notes and including an introduction and a conclusion. There is so much learning going on!  It is amazing what these kids can do.



At this point in the year in first grade the kids begin to fly in their reading.  Most have cracked the code, and really need to work on fluency.  I love these phonics passages and activities for the kids.  I have seen so much improvement in the way they read.  Above is one of my little guys working on his long e fluency.  These are from my Long Vowel Fluency Unit.  Link is below if you are interested.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Long-Vowel-Fluency-Unit-2368851


I am thankful to see my students beginning to use their voice in writing.  We've been focusing so much on structure and developing strong introductions.  I just love this one!  
 
Have a great week!

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Five For Friday February 12, 2016

1)  Flexible Seating


I am so blessed to be in a kindergarten room, even though I teach first grade.  It gives us lots of opportunities with flexible seating.  For me, choice in learning is vital.  During "student time", students can choose a variety of options of seats.  They can work at desks, tables, counters, floor, special seats, or a quiet desk. I got the great little rocking chair seats from Wal-Mart for $5.  The kids love them, especially during read to self time.  Not all time is choice time though.  During "teacher time" I let the kids know that I control where they are learning.  "Teacher time" is where I am giving my direct instruction. The kids know that during this time I control where they will sit. That being said, I don't have one spot where I have them learn.  We have a math carpet, a reading circle, sit spots, focus form when we are sitting at our desks, and huddle formation where everyone comes in very close to hear important information.  I mix all of the options up, even throughout a lesson.  I use my teacher judgement here, when I see the wiggles start to form.  If kids are at desks, and I see too much wiggling, we change gears to a different location.  Sometimes, we even switch spots at desks.  The kids love the change and they love variety.  They also know if I use huddle formation (where kids come in super close, standing like a football huddle) when I am about to tell them something VERY important.  I set up all the procedures for these listening spots at the beginning of the year.  I go through very slowly what it looks and sounds like for the teacher and for  the students. I also tell them the purpose of all of it.  They love hearing that their job is keeping their eyes on the prize . . . the prize being LEARNING!
These rocking chairs are available at Wal-Mart in the toy section.

The carpet is always a big favorite.  These students are playing Roll and Talk (a comprehension game from my Duck For President Unit).

2)  Growth Mindset


Each day, at the end of the day, we write a message of gratitude on our desks. This one touched my heart!  In our class we focus a lot on how hard work will get us to our goals.  If you use Class Dojo (a free behavior management system), you might already know about their new video series that promotes a growth mindset.  It is great!  Below is a link to the first in a series of short videos that promote growth mindset.


 3)  Valentine's Day Fun!




I absolutely LOVE kid art.  I also absolutely love to learn from art sessions.  Whenever we have art sessions, I always make them as free as possible.  I offer a set of choices of projects, teach a skill,  and I let them go.  I tell the kids that they can spend the time on one project (perfecting it the way they want it), they can do all the projects, they can do some of the projects, or they can create a new project using the skill I focused on.  The way the kids tackle this choice and the the way the attack their art speaks volumes, and I learn so much about my students through these art sessions.  I love to see and hear what's important to the kids when they do their art, the joy on their faces, the differences in their art, and I love just listening to them.  It is a time where I am not pulling kids to test, work on skills, or reteach.  It is a time where I can just work on building classroom community.  Each year on Valentine's Day I teach the kids how to cut a heart out of a folded piece of paper, a skill I still remember learning when I was about their age.  I'm always surprised to see who tackles the task with ease and who struggles with the folding, the cutting, and the frustration.  This year, one of my littles, completely broke down in unstoppable tears over the frustration of cutting out hearts.  What was so surprising is this is our "class artist".  She is the one who loves everything art and displays such a gift for it.  What she does struggle with, though, is trying new things.  I learned this early on in the art sessions, and we've been working all year on tackling how to feel when things are hard for us.  As I saw today, we're still working, but that is okay because that is what growth mindset is all about!

4)  Writing introductions and conclusions!



It's about this time of the year that I really start seeing the fruits of our labor!  I spend a lot of time trying to develop voice in my little writers, while also teaching structure.  The two above examples made my heart sing!  I love the introductions and conclusion of these two informative pieces written about the flag.  I'm working on some blog posts on a writing sequence coming soon, but below are two products that I use to really teach options in writing introductions and conclusions.  If you own them already keep checking back for updates because I add to my products all the time.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writing-Introductions-Leads-Opinion-Informative-and-Narrative-Text-1820344
 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writing-Introductions-Leads-Opinion-Informative-and-Narrative-Text-1820344
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writing-Conclusions-Opinion-Informative-and-Narrative-Text-2114551
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writing-Conclusions-Opinion-Informative-and-Narrative-Text-2114551
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Writing-Conclusions-Opinion-Informative-and-Narrative-Text-2114551
This is part of our writing wall, where we display introduction and conclusion types with examples from students!


 
5)  Audience
I love putting things facing out of our windows so that parents, other kids, and anyone walking by can see.  We put our American Flag news articles facing out and I can't wait for the kids to spy the audience reading our great work!