The Biggest, Best Snowman!!

We are currently learning about fiction story structure; specifically beginning, middle, and end. I was inspired by a Pinterest post and did this lesson with my kiddos yesterday! 

We read the cutest book, "The Biggest, Best Snowman" by Margery Cuyler. 

It's a great book about a little girl who is told by everyone around her that she is too small to accomplish anything but, with the help of her animal friends, she is able to build the biggest, best snowman and prove her family wrong.

As we were reading, I stopped at various parts of the story and had students turn and talk, then share out. We had already learned about Set-It-Up (characters and setting) and Mix-It-Up (problem), so we added those elements to our poster, but we were really focusing on beginning, middle, and end. This is how our poster turned out. Those details are right from the kiddos sharing, aren't they great! One day I will share about how we partner talk and share out in my classroom. I learned the strategy from another teacher at the beginning of the year and was so impressed! Of course everyone has heard of partner talk and sharing out, but they way this other teacher did it was just so fabulous! But that's another day :)

After our mini-lesson with this great mentor text, students went out and made beginning, middle, and end snowman graphic organizers in their reading response journals. Of course I don't have pictures of their work. I totally forgot but will add them sometime this week. Happy Day!

Iris and Walter: Urban and Rural Communities plus a Vocabulary Power Point FREEBIE

The first unit in my Reading Street Curriculum was "Iris and Walter" by Elissa Haden Guest.

Despite the current movement away from basal readers, I actually am really loving my Reading Street curriculum right now because it not only has great stories, but I am totally able to use the anthology as a shared reading basis for my Reading Workshop which is awesome!! I'm planning on posting about how I incorporate the reading curriculum with the workshop model soon.

Anyhoo, the main social studies concept from this unit was the concept of rural vs urban communities. Iris moves from the city and finds country life to be sad and boring until she finds a new friend, Walter.

After reading the textbook story, I gathered some pictures from good ole Google Image of urban and rural communities around the world. We went through the slideshow together, pointing out things we saw that were similar and different about the various pictures. Then, while the power point was on repeat cycle, students worked with their reading partner to find similarities and differences between rural and urban communities. Then the kiddos brought their sticky notes down to the rug and we learned about Venn Diagrams using their sticky note ideas (Sticky Notes are one of my favorite formative assessment strategies!!) If I was more on top of it, I would have had blue in the middle (Yellow and green make blue, duh!) but maybe next year! Also, the sticky notes were not very sticky so the pictures aren't fabulous, but you can see the work!

Here is what some of the smart little kiddos came up with.

Rural: "People, cars, skyscrapers"

"Cow, horses, houses, school buses"

"Pigs, horses"

Urban: "A lot of people and buildings"

"Cars, skyscrapers, Space Needle"

"Urban places have subways and skyscrapers"

"A lot of houses"

Both: "Houses, ambulances"

"Trees, schools, houses"

"Buses, schools"

"Moms, dads"

Students then did a word sort of urban and rural vocabulary words in their reading response journals and we read two of my favorite books about this topic. We of course read "Town Mouse and Country Mouse" by Jan Brett.

And one of my favorite books of all time, "The Little House" by Virginia Lee Burton. I would spend hours staring at the fabulous illustrations in this book when I was a child so I of course wanted to share it with my class. Oh nostalgia!

We also read Scholastic News which had a whole issue related to this vocabulary issue! The issue compared and contrasted urban, suburban, and rural schools. I get Scholastic News for my students every year and there is some weird sort of Scholastic News Magic where their issues almost always coincide with what we are learning about in class. Plus, they are aligned to Common Core now which is fabulous!! I love Scholastic News!

I'd love to share my Rural and Urban Power Point and Social Study Word Sort with you for FREE!! Find it here Rural or Urban Vocabulary Mini-Unit FREEBIE

Happy Day!

ABC Quilt

Look at this adorable project I saw when I went to work in my classroom, an ABC quilt our summer school students made!! It is a quick, easy, effective instructional strategy. Students search through magazines and cut out pictures to glue onto construction paper; one piece of paper per letter. After the pages are full, glue onto a big piece of butcher paper and make a quilt (don't forget to talk about how quilt starts with Q, duh!)

When I taught pre-k I kicked this idea up a notch and assigned a little homework assignment to the kiddo's. They would be assigned a letter and then be asked to bring a picture of something that started with that letter. A magazine cutout, sticker, really anything that could be glued to a piece of paper. This increased learning because they needed parental support for this activity and anytime you hooked parents, you increase achievement. Happy Day!

CAFE and Daily 5 Workshop!

I was soooooo lucky to get to attend the Daily 5 and CAFE training in Tacoma, Washington this year with the Two Sisters. My frugal self did not spend the money for the tickets, but my super kind principal had bought tickets and then couldn't attend so she gave little ole' ME her tickets!! I was so excited to attend this training. I had heard of Daily 5/Cafe/Two Sisters before, had seen a bit of their work in some of my colleagues rooms, but I had NO idea how popular this model had become. I live in Tacoma (the city of the convention), but was so surprised when I learned that people had flew in from all over the country, no, make that the world, to attend this conference. We had people from Hawaii, Nebraska, Maine, Colorado, Georgia, Canada, even New Zealand! Knowing that all these great teachers had flown in just to attend this conference let me know that what I was about to experience was special. 

Ten minutes in, I was hooked! The Sisters were not only experienced teachers filled with really sound advice on how to improve literacy instruction in the classroom, but they were funny! I love funny. Especially in teaching, when things can sometimes just get so darn hard and complicated, the only way to survive is to laugh at the crazy. They shared stories from their classrooms, spoke so fondly of their students and teachers they had worked with. I left the training with an understanding of the model and an excitement to get started learning more about it and implementing elements into my classroom. 

The basic premise of Daily 5/CAFE is that to make students become better readers, they need to spend the majority of their literacy block ACTUALLY reading real books. I am so on board with this. I taught at a small, private school for a number of years and we had no reading curriculum. We taught many kids how to read by teaching them the phonics and comprehension strategies they needed, but allowed them to read what they wanted. No boring basal readers. No colored reading groups. And it worked! However, we had ten kids to a class. As I was listening I was on board with the idea, but skeptical that it could be implemented in a class of 25+. It seemed though that as soon as this popped into my  head, they had the answer. They knew that to really get kids reading, teachers needed to spend the first part of the year focusing on teaching them how to read independently and build their stamina. Once you spend the first month and a half building their independence and stamina, then you can start meeting with students in small groups or one-on-one and giving them individualized reading instruction that they need to become better readers. 

The books give much greater detail on HOW to do this and what EXACTLY it looks like in a classroom. I've read the CAFE book and really enjoyed it. It explains how to implement the model in your room and, my favorite part, has sample lessons in the back for all the comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and vocabulary standards. I've ordered the new Daily 5 book and plan on reading that before school starts too. Their website also has TONS of videos and articles to support the model. 

So I learned a lot from the workshop and book; more than a typical professional development workshop. I felt a community between literacy teachers. I had a plan and was ready to implement, but I just can't share about this conference without sharing what I think made it stand out above every professional development workshop I've attended, and Lord knows I and every other teacher out there has attended hundreds if not thousands of professional development workshops. It all started in the first 10 minutes when the Sisters explained they weren't providing lunch because they do lunch. . . differently. I thought, "Weird, what could that possible mean?!" Well, about 30 minutes later we all found out. 

The sisters were talking about this great book, Dex: Heart of a Hero. It focuses on this little dog who wants to a superhero, but everyone tells him he can't because he's too small. Well, he buckles down and trains hard and then ends up becoming a famous and very helpful hero. The Sisters encouraged us to read it aloud to our students when talking about stamina. Just as I went to write down the title and author, they announced that everyone was getting a FREE copy of the book!! What?! My colleagues and I were so excited! They had volunteers pass out books to each of the probably 1000+ teachers in the room.

"How cool!" we all thought. Little did we know how cool it actually was. Over the next two days we got so much swag! Great books and tools that actually will help in the classroom. Many workshops give you a pen or, yes, ANOTHER tote bag, but this workshop gave us a ton of really useful things. We seriously felt like we were on the Oprah show by the end of it all. Look at all this stuff!

We got 4 really great books. We got chimes to use as a quiet signal, dry erase colored pencils (What?! I didn't even know they made those!) and a small white board, a timer, toys to help children focus and check for understanding, post-it notes, and tools to help kids track lines in their books. All this swag has got to be worth doing lunch on your own right?! They also gave use these really high-quality workbooks, notebooks, and STYLUS pens. Yep, that's right! Not just any ole' ink pen, but an ink pen that can also be used on tablets and phones. Super cool!

Long story short, (that was really long!), I really enjoyed the conference and walked away with useful things I am planning on implementing in my room this year. 

Of course, after the workshop I just HAD to start a project; making a cute CAFE board and Daily 5 signage. Here's a SNEAK PEEK! I'm hoping to get this project finished by next Friday