Starting to Think About the Beginning of School

Saturday, July 27, 2013

This past week we wrote our last TpT lesson plan for the summer.  Summer is flying by, and we now need to spend time cleaning our classrooms and getting them ready for our new students.  We are getting excited about meeting them and beginning a fresh new school year.

Our latest lesson plan goes along with our first Reading Streets story called The Twin Club.  It is a free lesson plan focusing on setting changes and how they affect the characters' thoughts, feelings, and actions.  If you use this basal series you might want to check it out.

We will definitely continue to write lesson plans, but we are taking a few weeks off.

No tutoring this week because the kiddies are on vacation.

Anne found an interactive venn diagram activity on Read, Write, Think.  She was thinking it might be a good tool for students to use during Daily 5.

Kim found two articles that seem to go together.  Both articles are about how to help students become more engaged and involved in their own learning.  This is a major component of the Common Core State Standards.  Here are the links the two articles:

How to Transform Direct Instruction

Essential Questions

Kim also found a fun, first-day-of-school activity to do with our second graders.  This is a new twist on the People Search we did for many years.  We will be making "Getting To Know You" necklaces.  After they make their necklaces the kids go around the room and look for other kids who have similar beads on their necklaces.  This idea came from the blog Sunny Days in Second Grade.  If you have never checked out her website, we highly recommend it.  You can download this free activity from this site.

Have a great time getting ready for the start of school!

Kim and Anne

Short and Sweet

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Good Morning! This week we spent time writing a lesson plan to go with the story Exploring Space with an Astronaut by Patricia J. Murphy.  This story will go along nicely with our Astronomy unit at the beginning of the school year.  It was easy to focus on the target skill of main ideas and details with this story because the nonfiction text structure supported this skill.  The headings of each section gave clues as to what the main idea was.  We decided to keep the lesson short with two hands-on activities.  It includes a quick lesson on identifying the main idea using pictures and creating supporting details to go with those pictures, as well as an art activity to solidify the main ideas and details of the story.  If you're interested, check out the lesson at our TeachersPayTeachers store. Below is a preview of our lesson plan.

This week Kim and her tutoring student used the Aims lesson called Jelly Belly to review types of angles, measuring angles, fractions, decimals, and finding percentages.  It took us two sessions, but was well worth it.

Math Playground is a great website that has many higher-level math activities for students to engage in. Kim showed her student the Common Core Third Grade games.  The student decided to review finding the area and perimeter of shapes using a game called Geometry Board.  She wanted to just explore this activity since it was her first time using it and made shapes to discover the area and perimeter of them.  As you can see, the activity gives you questions to try and answer by creating shapes.

Kim and her reading student have finished reading Middle School: My Brother Is A Big Fat Liar by James Patterson.  To prompt a discussion about the chapters they both read at home, Kim made a Jeopardy game .  Her student enjoyed playing it and told her that he and his classmates would play this same game during Battle of the Books, which was an extra curricular reading club.

We came upon this very interesting article while browsing twitter.  It is called "Planting Seeds for Fiction, One Fact at a Time."   It gave us a new direction on how to help students generate ideas in writing workshop.  We were inspired by this article because it linked nonfiction reading to fictional writing.  This is a perfect combination because many of our boys are interested in reading nonfiction materials and both boys and girls prefer to write fiction stories.  This article helps tie the two genres together so students have a coherent, believable piece of writing rather than one that loses its focus.  We look forward to using this idea in a guided writing lesson at the beginning of the year.

We'll see you on the blog next week!
Kim and Anne

A Little of This...A Little of That

Friday, July 12, 2013

Thanks to all of you who previewed and downloaded our newest activities on TpT.  We hope you find them useful.  Monday we will start writing a lesson plan for Exploring Space With An Astronaut by Patricia J. Murphy.  This story will go along with our Astronomy science unit that we will be doing in the fall.

During the past three math tutoring sessions, Kim and her student have been working with triangles and angles. Kim found a great Aims lesson called Tasty Triangles. The objective of this lesson is to introduce students to equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles.  Licorice twists were used for this activity.  First, Kim gave the student three pieces of licorice and asked her to make a triangle.  They discussed what they noticed about the triangle--all sides were equal lengths.  We called that an equilateral triangle.  Then, the student took a bite of one licorice piece and made another triangle.  We noticed only two sides of the triangle were the same size--an isosceles triangle.  Finally she took a bite of another side of the triangle and  noticed none of the sides were equal in length--a scalene triangle.  The student completed the booklet to help her remember the three types of triangles.

Kim and her student also learned about right, acute, obtuse and straight angles.  They did activities from Aims Angle Aerobics, Angles More or Less, and Angle Hunt.  They were so much fun, the student wanted to do a Wixi project to show what she learned.  

  Pictures came from Altteacher on TpT.

Kim also introduced her student to Smart Cards so she could practice her mental addition skills.  They are super fun and the work like "magic."  One person thinks of a number between 1-31.  They point to all the cards that their number appears on.  The student keeps track of the cards and mentally adds the first numbers on each of the cards that has the target number.  The sum should be the number the first person was thinking about.  

For example, Kim thinks of the number 11.  She points to the blue, pink, and green cards because 11 only appears on those cards.  The student (who does not know the number Kim is thinking about) adds the first numbers on the blue card, pink card and green card-- 1 + 2 + 8=11.  The student says "11?" and Kim says yes, that is the number she is thinking of.  It works every time as long as the adding is correct.  This activity came from Marilyn Burns' book The I Hate Mathematics Book.

After reading Igniting A Passion For Reading, by Steven L. Layne, we have been inspired to begin a new program in our second-grade classroom.  It is called "Newspaper Day."  One day a month our students will read newspaper articles, written for students, at the online site called Tween Tribune . The great thing about this site is that the articles are written at different reading levels so the students can choose a level that they are comfortable with.  They can also add comments to articles they have read and read other students' comments.  Newspaper Day will occur once a month during our Shared Reading block for about 45 minutes.  We want this to feel differently than our other reading activities.  We want to create a casual and pleasurable environment where students are reading, writing, and discussing about articles of their own choosing.  The environment would be similar to adults reading the Sunday paper and talking about it with someone in their family.  During this time we hope to have parent volunteers bring in healthy snacks and drinks for the kids.  The purpose of starting this program with our second graders is to promote a love of reading, develop their comprehension of nonfiction texts, and promote peer discussions around a specific topic.  This program will meet various Informational Text and Speaking and Listening Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Permission slip to comment to the public

Have parents volunteer to bring in snacks.

We read another article from the International Reading Association that gave us a lot to think about.  It is titled, "The Common Core's Stair Case to Text Complexity: Getting the Size of the First Step Right" by Elfrieda H. Hiebert.  At first we thought it contradicted the article we read last week by Timothy Shanahan, but as we read it a second time we could see a connection between the two articles.  The main thing we took away from this article is that we need to really be aware of who our readers are and choose reading material that meets their needs.  If they are struggling readers putting them at a frustration level book is not going to be effective; however, more able readers most likely would be able to  handle reading material that that is just above their instructional reading level.  In either situation we need to make informed professional decisions for our students.

Have a great week.



Kim and Anne

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

We finished!!! Our Henry and Mudge lesson plans are on our TpT store.  We hope you can check it out.  If you do, let us know what you think.  We also put a free reading interest inventory  inspired by the book Igniting a Passion for Reading.  If you remember, this is the great book we have been reading this summer.  It is by Steven L. Layne.  We highly recommend it!

Have a great week.  Talk to you Saturday.

Kim and Anne

Henry and Mudge and More

Saturday, July 6, 2013

We hope everyone had a Happy Fourth of July.  The weather here is finally starting to feel like summer. Yeah!!!   This week we continued to work on our Henry and Mudge lesson plans for our TeachersPayTeachers store.  We are really happy with the way it's turning out and cannot wait to implement it in our classrooms this fall.  Below are pictures of the new activities we have been working on.

Retelling Bags

This week in tutoring, Kim and her student began reading Road Trip by Gary Paulsen.  It is a fast read that has hooked her student.  He can't wait to keep reading.  That was her goal--get him motivated to want to read this summer. :) Reading this book is part of the summer reading assignment her student must complete before starting junior high in the fall.  Kim and her student read chapters together during the tutoring session, but the student also reads some chapters on his own.  Kim found a fun Connect4 2  game on Smart Exchange that she uses to guide her discussions on the chapters they have read on their own.  Connect4 is a generic game that you can modify to fit any of your curriculum needs.

Pull the screen down to reveal the answer.

One of the requirements of the assignment is to make a bulleted list of 10-15 main ideas from the book. So Kim created a main idea page that her student completes after reading each chapter.  Keeping track of the main ideas will make it easy to type them into a table later.

Next week Kim will share her Tasty Triangle activity that she did with her math student.

Kim did find an awesome website that she wanted to share with everyone.  It is filled with fun websites for every subject area--including art--that kids can visit if they finish their work early.  Some of the sites may even be appropriate to use during Daily5.  It is called kb...Konnected Kids.

You have to check this out!!!

Another interesting article we read was by Timothy Shanahan  titled "Common Core Standards: Are We Going To Lower the Fences or Teach Kids to Climb?"  As stressful as it has been in trying to gain an understanding of the Common Core State Standards and implementing them in our classrooms, this is another article that has helped us feel confident that our students will be successful with the CCSS through our teaching methods.

It was a great relief to read his statement, "Truth be told, there is little research supporting matching kids with books, and there are even studies suggesting that teaching children from frustration level text can lead to more learning than from instructional level ones."  There have been times in the past that we felt the books we had chosen for a guided reading group were too challenging for the readers.  We questioned ourselves and each other and often wondered if we should abandon the book.  We even questioned the kids and asked them if they felt the book was too challenging, but they always said no they wanted to keep reading it.  We knew our discussion questions and projects had to fully support the kids' understandings of these books.  In the end, sticking with the books proved to be the right decision.  According to formal and informal reading assessments, our students' reading comprehension greatly improved, as well as their motivation to read more challenging books.

Shanahan does clearly state that teachers need to be careful with putting beginning, struggling readers into reading material that is too challenging.  This is something we will be aware of as we begin our guided reading instruction in the fall.

Until next week...
Kim and Anne