September 28, 2013

Hi everyone! It is hard to believe it is already the end of September. This first month of school just flew by! This week, for the first time, we shared our students for shared reading. This is a typical year, where the range of our students' reading abilities varies greatly. We find it beneficial to sometimes split the students into two different shared reading groups to better meet their needs. One group gets a more guided, supported reading lesson, while the other group gets a higher level, more independent lesson.

With our more guided group, we used our Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night  Teachers Pay Teachers lesson. We haven't completed it yet, but here is the start of our storyboard. There are many more activities in this lesson plan. Check out our Teachers Pay Teachers store.

For our other group, we decided to use Henry and Mudge books to teach characterization. We introduced the students to direct and indirect characterization through the song You're a Mean one, Mr. Grinch.

We then had students choose their own Henry and Mudge book to read, and the plan was for them to complete the same type of character trait chart on Henry. However, this was too big of a jump for them to do independently. So, we are revising our original plans, and are going to have the students complete a character web before they infer Henry's traits. We think this will make the activity more concrete for them before jumping into such a difficult task.

For a fun way to reinforce our word block lesson on magic e words, we had the students make hink pinks. They loved listening to the hink pink riddles in the book, What Do You Call a Rhyming Riddle? by the fifth-grade students from St. Joseph Montessori School, and they had a great time writing their own hink pinks afterwards.

Two days this week we were out of the classroom for Fountas and Pinnell individual testing with our students. This is a new assessment for us. We also plan on giving our students the Basic Reading Inventory (BRI) by Jerry Johns in the next few weeks. This is our tried and true favorite informal assessment to give the students.

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Sensational Science

September 21, 2013

Reading and writing expository texts about scientists and space was fun for our students this week. We know with the Common Core more complex, informational text needs to be incorporated into our lessons, and we have tried to connect this reading to hands-on, engaging activities to hook our students.

We got to implement another one of our teachers pay teachers lessons, Exploring Space With an Astronaut by Patricia J. Murphy. Using the picture sort to generate main idea and details was a concrete way to introduce this skill. During our close read of the text, students were able to use the headings to find clues to the main idea of each section. We had students look for the main idea, usually found in the first sentence, and underline it in orange crayon. Then, they underlined supporting details in yellow. To challenge them, we also included one section where the main idea had to be inferred. We ended this lesson with an art project where students had to write one main idea and two details on their space scene.

Two different picture sets students worked with.

We also read more about being a scientist. We wanted the students to gather information from multiple sources to answer the questions: What is a scientist? and What do scientists do? Students first read the book, What Do Scientists Do? by Daniel Jacobs. They had to take notes on what they felt was important. They also read a Keynote that Kim created to gather more information. When they finished the Keynote, they went to this great website from PBS where students could listen to real scientists talking about their jobs. We bought sticker scenes from Oriental Trading for the students to create a picture of scientists working in a lab, and finally, they wrote a list with a repeated line explaining what scientists do. Our repeated line was A scientist..., which was a great way to reinforce the concept of complete sentences needing subjects. We are also planning to use this writing as a springboard into list poems next week.

This is one page of the Keynote.

Again, we wish you a happy, relaxing weekend. We'll talk to you next week!

Kim and Anne

September 13, 2013

Hi everyone. We're writing the blog on Friday because we have so many commitments this weekend, so we're going to make it short and sweet.

We did a follow-up activity to our Orb experiment this week. Students had to come up with their new question to test with the orbs. Some students chose to put the orbs in ice water, salt water, Dr. Pepper, tea, or oil. Amazing results occurred and fascinated our students. It led them to even more questions they wanted to test. They were thrilled when we gave them orbs to take home, and many came back the next day discussing their new experiments and results. This has been such a motivating way to introduce the scientific method.

Orbs in Oil.  Nothing happened, but we had a great discussion on why.

We've had an independent reading program, called Buzzing, for years. We even did an action research project using our Buzzing program, and the results proved what we already knew. Kids who consistently read outside of the classroom for thirty minutes or longer, and discuss their reading in small peer groups, or buzz groups, make significant gains in their reading abilities. Our buzzing is getting underway nicely. We made a Buzzing I-Chart, and a Reading Is Thinking Chart to help the process. The Buzzing I-Chart helps the students become aware of what their responsibilities are during these discussion times. The Reading Is Thinking Chart has helped students discuss more than just the focus question of the day. That chart was generated after students participated in a shared reading activity where we introduced being metacognitive while reading. We introduced five reading strategies and their codes so we could mark our thinking spots as we read. These two charts, along with our joining in a buzzing group each day to help model and facilitate good discussions have helped lead to our successful start. We think students are offering more thoughts and insights in their discussions.

Close reading has been given a lot of attention recently. Here is an article explaining more about close reading, and some of the misconceptions about it. After reading the article, we think buzzing really can be considered a form of close reading because students are going back to their texts to talk about specific parts of it. The focus questions allow them to hone in on different ideas.

We're off now for a busy weekend. We hope you enjoy yours!

Kim and Anne

A Walk In The Desert

Sunday, September 8, 2013


It's finished!!! Our latest TeachersPayTeachers product has been posted.  It is a lesson plan for the story A Walk in the Desert by Caroline Arnold.  It includes hands-on activities to teach the reading skill main ideas and details.  We love it and hope you check it out.

Kim and Anne

Second Week of School

September 7, 2013

It is only our second week of school, and our students are already getting used to our classroom routines and expectations. We are all starting to come together as a team. We have started to implement Marvin Marshall's ideas from Discipline Without Stress, Punishments, or Rewards into our own behavior programs. Our students are better able to reflect on their behavior and monitor it.

We finally began our first story from our reading series, The Twin Club. Our focus was on the settings of the story and how it affected the characters' feelings, thoughts, and actions. After our shared reading, students sketched out the six different settings of the story. Then, they wrote words to describe the circumstances surrounding each scene. After our close read, we challenged our students to make inferences about how the characters were feeling, and what they were thinking. Yes, we were worried and felt at times that it might be too difficult for our students this early in the year, but we know how important it is to have rigorous lessons with the Common Core. Our students really stepped up to the plate, and it was a successful lesson on a Friday afternoon! If you use this curriculum and you want to check out the lesson, here's a link for you to download our free lesson plan. The Twin Club

We finally got our "tweet" lesson from Amy Lemons done this week. We talked about how the first thing a writer needs is ideas, and then he or she needs to decide on which idea to write about. After brainstorming a list of summer events, our students selected one idea and wrote a short narrative.

Science was once again a big hit in our rooms. We continued to practice our observation skills with our orb experiment. After making observations about the tiny orbs, we presented our students with the question: What will happen when I put orbs in room temperature water? After making a hypothesis, each student got their own cup of water and orbs and patiently waited for the next day to see the results.    They put their observation skills to good use, and were amazed by the changes they saw. Squeals of laughter and delight over how bouncy and squishy the orbs became spread throughout the room, and the students were surprised to discover that the clear orbs did not disappear, but just became camouflaged with the water.

When the students were finished observing, we explained that observations lead scientists to new questions. We asked them what new questions they had about the orbs and charted their responses. We told the students we would give them new orbs to test their questions on Monday.

Then, we pretended to have forgotten to observe our own orbs that we put in water. When we showed them the cup, they immediately knew we had done something different with our orbs because they were gigantic. We explained that they were inferring, or drawing a conclusion. They then naturally started making hypotheses about what we had done. All we had really done was use giant orbs instead of the regular ones. If you'd like to try this with your students, here is the link to Steve Spangler, where  you can buy the orbs.

Enjoy the weekend! It's going to be a hot one here!

Kim and Anne