Writing, Synonyms and Reindeer

Friday, December 19, 2014

We can hardly believe it is time for winter break.  Where has the first part of the year gone?

Last week we made adorable sock snowmen.  This week we wrote an explanatory piece giving directions on how to make them.  For some reason the kids were super focused and wrote for over an hour!  It was probably because they loved the little snowmen so much.  They even wanted to include their writing as part of their gift to their parents.  It was nice to end the week with such quality work.

Yes, we know the border is upside down, but this student's writing was so well done we wanted to show-case it.  Also, this is only page one.

Another fun activity we did this week involved synonyms and antonyms.  The kids made synonym-antonym word strings. Each group of students was given a bag filled with six words.  They then had to arrange them according to their degree with the strongest opposites at the top and bottom. Before they could arrange them, they had to look up the definitions to determine where to place them.

In computer lab, we continued having fun with words. We used the program Tagxedo to create word art with synonyms or antonyms.

Our last activity of the week was making pine cone reindeer. To solidify the idea of following directions, we had the kids how to make the reindeer. If they followed the directions they ended up with an adorable reindeer!

Have a great Holiday Season!

Kim and Anne

Simple Machines and Main Idea

December 12, 2014

Hi everyone,

It is hard to believe that there is only one week of school left before winter break. There is so much to get done in these last few days! One thing we did finish was our Simple Machine Unit! We spent a little more than a trimester on this unit, but it was well worth it.

We thought what better way to wrap up this unit than to have our students become the teachers! Lately, we have spent much time focusing on main idea and important details with our kids. It can be challenging to find the main idea, and even more challenging to weed out the interesting details from the details that are most important to the main idea.  Students really have to think critically about the text, which we think is so important. The students' task as teachers was going to  focus on this skill.

Before we sent them off on their task, we once again addressed main idea and details in our shared reading. Together, we read the one page text, What Are Simple Machines? We had to find the main idea of the entire text, not just one paragraph.  It was a little tricky, because the main idea really was in the second paragraph. After identifying the main idea sentence, we charted important details, and interesting details.

Then it was time for the students to switch roles in cooperative groups! Each group was assigned a  different simple machine. First, they had to follow directions to make a quick three-dimensional paper model of their machine.

Once they finished making their model,  they moved on to reading a one page text about their machine. Their job was to read the text, identify the main idea, important details, and interesting details and create a chart about their simple machine. They would use this chart to teach the class about it. We were amazed with how hard they worked to dig deeper into the text to find the main idea. One group inferred a main idea that was much better than the one we had come up with! They also had great conversations about which details were the important ones.

After practicing their presentations, it was time to teach! The kids had a blast teaching to the class, and listening to the other presentations. It was a huge success!

During this unit, we visited two websites about simple machines during our computer lab time. One was a BBC website, and the other was Edheads. We thought you might like to check them out!

On another note, we found a super cute snowman craft online that the students made this week. This craft is going to serve two purposes for us- it will be our kids' parent gift and it will be used as a springboard for a writing activity that we will share next week!

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Evergreens and Oranges

Friday, December 5, 2014

This week we did a follow-up activity to our synonym lesson from last week.  Trader Joe had the cutest little evergreen trees that were covered in sparkly glitter.  We bought a bunch of them and used them to to write descriptive poems.  They were frame poems that used only adjectives and nouns.  We reviewed the fact that most synonyms are adjectives, so when the kids wrote their poems they needed to use at least two synonyms from our previous lesson.  Our students had a great time playing with words, and we felt great about expanding their vocabulary.  You can link to our frame draft here and our final copy here.

In math, one of our groups had fun with multiplication using the book Each Orange Had Eight Slices: A Counting Book by Paul Giganti, Jr. As it was read aloud, the students had to record and solve the multiplication equations for each page.  Then they had to write their own multiplication story problems following the same format as the story.  It was challenging, but they got the hang of it.  Doing activities like this, as well as Engage New York lessons, have allowed our students to have a deeper conceptual understanding of multiplication and division.

Once again we were pulled out of our classrooms for a math committee meeting, but all was not lost.  We got ahold of a great new resource that will help us as we plan lessons that develop deeper conceptual understandings of math concepts.  The resource is called ISBE Model Math Curriculum.   We are really excited with the direction our district is going in math.  We are excited to continue planning lessons that will meet the needs of our kids.

Have a great weekend!

Kim and Anne

Synonyms

November 21, 2014

Hi everyone! Sorry we were off last week. Our trimester was ending, and we had to get grades and report cards ready.

One of the fun things that we did in word block this week focused on synonyms. It was a springboard from an activity that one of our colleagues gave us. Students had to find synonyms for the word small. We loved the synonym choices because they included words that students were not familiar with. It required them to look up each word in the dictionary and determine if it meant small or not. It wasn't easy, and they often had to draw conclusions to make their decision.

The next part of this word block activity involved helping students use the synonyms correctly. The synonyms for small and big are used in different situations, and we wanted students to practice using them correctly. We separated their uses in their reading notebooks, and they could refer back to their notebooks when engaging in the next activity.

It was then time to practice using these new words in sentences. The kids really did a great job, and everyone used them correctly. This was important for us because in the past when students have used a thesaurus to choose a synonym, they don't choose appropriate ones for their writing. You can click on this google link to get a sentence template for this activity.

The girl who created this synonym page told me she is not finished with the picture.  I apologize.  I'll replace this picture with the completed one as soon as she finishes.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving! We have conferences at the beginning of next week, and then hope to have some time to relax with our families!

Kim and Anne

Writing and Compound Sentence Activities

November 7, 2014

Hi Everyone,

Once again it was a short week for us. Kim had committee meetings on Thursday and Friday, and Anne was out on Friday. Needless to say, we find ourselves once again in the middle of things!

One activity that we did complete was our word block/grammar lesson on conjunctions and compound sentences. We began by asking the students, "What is a conjunction?" None of them knew, but they quickly caught on while we were reading the book, If You Were a Conjunction by Nancy Loewen. After enjoying reading about the many ways conjunctions are used, we introduced the students to compound sentences, and how conjunctions can be used to connect two individual sentences. The students were then given a bag of sentences and conjunctions. They had to match the sentences, select the appropriate conjunction, and make new compound sentences.

The next day, we gave the students random pictures from the internet. They worked in partners to generate compound sentences about their picture. It was a little more challenging than we had anticipated, but everyone did a great job! These two activities were simple, and relatively quick, but really helped our students solidify their understanding of conjunctions and compound sentences. Hopefully, they will carry this into their writing, as we encourage them to not only use simple sentences, but also use compound and more complex sentences as well.

We also worked more on our narrative writing.  As we were reading through some of the students' original narrative stories, we noticed most of them were not adding enough details to develop them.  So, we once again looked to the Smekens website for guidance.  We found two websites that have student anchor papers.  We decided this would be the most effective and efficient way to help show our students how developed narratives look and sound.  We highlighted and annotated the anchor papers so we could use the techniques we found in our own stories.

We not only focused on details and development, we also worked on making sure our narratives had appropriate and interesting transition words and phrases.  We discussed the fact that one of the elements of narrative writing is moving the story along in chronological order, and that it is important to let the reader know when you are moving a long in time.  We decided to keep a list of transition words in our writing notebooks for quick reference.

One last thing we want to mention is an App that many of you may have heard of before, but Kim just learned about it at her committee meeting yesterday.  It's called Chatter Pix.  Kids take pictures of objects, draw a mouth on the object, and then record their voices.  When the clip is played back it looks as if the object is talking.  Oodles of activities could be created that involve kids using this App to demonstrate knowledge and understanding.  The first thing Kim is going to do is have her math students write and solve a multiplication problem that involves drawing arrays.  The students will need to explain what the array is showing.  They may want to draw a character and make it talk, or they may want to have a pencil do the talking, or most likely they will find some other object to do the talking.  This will be a fun way for students to demonstrate their knowledge of what the factors in a multiplication problem mean.  While this is low on Webb's Depth of Knowledge chart, knowing this information is critical to their success in future math concepts.

Here is a YouTube video explaining how to use Chatter Pix.  So easy!

We hope you have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Friday, October 31, 2014

Happy Halloween!  Luckily we are not in class with the kids right now because we know they'd be bouncing off the walls, and we would get nothing accomplished.  Unfortunately, we are at an Institute Day which seems long even though we get out two hours early.  During our breaks we will take the opportunity to type this blog.

Our Force and Motion unit in science continued this week.  We really feel that with all the hands-on activities our students are really internalizing the concept of forces and the vocabulary that is needed for understanding it.  After exploring forces with commercial tops, our students designed their own tops using everyday items.  This was a good activity to have the students really think about what makes a top work.  Surprisingly, after all the exploring they did with tops most groups were not successful in creating a top that could spin for 10 seconds.  The positive thing that came out of this lesson was the fact that the kids had to figure out why their top didn't work.  This led to great conversations, and most of them were spot on.

Many of our kids stated that one reason their top did not spin was because their top was too heavy.  So, the second part of our top designs addressed how weight affected how long a top spins.  In fact, that was our question to them--"How does weight affect how long a top spins?"  Of course many of them hypothesized that their top would not spin at all or it would spin slowly and for a short time.  It was fun for them to discover the exact opposite of their hypotheses happened.

As we reflected on the results of this activity, we were able to introduce the students to the term momentum. We then wanted to see how well students could reflect on their learning throughout these top activities. They did a great job incorporating their understandings of the science concepts to what actually happened with the tops, and they had a lot of fun doing it!



Next week we will be moving on to the concept of gravity, and we will have a Flying Cup Experiment to share with you. We can't wait because it has been a big hit in the past, and it has been awhile since we have taught it!

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Friday, October 24, 2014

Anne and I are going out for a much needed "Girls Night Out" with our teacher friends.  We will be back on line next Friday with lots of fun things to share with you about spinning tops and our Force and Motion science unit.

Have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne

Summarizing, Science, and Book Reviews

Sunday, October 20, 2014

This week was filled with tons of new and exciting learning opportunities.  We spent a lot of time digging deeply into the narrative poems The Spider and the Fly and Dogku.

The Spider and the Fly group did a close read on individual stanzas and tried to summarize them in everyday language.  This was a challenge, but it felt good to accomplish this task.

Later in the week, the students went to the website Spaghetti Book Club--Book Review and read several of the reviews.  Their task was to determine what the book reviews had in common.  They found that each review included a summary of the text, an opinion about or connection to the text, and a recommendation for the text.  It was then the students turn to write a poem review about The Spider and the Fly.  They persevered through this challenge, and impressed us with their writing.  In fact, one student said he felt like he was in junior high after doing this activity.

Our Dogku group completed a similar task.  They also did a close read of the stanzas and had to summarize them in everyday language.  This group then compared and contrasted this narrative poem to  When Charlie McButton Lost Power, another narrative poem.  This activity was not preplanned.  It came about during a discussion about the mood of Dogku.  The students naturally noticed similarities between the moods of each poem.

Our science lesson this week was a combination of reading, writing, and scientific discovery.  We began our force and motion unit by making observations of spinning tops.  The students recorded their observations, as well as questions they had about the tops.  These observations led to discovering our key concepts of force, friction, gravity, position and change direction.  Then the students participated in a sorting activity.  We gave them the key words from our science text, and they had to group the words how they predicted they would be grouped together in the text.  As soon as they were done sorting, we read the text and resorted the words.  We didn't have that much resorting to do because their predictions were accurate.  We think the hands-on top activity was responsible for this.  To wrap the lesson up, students wrote a reflection of what they had learned about force and motion in their science journals.  Surprisingly every student understands that a force is a push or a pull.  Next week we are going to extend our spinning top activity and have students design their own tops.  Their tops will be required to spin a minimum of 30 seconds.  We'll see how it goes and report back next week.

Have a great week.

Kim and Anne

Close Reads and Narrative Poems

October 10, 2014

It's SIP day here for us. The morning began with a presentation from Pat Donahue from Mawi Learning. He was outstanding and talked all about a growth mindset, which is our school's theme this year. We thought we would share some of our activities this week during our lunch break now. With that in mind, please have a growth mindset with some of the student work this week.

After all of our poetry reading, and learning about some poetry devices we introduced a new genre of poetry to the students- narrative poems. These poems tell a story and have literary elements as well as poetic devices. The first narrative poem we read was called, Wonton, A Cat Tale Told in Haiku by Lee Ward. We used this book to talk about point of view. Our discussions led to understanding not only the main character's point of view, but also a minor character's point of view. After a close reading to infer what the boy, who was the minor character was thinking, we wrote a haiku from his point of view. The students loved trying to brainstorm phrases that matched 5-7-5 syllable pattern.

From that narrative poem we moved on to When Charlie McButton Lost Power, another narrative poem. This was a challenging text, and it took awhile for the students to realize that this was a narrative poem. After much discussion, we identified literary elements and poetic devices. We used the literary elements to write a story pyramid. This was a fun way for the students to reformat the literary elements to solidify their understanding.

We aren't ready to post this yet, but this week we also split our students into two different shared reading groups to read more complex narrative poetry. The students were required to do several close readings of different stanzas to understand what was happening and what the characters' points of view were. We will finish that project next week and share it with you.

Kim came across an article titled, "How to Choose the Perfect Passage for Close Reading" from the site  We Are Teachers. Close reading lends itself well to shorter texts, but there is so much quality literature that we still want our students exposed to. There are many places or parts of the story where it still important for students to close read to gain a deeper understanding of what is happening, and a deeper connection to the characters. A close read also allows the reader to think about the craft and structure of the literature. We think the ideas in this article can be adapted to any grade level.

Well, we are off to our afternoon meetings! Have a great long weekend if you celebrate Columbus Day on Monday!

Kim and Anne

Illinois Reading Council Conference

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Anne and I spent Thursday and Friday of last week at the IRC Reading Conference.  Maria Walther and Steven Layne were two speakers who inspired us with their reading and writing ideas, as well as their professional book suggestions.

Maria Walther teaches first grade, but many of her ideas about reading and writing can be adapted to any grade level.  We plan on implementing several of her suggestions in our third grade classrooms.  Her main message on Thursday was,"... reading aloud to students is a must if we are going to transform literacy instruction.  The Common Core State Standards states teachers need to read aloud and do a lot of it."  In her classroom, Maria kept a tally of all of the read aloud experiences she and her first graders had last year.  At the final count they had 794 read aloud experiences!  That's huge.  This is something we would like to try beginning on Monday.

Maria spent the hour presenting book titles that would engage students in collaborative conversations and get them thinking deeper about the story or the craft and structure of the book.  Some good book titles included Peanut Butter and Jellyfish by J. J. Krosoczka, which is a good for encouraging students to noticing amazing vocabulary words.  Tough Boris by Mem Fox is great for modeling a close reading of a text.  The illustrations have something entirely different happening in them than what is going on in the text.  It is a short book and easy to read aloud several times for different purposes.  The Secret Message by M. Javaherbin is great for helping students infer the big idea.  They really have to think about what happened throughout the entire book and use their background knowledge to understand what the secret message is at the end.  This book seems good to use with higher-level readers.

To get students' conversations going, Maria created anchor charts with them.  They include:

When we think and share we...

*Look at one another.

*Keep quiet while one person talks.

*Stay still.

I can link my thinking by saying...

*Tell me more about your thinking.

*I have the same thinking because...

*My thinking is different because...

I can link my thinking by asking...

*What do you think?

*Tell me more about your thinking.

*Thanks, you really made me think today.

Maria said many of these wording ideas came from two professional reading books by Peter H. Johnston.  One is called Choice Words and the other is called Opening Minds.  According to Johnston, it's how teachers word their questions and their conversations that help students grow in their reading and writing potential.  These are two titles we are definitely checking out.

If you are interested in anything we've mentioned above, you can find Maria Walther's handouts at her website under the calendar tab.  The handout we received at the IRC is up there now.  It might also be a good idea to follow her on Twitter.  She always has some inspiring little tid bit to share.

Steven Layne's presentation was similar to Maria's.  He talked about using picture books as spring boards for literacy activities.  Again, he shared the importance of reading aloud to students of any age.  He currently teaches undergraduate and graduate students at Judson University, but in the past he has used these ideas with students as young as third grade up to students in high school.  

One of our favorite ideas for concept reinforcement was using the book Q is for Duck by Mary Elting and Michael Folsom.  It's an alphabet book, but it's not written with the typical organization of an alphabet book.  The letters of the alphabet have an unusual way of matching a concept.  For example, the book begins-- "A is for zoo.  Why?  Because animals live in the zoo."  Teachers can easily use this organizational format to have students create alphabet books based on any concept being studied.  As Steven Layne stated, "You have to know why concepts are important before you can add them to the book."  This activity would really encourage students to think about what they've learned and write about it in another way.  This goes back to Kristina Smeken's idea that students need to reformat information they have learned through their reading.  It is how they get to higher level thinking and understanding.

Another idea we want to take back to our classrooms is rewriting text.  Layne used the poem Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out, by Shel Silverstein to model how students could rewrite text.  He asked the question, "Why do we like this poem? Because Silverstein took a job no one wants to do and exaggerated what would happen if it didn't get done."  He encouraged his students to brainstorm a white board full of "yucky" jobs.  Then students would create poems that would explain what would happen if no one did them.  This activity seems fun and challenging.

Thought squares was a final idea that we thought could be easily incorporated into our reading activities.  It's what we already do with one minor difference.  Thought squares involve students in writing down their thinking as they are reading or listening to a story read aloud.  However, instead of having them write whatever thoughts pop into their heads, Layne suggests asking focus questions along the way, and having students write down their thoughts to those questions.  We liked this because sometimes students miss what we think is important, and we have to go back and discuss those after they share their thoughts.  Focusing their thoughts, at times, would help them notice important points in the text right away.

If you are interested in any of the ideas by Steven Layne you can learn more about them at his website, stevelayne.com

The reading conference kept us away from our classrooms for longer than we like, but hopefully incorporating some of the above activities will prove it was worth it.

Kim and Anne

More Math Resources

Friday, September 26, 2014

We are working with the math committee again today, trying to get ready for the PARCC assessment that is coming in March.  We think we finally have a good sequence of lessons and activities that will hopefully prepare our students for this assessment.

Before we talk about some of our activities we did this week, we want to tell you about two math resources you may be interested in checking out.  Many of you may be familiar with the math site TenMarks, but our first time using it was this summer with our tutoring students. Students can go to the site and practice various math concepts.  The problems/lessons are challenging, but the students love them.  This site is a fabulous supplement to what you are already teaching.  We are planning on incorporating it into our daily math block.

Another resource that we just looked at today is called Georgia Common Core Standards.  It seems very user friendly, hands-on and engaging.  We are supplementing some of our math curriculum with these lessons.  We are really excited to implement them.

Two weeks ago we talked about the strategy of synthesizing.  This week we took that concept a bit further through science and writing.  As an extension to our study of polymers, the students created and tested a new question about the statement Polymers absorb liquid.  Some of the questions included: What would happen if the polymer was put in Coke?  What would happen if the polymer was put in chlorinated water?  What would happen if the polymer was put in colored water?  From this we drew the conclusion that polymers absorb liquids that contain water.  The more water the liquid contains the bigger the polymer grew.  

Polymer nose in chlorine.

Polymer hand in colored water.

We then wanted them to take this knowledge and apply it to answer the question: How can polymers make our lives better?  Again they did a great job of coming up with more ways polymers could be used in the real world than we could ever have imagined.

Synthesis

Our reading has focused on poetry and devices poets use when writing poems.  The students are having a great time finding these devices in the poems they read.  To help solidify some of these devices we made flip books.  Each page included a device word and an example of that device.  During Daily 5 the students read a variety of poems and then wrote a poem review.  They used their flip books to complete the review sheet.  These lessons are leading us into reading and analyzing narrative poems.

Our writing went along with our mini poem study.  The students wrote autobiography poems.  After editing them, they published them in Pages and used Photo Booth to import a funny picture of themselves.  As they hang in the hallway, many people have stopped by to enjoy.

Have a wonder weekend.  We are off to the reading conference next week.  Hopefully we will have some fun ideas to share.

Kim and Anne