Get Your Teach On Take Two

October 15, 2017

We had an amazing Monday and Tuesday. We had been waiting for these days since Kim got back from San! Antonio. Because the second and third grade session from the Get Your Teach On conference was so inspiring, we decided to go to the fourth and fifth grade session. Luckily, it was here in Chicago!

We didn't think we could learn any more, but we did! One of our favorite speakers was Hope King. She again explained how to help students determine the main idea and key details through her Get Your Neon Read-On. We have never been this excited to begin teaching this very challenging concept to our third graders. We have our neon glasses, pattern pair eye rings, and multi-colored highlighters ready to go!

If you ever want to know more about Hope King you can visit her website Elementary Shenanigans

She goes into great detail about each of these reads and how to guide students through each one.  

This is one of the end results of reaching Get Your Neon Read On!  The kids will love it.

Elizabeth Raff is a sixth grade ELA teacher from Pennsylvania. Her presentation was one of the best we have ever seen. She shared effective, exciting, and engaging activities that will truly elevate our third grade readers to the next level of competency in their reading. She is someone everyone should follow on Instagram. There, you can watch how she engages her students as she teaches the elements of plot. If she can get her sixth graders this involved and engaged, we know we can hook in our third graders!

Definitely follow her on Instagram.

Get Your Neon Read-On is not the only fun activity we are going to start this week. We are also going to begin Elizabeth Raff's poem of the week idea. We are going to give our students a favorite Halloween poem called, Watchdogs. We are going to read the poem with movements and expression, and then our students will mirror what we do. Throughout the week, our students will practice reading this poem for fluency and also adding their own movements with a partner.  We will also use the poem to annotate the text, answer comprehension questions, and experiment with using different expressions as we read. On Friday, each group will perform their interpretation of this poem for other classmates.

How lucky I found this on the discarded books shelf!  It has amazing poems.

We can hardly wait to get to school tomorrow!
Kim and Anne

Having Fun With Science

October 1, 2017

Did you ever think that highly engaging science activities would help improve students' higher level thinking skills in reading? We have witnessed this all week! To get our students ready for our upcoming STEM activities, we ignited their thinking through the scientific method. This year, we consciously made our kids aware of the connection between their thinking voice in reading with the thinking skills needed to make a hypothesis and draw a conclusion in science. We did this because we are focused on student engagement more than ever before, and this turned out to be an "aha" moment for our kids. 

One of the science activities that engaged our students the most was stacking colored water cubes in test tubes. We asked the students to make a hypothesis about what might happen. We had already completed two prior activities with the water cubes and we encouraged them to make their hypotheses based on what they had learned from those experiments. We connected that with making predictions in reading.  Predictions don't come off the top of your head, you have to use clues that the author gives you in the text. The kids made great and reasonable hypotheses.

Put these in water over night in separate cups.

Notice her hypothesis.

After leaving the cubes over night, the students were able to use the results and their background knowledge of the results to draw conclusions about why the cubes blended together to make a rainbow of colors. We made the connection to drawing conclusions in reading.

These are the test tubes after several days.  They were brighter and the colors were more separated the day after we did the experiment.

As the Grand Finale for this week's science, we made a chemical reaction bag using cabbage juice, baking soda, and driveway salt. Once again, we connected the higher level thinking skills in reading and science.

The baking soda and calcium chloride.  No reaction.

Spilling the cabbage juice.

Color change

Producing a gas.

Feeling hot

Both of these activities were a big hit with the kids. The activities kept them thinking, questioning, and experimenting, well beyond the time in the classroom. But more importantly, they also ignited their thinking voice in reading. Our students came into the classroom wanting to share their thoughts and new ideas about reading. Some wanted to read aloud poems and share their thinking voices with the class. One student even encouraged students to use post-its to record thoughts while reading at home.

We are not sure, but we believe that this new desire to think at a higher level in reading is in part due to their high level of engagement and thinking in science.

This was such a fun week!
Kim and Anne

Lego Challenge

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Monday mornings look quite differently for us this year.  In the past, we've treated Monday like every other day of the week; the kids come in and do a warm-up.  However, since reading The Leader In Me book, we are being more deliberate in setting a time to build relationships.

This past Monday we decided to put our students into groups of four and have them engage in a Lego challenge.  Their task was to work together to build a robot.  While this was fun, it was not as easy as they thought it would be.

We ended this activity by completing a Plus/Delta chart so our students could reflect on the positive elements of this activity and what they found to be a struggle.  Their reflections were very insightful.

On the Plus side they felt their groups persevered through the difficulties of robots falling apart or ideas not working.  They were all happy with their end product and that everybody had a hand in making the robot.

The Delta side had comments such as it was hard to not have their ideas chosen or to include everybody's ideas.  They also felt there was some arguing happening in the group.

This Monday we are going to do another Lego challenge--they will make a class pet.  But, before we begin the challenge, as a class we will reflect on last week's Deltas.  We will come up with a plan on how to improve them.

Happy Monday to you all.

Kim and Anne

Tweet Tweet

September 10, 2017

To kick off our first writing project, Our Summer to Tweet About, we read How I Spent My Summer Vacation, by Mark Teague. From there, we tried a new activity from the book, Make Thinking Visible, by Ron Richhart, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison called Chalk Talk. This activity "asks learners to consider ideas, questions, or problems by silently responding in writing both to the prompt and the thoughts of others. It builds an understanding in a collaborative way."

After discussing How I Spent My Summer Vacation, we posed the question: What are your thoughts, questions, and wonderings about whether it is ok to fabricate stories to tell others? We used this question because we had an in-depth discussion on the truthfulness of the main character's recollection of his summer. This was our first attempt at digging deeper into a story, and we had no idea how it would go. We were pleasantly surprised at the "silent conversations." The kids had strong arguments for  both sides, that yes it was ok, or no it was not. This is our new favorite activity, and we plan to try it again next week when we read The Name Jar.

Then, we asked the kids to write a narrow, focused paragraph about their summer. We asked them not to fabricate too much, because we really wanted to know what they did. We wanted it so short, we called it a tweet. Thank you, Amy Lemons for the idea. The kids had a fun time reliving a fun summer time activity, as well as completing the craft that went with it. We plan to use this writing in the future when we introduce how to revise our writing.

Kim and Anne

A Little Win Win

Monday, September 4, 2017

Happy Labor Day!  We wanted to take a quick minute to share two of our newest activities we implemented into our classrooms last week.  Since attending the Get Your Teach On Conference and after reading The Leader In Me, we have been trying to make a more deliberate effort to establish stronger student relationships, while at the same time continuing to find new ways to engage the kids.

Our first activity focused on The Leader in Me's Habit #4--Win Win.   This habit focuses on being kind to others and finding ways to make everyone happy in different situations.  We played The Ring Toss game to help the kids understand this habit.  Unfortunately, we forgot to take pictures of this so we will just explain it here.  This game is similar to horseshoes.  One student holds a pencil still on the ground.  Another student stands seven steps away and tries to toss a ring onto the pencil.  As they quickly discovered this is very difficult.  On the next round, the person with the pencil can help the ring tosser by moving the pencil off the ground to catch the ring, or move the ring closer to the tosser. They can do anything to help the tosser be successful.   We could tell the kids were having much more fun on this round from their screams and laughter.  The kids realized it is more fun to help each other so everyone is successful; hence win win!

The next activity to help our students understand Habit #4 was to making compliment bags.  We used these adorable patterns from Amy Lemon's Back To School Engagement Made Easy bundle. Throughout the week the kids wrote compliments to each other and slipped them into their bags.  On Friday they got to read all of their compliments and take their bags home.  They felt so good about the kind things their classmates said about them.  The kids also loved looking for compliments to give each other throughout the day.  One of the students said he did not want to take his bag home because he thought he could reread his compliments if he was ever having a bad day.  What a way to make this an even more meaningful activity.

Hope you all had a Happy Labor Day!  Have a wonderful week and good luck to all of you just starting school this week.

Kim and Anne

Exploration Success!

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Good Morning!
We are happy to report that the exploration of our classrooms was a complete success.  The students were ecstatic to enter our classrooms and find all of the exploration gear on their desks.  It may have been just wishful thinking, but we believe they were geared up and ready to complete their field notes.  As they buzzed around the room anticipating what third-grade would be all about, they had their first opportunity to make new friends.  Soon after the exploration was over our students got busy writing and illustrating their findings.  Our first bulletin board is adorable.  We felt like this was a much better way to kick off the school year than simply spending the first hour of school organizing our supplies.

At the last minute Anne had the idea to put their pictures with their writing.  Looks so cute!

Glad they believe third grade will be a good time.  That's our goal.

We pulled out an oldie but a goodie to kick off math!  We began by reading aloud The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Heiligman.  It's a biography of Paul Erdos, a fascinating boy who began to explore the world of math at the age of 4.  The kids were astonished about his unique abilities in math.  We then posed the questions what do mathematicians do, what do they need, and what are their attitudes toward math?  The students came up with a great list of ideas.  Then they made their own mathematician and wrote about how they view themselves as a third-grade mathematician. Thank you Amy Lemons for the cute craftivity idea!

We have many more exciting and engaging activities to keep our students loving the challenges of third grade.  We are off to a great start and are so excited to go back to school tomorrow.

Kim and Anne

All Set For Exploring

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Guess what?  Our rooms are ready and our students' desks are filled with the tools they will need to explore our classroom and get ready to anticipate what third grade will be all about.

Hats, globes, and binoculars are from Oriental Trading Company.

Once the kids have completed their "field notes" they will be ready to do a quick writing activity explaining what they anticipate will happen or what they will do in third grade.  Our students will also illustrate their writing, and the year's first bulletin board will display their exciting discoveries.

The bulletin board is right there in the background.  Thank you to Hope King for the website where we found our Safari Guy craft.

Anne and I cannot wait to wear our costumes and greet the kids tomorrow morning.  We hope they are super excited to start the school year!  If you want to see our costumes check out our last blog.

Have a great start to your school year.

Kim and Anne

Let's Play Dress Up!

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Hi Everyone,
Sorry I've been MIA for awhile.  Anne and I have spent a few weeks planning for the beginning of our school year.  We have so many new things planned because we were so inspired by what I learned at the Get Your Teach On conference.  In fact I loved that conference so much that we are going to both go the conference in October because they are coming to Lombard!!!! Yeah! We are absolutely so excited, and this time we are going to the 4th-5th grade sessions.

As I might have mentioned in my last post, Anne and I are very passionate about student engagement, especially in these days of Common Core Standards and high stakes testing.  We want students to enjoy the rigorous lessons we plan for them so they can absorb as much learning as possible.  So, we are stepping outside our comfort zone on the advice of Hope King and the GYTO conference speakers.  To get our students excited about coming to school and anticipate what third grade is all about, Anne and I are going to dress up as Safari explorers!  Before we even enter the school, we are going to tell the students we are going to go exploring and we want them to come with us.  On their desks they will find safari hats, binoculars, and a little globe.  They will need to put these on before we begin our adventure.

I had so much fun looking for this costume.  Boots from Walmart, shorts from the Gap, vest from Charlotte Russe, and hat and accessories from Amazon.

Supplies from Oriental Trading Company and Walmart.

After everyone is in the room and dressed, we are going to explore our room to try and discover what third grade is all about.  We will have special pencils and clip boards on their desks with a recording sheet.  They will need to go around the room and explore what's there!

These recording sheets will be clipped to a clipboard waiting for them on their desks.

When we have observed, and explored, and recorded all that we can, we will do a writing activity called What I Anticipate Third Grade To Be All About.

As Hope King has advised, it is important to hook them in, but then get into the rigors of learning.  Following their first writing activity will be a reading activity using the poem Rules by Karla Kuskin and the book Back To School Rules by Laurie Friedman.  We will discuss poetry devices students recognize, as well as compare and contrast the book and the poem.  These two pieces of literature will guide us into a discussion about leaders, what leaders are and how leaders behave.  Then we will brainstorm Leadership Expectations for our classroom.

We have never started out our school year with such fun and such rigor the minute we've stepped into the classroom.  We super excited and think this just might be our best beginning yet.

Kim and Anne