July  24, 2015

This has been a great summer of reading. We are super excited to share all the reading we have done with you. It is like a shot in the arm to have new children's literature to share with our students. It has inspired us, and we can't wait to share our enthusiasm with our students. We know motivation is the key to reading success, and we are confident that our students are going to be begging us to take these books home to read. 

It has also been a great summer of writing. We are taking a class from Learner's Edge called The Writer's Notebook. We have gotten several new ideas to enhance our Writing Workshop lessons, and we have an exciting kick-off  party planned to introduce our students to the Writing Notebook.  Over the next few blogs we will share that and other resources with you. Today, we just want to share a few of our favorite picture books. We've been spending so much time reading these books, but at this point in time, we don't have a definite lesson plan for using them. That will come soon. This is just our recommendation of good books you can read. 

The first one that caught our eye was Peanut Butter and Cupcake by Terry Border. This is a book that we will definitely use in the first few days of school. It has a wonderful theme and message. We will want our students to complete a project and respond to the message. Somehow, we will make sure a cupcake is involved! This book is all about friendship, making new friends, and accepting others.

Another good book that we will use as we introduce the 6-traits in writing is What Do You Do With An Idea? by Kobi Yamada. We feel like this book is like an allegory of the writing process, and how an idea can grow into something special. It also addresses some of the struggles and fears that occur along the way.

A Boy And A Jaguar by Alan Rabinowitz is a true story about the author's struggle with stuttering, and how that led him to "being the voice for jaguars and other large jungle cats. As a boy, animals were the only ones he could talk to without stuttering. He promised them that once he found his voice, he would speak for them. He kept that promise, and is still doing that to this day. This has a message of believing in yourself, overcoming fears, and keeping true to your goals and desires. This is another good book to read at the beginning of the year when you talk about setting goals and reaching them. 

The last picture book we want to share with you today is titled, This Is A Mouse by Richard T. Morris. Along with A Boy And a Jaguar,  this book is a Monarch Award Nominee for 2016. With this book, the main focus would be fluency, and using the punctuation to add expression and to understand what is happening. This book would be perfect to use after introducing the Christina Smekens voice chart. From this link, click on the chart of punctuation marks link.This book can also introduce students to the concepts of foreshadowing and irony at their level. The foreshadowing comes into play on the front endpaper and the title page. 

We hope you can find the time to read some of these books if you haven't already. We included the thoughts off the top of our heads on how we would use them. If you have other ideas, we'd love to hear them!

Kim and Anne

What About Me?

Friday, July 10, 2015

Exciting news (for us anyway)!  We have finally completed another TeachersPayTeachers lesson plan. It seems to always take us quite awhile because we want to make sure our lesson plans are rigorous enough to go with the Common Core.  We decided to create a lesson plan for the tale What About Me?  by Ed Young because we are going to kick off our year with different types of tales.  If you check this lesson plan out and have any questions, let us know in the comment section.


Next week we plan on beginning our fairy tale lesson plans.  Hopefully we won't run out of time to get them completed before school starts.  We will share some of those lesson plans with you as we complete them.

We are still reading fabulous children's and young adult books.  We still plan on sharing these great titles with you.

Kim and Anne

Weather

June 26, 2015

We loved our weather unit that we completed at the end of the year, but we are not loving this Chicago area weather. It's been cloudy, dreary, and gloomy. It doesn't feel like summer at all. Hopefully, you are enjoying better weather than we are!

We were able to transition nicely from water, the water cycle, and clouds straight to weather. We first had students make a model of the layers of the atmosphere. They labeled each layer and wrote what happens in it. Here is a sample of that.

We wanted to have our students understand the components that make up our weather, so we had them work with a partner to read the information on the BBC What is Weather? site.  While reading, the partners had discussions about their reading to answer the questions we created for them.  The answers were not as easy to come by as we thought they would be.   For more added fun, the students went to another BBC weather site that was very interactive.

From there, we began our nonfiction reading about violent weather. We used the book Storms by National Geographic. The students took notes on the details about thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. We found a fun, familiar Steve Spangler science project to do- Tornado In a Bottle. We bought enough connectors so students could work in small groups to create their own "tornado." Then came the challenge. The students had to connect what they learned about tornadoes from their reading to the tornado in the bottle. We found a great explanation on a site called sciencewithtoys.

The last thing we wanted to share with you from this unit is our weather idioms. We used the book Birds of a Feather: A Book of Idioms with Silly Pictures by Vanita Oelschlager to review what idioms are. Then, each student got a weather idiom of their own. They had to show their understanding of the meaning of the idiom through a written sentence, and then a draw a silly, literal interpretation of the idiom.

Well, we are keeping our fingers crossed that the sun will come out soon, and it will feel like summer. One good thing to come from these dreary days is that we have had time to look for, and read some new children's books that we want to share with our class next year, and with you next time we blog!

Kim and Anne

Clouds and More Clouds

June 9th, 2015

School is out! Yesterday was our last day. We can't believe how the year flew by! Last week we said we would share our cloud activities with you, so here they are!

We first read information about the three main cloud types online. One of our favorite sites was Weather Wiz Kids, but there are a ton more out there. After we took notes from this site, we color coded categories we found within our notes. This helped us with our organization when taking notes from other sites. Eventually, this would also help us organize our expository cloud writing.

To solidify our understanding of the cloud types, and to add on a fun project, we painted a chart of the cirrus, cumulus, and stratus clouds. We included their elevation, and we tried to our best to use the paints to make the clouds look realistic.

After taking notes for a few days, it was time to write our expository piece on clouds. Before we could start, one of our students came up with a fantastic idea on his own. He suggested that we create a Google Slideshow of the information, instead of just typing it in Pages. We couldn't believe how the class bit on that, and how engaged they were. Each slide show included photos and video to go along with the writing. These are some screen shots of part of one of them, since we cannot share them to the public.

While we were writing, we read the book, Cloud Dance by Thomas Locker. It is a beautiful prose picture book. We wanted the kids to experience different types of genre on the topic of clouds. Cloudette, by Thomas Lichtenheld is another delightful fiction story on clouds. It is filled with literary devices, such as puns, alliteration, allusion, and idioms.

Lastly, our kids got a kick out of reading Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett. After reading, we wrote a Found poem together. This was the first time writing this type of poem. It was a fun challenge!

It's not quite vacation for us yet. We have math committee work for the next few days. But after that, we plan to take a few days to breathe! See you soon!

Kim and Anne

Water, Water, Everywhere, part 2!

May 29th, 2015

Good morning, everyone. Our students are in an assembly so we thought we would get a jump start on the blog and get back to where we left off with our water and weather activities.

Last week we talked about how we introduced the vocabulary words evaporation and condensation with our students. From there, we went into the water cycle. We read and completed a Sketch to
Stretch with the Reader's Theater called Water Cycle Adventure. The purpose of the Sketch to Stretch was to help the students visualize what happens to a drop of water in the water cycle. We also used this visualizing to create a mural of the water cycle.

To connect with our theme of water and weather, we used the MAC program Numbers to create a circle graph showing how much of our earth is covered with fresh water, salt water, and land.  This led to a lively discussion about the importance of conserving our natural resources.

Our next step was learning about clouds because they play an important part in the water cycle and our weather. Before we did our research about the different types of clouds (that will shared with you in our next blog), we decided to start with reading another African Tale about a cloud that changed the weather. It was called, Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema. We used Christine Boardman Moen's idea called Crayon Conversations from her Better Than Book Reports: More Than 40 Creative Responses to Literature to summarize the tale. It was a lot of fun and it stretched their thinking because they had to do it independently. We felt they were ready for it because we have done many summarizing activities throughout the year.

That's all for now. We look forward to sharing more cloud activities with you next time.

Kim and Anne

Water, Water, Everywhere!

May 15, 2015

We just finished a very fun Water/Weather Unit. It has quickly become one of our favorite science units. Today we will share a few activities that we did to kick-off and begin our unit. We know you can't use these this year, but it might be a great way to start off your next school year.

We began with an inquiry based lesson that required the students to make observations and inferences, and to draw conclusions. We handed each group of students two cups of Insta-Snow that we got from Steve Spangler. We also handed them two cups of clear liquid. One was water and one was rubbing alcohol. The students did not know what the liquids or powders were. They had to make observations about these items. Then, we poured the water into one cup of the Insta-Snow, and the rubbing alcohol into the other cup of Insta-Snow. This caused quite a reaction with our students. They couldn't believe what they saw. They were then able to draw conclusions about the liquids and the powders. They were amazed that mere water created the snow. That's what led us into checking out the cool properties of water.

Before adding liquid.  Snow is crystal-like.

After adding liquid.  Water made the Insta-Snow fluffy and rubbery.  The alcohol didn't absorb at all.

Then, we made a water molecule, and talked about how these molecules are sticky, or cohesive, and want to stick together. This was the perfect time to introduce the concept of surface tension. We watched a BrainPop  video about it, and then did The Amazing Race from AIMS Education. The kids never knew how much fun it could be playing with a drop of water. They had a grand time competing to see who could stretch their drop the farthest.

Water molecules in liquid water flow over each other.

Our next step was to focus on evaporation and condensation. We used the Insta-Snow with water to demonstrate evaporation. We left it out for a week. When we went back to observe, we had the crystals back and not the fluffy snow. Even though we didn't see it, we drew the conclusion that the water had evaporated. To try to see water evaporating we put a wet toy under a clear vase. After about a week, we saw that the water droplets were clinging to the side. We could infer that the water from the toy must have evaporated and then condensed. Once again the kids were amazed at what water could do!

Insta-Snow after water evaporated.

Water droplets are clinging to the side of the glass.

It feels so great to be back! Most likely, we will be blogging every other week from now on. Have a great weekend!

Kim and Anne

Coming Soon...

May 1, 2015

Hi everyone! We've actually taken a longer hiatus from the blog than we expected. We will be up and running again in two weeks. Here is sneak peek at a few of the exciting things we plan to talk about over the next few weeks.

Cloud research for our expository writing.  We have great cloud sites to share.

Water cycle mural created after reading a reader's theater.

Used a mentor text to write this "How To Clean Your Room" essay.

It feels great to be back.  We cannot wait to share these and other ideas in two weeks.

Kim and Anne