Becoming Word Wizards Kick-Off Lesson

July 19, 2018

We have had a busy, but fun summer getting ready for the upcoming school year. Time is really flying by! Over the next few posts, we want to share a few new things we are going to be doing this year.

To start off the summer, we hung up our teacher hats and became students again, when we took the class Own Your Words: Effective Vocabulary Instruction through Advancement Courses online. The focus of this class was to implement robust vocabulary lessons and assessments to help students internalize their own academic vocabulary and then use it in their own communications.

As Jim Rohn states, "Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future." These words reminded us of the monumental responsibility that we have to each and everyone of our students. Our ultimate goal, as third-grade teachers, is to elevate our students' literacy skills to a level in which they can begin to understand the world around them, as well as communicate effectively with those in the world around them. To reach our goal, we thought, "Would it be a good idea to step up our game when teaching vocabulary?"

The course answered this question with a resounding yes.We learned we needed to tweak some things this year and make small changes that we believe will have a huge impact on our students' vocabulary knowledge. We also realized that our instruction was really only for short term learning or understanding of the words. It needs to be more robust for students to retain these words on a long term basis. However, it did validate the activities we used with our students.

Many of the activities that we will share with you over the next few blogs are based on the research and ideas from Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan in their book, Bringing Words to Life. At times we will even throw in some activities, thoughts, and articles from the well respected Robert Marzano.

To kick off our vocabulary instruction for the year, we want to get our students excited about words and make them aware of the amazing words that can be found all around them, within the four walls of our classroom, and in the world around them. We want them to view words as magical keys that allow them to have an unlimited vision and future. Below, we are sharing with you our kick-off lesson to this year's vocabulary instruction.

Kick Off Lesson

More lessons, assessments, and games inspired by Isabel L. Beck, et al., will be coming your way soon.

Kim and Anne

New Ideas With Charlie McButton

January 13, 2018

Good morning everyone! We just wanted to take a quick minute to share two highly engaging activities our students did after reading the narrative poem, Charlie McButton Loses Power by Suzanne Collins. The first activity comes from junior high teacher Christine Boardman-Moen's  book, BetterThan Book Reports. This book is filled with timeless activities that deepen students' reading experiences. We highly recommend checking out this book. We have used many of the activities in this book over the years.

The activity we chose is called The Story Tree. This activity helped the students review the literary elements of protagonist, setting, conflict, solution, and resolution, as well as allow students to reflect on their own opinion about the story. We believe the Story Tree also met the CCSS RL3.5 because students must refer to parts of the poem and describe how each successive part builds on earlier parts. Our students loved the challenge of describing each part of the poem with a given amount of words. They especially loved typing their work and putting a watermark behind it. We were pleased with the amount of conversation this activity promoted, as well as the excited energy it ignited within the students.

The second activity came from the Get Your Teach On conference. It involved the students creating a fake text message conversation using the website iFake Text Message. This activity addressed the CCSS RL3.3 because students had to identify the protagonist's (Charlie McButton) traits and feelings and explain how his actions contributed to the sequence of events.

This activity grabbed our students' attention immediately because text messaging is a part of their every day life.They couldn't wait to get started. They were charged with the challenge of having a conversation with one of their friends about some of Charlie's character traits. In that conversation, the students were required to support those traits with evidence from the poem. This was a challenge because it wasn't just straight forward- find the trait and find the evidence. That in itself requires higher level thinking. This upped the ante because they had to turn it into a conversation. Their conversation had to use all types of sentences and interjections to make it flow.

All of us loved this activity so much, we decided to use it with our next Common Core Standard, RL3.6, which is on perspective. We will share that with you next time.

Stay warm over this Martin Luther King holiday weekend. It is two degrees here in Chicago, and we are getting ready to get hit with snow!

Kim and Anne

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