Five days

Spring (and its allergens) have officially hit Las Vegas.  It's pleasantly in the 80s and that magical time of year when I need neither the heat nor the air conditioning on inside.  I simply open the windows, run fans, and the temperature is fabulous.

We've taken the students outside to read a few times because it's so lovely outside.

This gorgeous weather makes for irksome behaviors and lots of parent teacher conferences.

While most of the country has already had spring break, we are sitting at five days out.  Five long days.

Here's the gist of what's causing their spring madness:

1) The fifth graders are getting the elementary version of island-fever.  

They've been to their middle school (which is across the street) and registered for next year's classes.  They've seen all the clubs and activities that are available to them as sixth graders.  Most are starting to experience puberty and all the roller coaster emotions (and smells) that accompany these natural changes.  They feel they've outgrown elementary school and are ready for the next step.  Some are excited while some are terrified.  I've set out my "how to deal with middle school bucket" and made myself available at recess to talk about middle school myths.

2) Testing season is soon.  

We have a large pep rally soon and the primary classes are adopting the intermediate ones to sponsor with messages and little treats.  I will be digging out this:

to read to them.  We'll be talking about testing strategies and crossing our fingers for perfect attendance.  This year we'll be taking the SBAC, which is all online...which presents a whole new set of problems.

3)  Their emotions.

 I find that i need to, on an almost daily basis, re-establish our classroom norms.  On any given day, I say any (and all) of these things:

No child, you can't stand up and run out of the classroom bawling hysterically.  If you don't feel well, ask for a nurse pass. I am not a mind reader.

No child, you can't choose to do none of your work and still expect a reward.  

No child, you can't roll your eyes at me and expect me not to call you on that. There will be a card change and a hallway conversation.

 No child, you can't pull your tooth out and bleed all over your test as a strategy to get out of taking it.  A clean, blood-free one will be waiting for you when you return from the nurse.
  
No child, you can't take a bathroom break right when the class returns from recess.  

No child, you can't try to sneak off for a ten minute bathroom break every time we are ready to take a timed math quiz.

No child, you can't try to use the bathroom three times in the afternoon because you don't want to read your book.  If you keep asking, you're going to the nurse because something may be medically wrong if you insist you must use the bathroom every twenty minutes.

No child, you and your best friend can't both go to the bathroom together. I'm female, I know you want to go outside and giggle.  One at a time, nice try.

4) The excitement.

We've got several guest speakers lined up.  Field day is this Friday.  We're watching The Lightning Thief in the morning (because we finished the novel) before doing this activity as a table team.  Math is hands-on and reading is integrating history (American Revolution).  They are simply so excited about every thing we are doing.  Every little thing.

You know when Oprah would give away free things and the audience goes absolutely wild?  That's what teaching fifth grade is like.  It's exhausting.

Five days.  I can do this!
 

Disappointments

I just finished grading my students' writing proficiency exams. (Yes, teachers grade these.  No, we aren't paid to do so, it's just something that's expected to get done.)

Some of them did a great job with their expository pieces.  For their task, they were given two short informational articles to read and respond to.  In their responses, they were expected to refer back to the text for evidence and write with a problem and solution text structure.  This was their end of year task.

However, upon grading these papers, I became increasingly disappointed.  This frustration during grading is one of the hardest things for a teacher.  The "I know I taught you this!" runs through my mind quite frequently.  There were lots of careless mistakes by many of my students.  

One turned in two drafts, basically saying pick which one is better.  

One wrote a single paragraph.  Not once in the past ten months of school has a single paragraph been a satisfactory answer.

Several turned in work that wasn't complete.

One used no punctuation whatsoever. 

One wrote "thank you for reading my paper" while another ended with the dreaded "I hope you like it."  Neither of  these are appropriate closings.  We've addressed both of these big writing no-no's on every single paper we've written.  These two clearly didn't listen.

Another decided not to use any paragraphs, another wrote no name, another went completely off topic and the final completely disregarded the audience and wrote as if she was writing to her friends and not a formal piece of academic work.

Not a single one used the sentence stems for quoting accurately from a passage.  The sentence stems we went over and have been using all year were completely disregarded.

This is frustrating as a teacher.  I feel disappointed in their essays.  They rushed and I have to score them lower then I'd like because of their silly mistakes.  This is one of the hardest parts of being a teacher.

Plenty of Polygons

With our standardized testing right around the corner, we've been doing test prep.  Many of our students are struggling with the geometrical hierarchy of polygons, so we created some sorts and matching activities for them.

They had such a great time figuring out which polygon was being described and I loved that some of my high kids still learned new vocabulary terms (like kite).  Most students are pretty good with matching the polygon to the definition, but when it comes to the classification of quadrilaterals...they get a little stumped.

But these centers really helped them understand not only the individual polygons, but how they interact with each other within the geometrical hierarchy.

I've bundled these centers and they are now available here on TpT!

(On a completely adorable side note, several of them went off on a tangent about how this hierarchy was like the Greek mythology family trees we made in small groups.  Two groups got into it about who would be at the top of the tree: Zeus?  Jupiter? The Titans? Kronos?  They were rather reluctantly wheeled back into the math conversation.  At least they're making connections!)

Testing Strategies Recap

During our intervention block we've been working on testing strategies with a practice standardized test.

As a wrap up activity to a week of test prep, we made brochures:

Students got to be a little creative and design their own brochures to help with testing strategies.  They had so much fun with it!

Annotating Their Thinking...

We've been working on "stop and jot" where students "read with a pencil" to record their thoughts.  Perhaps I've done too good of a job modeling my metacognition and what goes on inside my brain.

I was reading over their most recent tests and here are some favorites:

Text states: "Then, before flying a new airplane, NASA will test it in a wind tunnel to make sure it will fly as it should." (excerpt from What are Wind Tunnels? by David Hitt)

Her response? "oh, that's safe!"

There were also numerous "that's cool" and "that's big" comments, which made me giggle because this student legitimately got that excited on her reading test.

But my favorites:

Text states: "...some wind tunnels are made to test hypersonic speeds.  That is more than 4,000 miles per hour!"

Her response? "Oh, that's like how my mom drives."

Excerpt: "...the rebels didn't have enough gunpowder to shoot back." (from George vs. George)

Her response: "go buy some more, duh".  If only the rebels had it that easy!

Thank you child for your metacognition during testing.  I know you weren't trying to make me laugh, but you did.

Testing motivation 2

My students are stressed about standardized testing.

I don't blame them!  They know teachers are under a lot of pressure to show academic gains and I'm sure that sense of urgency trickles down to them.  

To help ease their fears, I try to make cute little testing motivational signs to show them that I care.  I've done this for open house, testing and the first day/week of school.

Here are some cute, free printables from GingerSnaps, available for free on TpT:

So cute!  

They're having a quiz on maps tomorrow and already had their first phonics test, but I think I might do one of these for their first unit test in reading in the upcoming weeks :)

New Centers on TPT: prefix and suffix sorts

While preparing for my small reading groups, I began thinking about word work.  For my group of fifth graders, our phonics is more focused on affixes, roots and multisyllabic words rather than vowel teams and blends.  So I made a concentration game for word work, focusing on prefixes.  Then I made one for suffixes.  Then I started making one for roots, but realized I had been way too productive for Saturday morning and turned on Netflix instead :)

You can grab these mega centers here at my TpT store.

Each is $2 and includes 28 pages (what a steal!).

After sorting and matching, you can have students write in their word work notebooks about how prefixes impact a word's meaning as well as make their own.

Hope your students enjoy this center as much as mine do!

-Ms. Vice

Literacy Ideas for the real world

I love literacy ideas that actually will be useful.  Sometimes I see beautifully decorated classrooms, but if the teacher is working way harder then the students...something is wrong.  Way way wrong.

I don't know what it is about word walls, but I am awful at keeping them up to date.  Our school does "power words" of the week to improve our students' vocabulary, but around November, I get overwhelmed (shocker) and forget to staple up any new words.  

However, I stumbled upon this idea on Pinterest:

Using paint chips from Home Depot or Walmart, students work with you to create the word wall.  Students can also make their own mini-thesaurus by using the longer, skinny paint chips, a three hole punch and binder rings.  The binder rings are to clip all the paint chips together to a desk so the pages don't go missing :)

Alternative Ideas:

1. Using these paint chips for "shades of meaning" for vocabulary

2. Using these paint chips for synonyms & antonyms, as shown below

3. Using these paint chips for affixes or Greek/Latin roots

4. Using these paint chips for operation strategies (math)

5. Using these paint chips for test-taking strategies

6. Using these paint chips as a monthly book challenge where students must read one book per color (can be modified by using paint strips with less colors), as shown below

7. Using these paint chips for word families (for younger grades), as shown below

8. KWL (what I know, what I want to know, what I learned) charts, as shown below

Second issue: editing and revising

I'm constantly looking for real world examples beyond my students' notebooks.  Then I stumbled upon this gem:

Students here are shown with tweets from NFL stars, but this could be changed to celebrities or other sports depending on students' interests.  I love how it hooks them by using technology references (Twitter, tweets) and by incorporating their interests.  Students can work in groups to be the stars' "publicists" and edit the tweets.  These can also be used as mini-lessons to address specific skills that are seen in students' writing.  Plus, students can see the real world implications of poor grammar :)

Idea #3:

Dollar Store picture frames = instructions for centers, stations or computers.

I would probably use this to display website links, user names and passwords for computer sites because the picture frame can be easily stored on top of the computer.  Obviously I'd use a larger font, but this helps students become self-sufficient at stations.  You can list the do's and don'ts of each station, thus eliminating (or at least reducing) the number of interruptions you receive while with small groups.  Plus, you can easily switch out the pages and the cost is relatively cheap :)

Idea #4: The Class Journal

Now, these composition notebooks aren't cheap and I certainly wouldn't devote an entire notebook to a single prompt, but I like the idea.  You could put in post-its or tabs to differentiate the prompts or have the journals for table teams.  This would be a great back-up plan for when technology chooses not to work (since many of my lessons are on the smart board) or for students who finish standardized tests early :)

Idea #5: Peer Reviews and Book Recommendations

I found this image on pinterest and while it is a bit juvenile for fifth grade, I like the idea of students recommending books to one another.  I mean, we do this all the time as adults, so why not have the students do the same?  (Ok, I may not do it as an adult, but Oprah does and I like her book recommendations!)

This makes me want to have a mini-book fair between the classes and have students do a book share :)

Testing Motivation

Testing....testing.....

For many of my fifth graders, standardized testing means lots of anxiety.  To ease their fears, I created little incentives to boost their confidence each day.  I wrote letters home to families (in English and Spanish) asking for good luck letters for my young scholars.  Coupled with treats and good luck banners, my students felt loved and encouraged to do their best!

Other testing ideas include:

"good luck smartie pants!" (always a classic when combined with smarties candies)

"don't be an airhead!" (with airhead candy)

"don't blow it! Take your time and do your best!" (with blowpops)

A new pencil to help you dazzle your readers (for the writing test)

I love when my students feel successful :)