New Product: Teacher Guide for Mockingjay

I've expressed my love for Suzanne Collin's trilogy more than once.

I have already posted a teacher's guide for Hunger Games on TpT and I'm pleased to announce that as of about five minutes ago, there is one for Mockingjay as well!  Like all the others, there are lots of good things in this teacher bundle :)

I'm fully aware that Catching Fire is between these books and I am in no way advocating doing a book study with students while ignoring chronological order.  I just am still working on my teacher guide for Catching Fire because I want to update it with comparisons between the book chapter and the movie trailer.  My hope is to have this up by the end of the month, so stay tuned!

Happy reading and may the odds be ever in your favor,

Ms. Vice

Rules, rules, rules

I don't like the word rules. I tend to want to bend them, immediately.

Instead, I prefer "guidelines for harmonious living" but that's a little long for an elementary classroom.

So instead, we shall call our guide lines norms.  Norms, in contrast to rules, are created by and with the group that they'll affect.  Rules are imposed upon a group by a leader and often met with resistance.  Not to go all social contracts and political science on you, but rules don't always lend themselves to I-Thou relationships.  I want I-Thou relationships in my classroom where respect, individuality, rights and cooperation are emphasized.

(Thank you to countless political theory classes and the ideas of Locke, Socrates, Hobbes, Rawls, Buber & the whole gang)

So instead of making rules posters, we are going to make a class constitution and set our norms during the first week of school.  By creating a social contract with my students rather than handing down rules, I will create an environment where discourse is encouraged.  I won't tell them what I want our class norms to be, I'll guide their discussion and let them generate norms of how we'll thrive in room 45. 

To do this, I'll generate their question stems for gallery walks and let them go.

After they've had a chance to answer all of the questions, I'll bring them back together for a Socratic chat about each poster.  We will establish norms for general classroom cooperation, small group interactions, student-teacher expectations and most importantly, they'll get the opportunity to reflect upon their own goals.  They get to decide how they want to conduct themselves and how they want to grow academically this year.

Granted, they won't have total control because well, they're ten.  However, they hopefully will feel a lot more ownership over the classroom and hold one another accountable to our norms.  Not my rules, our norms.  

I'll display our norms on a wordle and something cute like this:

(Except it won't say rules!)

Writing Ideas

As a teacher, I think teaching writing is my weakness. I'm constantly in awe of my former co-teacher who is now in the general ed classroom. She makes teaching writing look so easy and her kids enjoy it.  I love picking up ideas from not only her, but the rest of my grade level as well.

This year we are starting using a new curriculum called Being a Writer.  I read through the teacher manuals this summer and I'm pretty excited by all the mentor texts that are used.  The lessons seem to blend nicely with the Common Core and are worded very similar to how I would start lessons.  I'm rarely a fan of a provided curriculum, but Being a Writer seems to make sense, spiral nicely and be student friendly.  Plus, there are sample anchor charts included which is great for days you have a substitute teacher.

At our school, we have writing conferences with our students and I keep all my information in a spiral bound notebook.

I use colored post-it tabs down the side with students' names.

I color code them for who I need to meet with more frequently.

I grade their essays and write my feedback on post-its.  I make a copy of the essay for the students to keep in their data folder, place the post-it on the student's page in my notebook, then we discuss their paper.  I try to have most of the conferences student-led by asking them the following questions:

What did you do well on?

What part are you the most proud of?

What did you take away from our mini-lessons that you tried in this paper?

Who did you peer edit with and what feedback did they give you?

How would you make this better?

What is still challenging for you as a writer?

However, I'm excited to try these new ideas this year:

Personalized word wall in their notebook.

 I'm awful at keeping up with word walls.  I try to do anchor charts of the vocabulary words we learn in our novels or our school's "power words of the week", but it's one of the things I tend to let slip through the cracks.  I love the idea of having students make their own because then the words are personalized.  With my inclusion classroom, some students are working on spelling sight words while others are working on multisyllabic words.  This allows students to feel empowered and write down the words they truly need help with.

On the subject of word walls, I also like this teacher's idea:

Instead of using a bulletin board (because I have so few and they're usually covered in anchor charts), a recipe box was used instead.  This would go great in our resources are of the room next to the dictionaries.  

This TpT freebie is great for students to organize different words and phrases:

I always teach "fanboys" with a fan shaped foldable, but I like this teacher's structure with an anchor chart:

I also found this idea on pinterest and it'd be a great review of text structure and topic sentences.

By using different colored sentence strips, you can review structures of a paragraph.  This idea also has potential with reading cross over by showing how to summarize an informational text.

This was developed by a primary teacher, but I love that it could be adapted as an extension center for early finishers.

It could also be used to review parts of a sentence with more struggling writers.

This anchor chart would be great for reviewing types of sentences:

I might modify it into a foldable in their notebooks because wall space is limited.

This is another great one for helping students with the different type of verbs, which is part of the Common Core standards:

I love new ideas!

New Product: Teacher Guide for the Sea of Monsters

As promised, I've posted my teacher guide for Percy Jackson and The Sea of Monsters on TpT.

With the release of this aquatic adventure conveniently timed for release during Discovery's Shark Week, there is a lot of hype about Percy Jackson.

I have to confess, I haven't seen the movie adaptations of these novels yet.  I've heard mixed reviews on the first movie.  The movie is PG which means I should be able to show clips of it at school with a permission slip.  I would have students compare and contrast the novel with its film adaptation (RL 5.7).  

Happy reading!

New classroom things

While avoiding organizing the desks in my classroom, I decided on making some new items for the first week.

Here is the first one: 

new classroom sign

I went to my local craft store for a new board

 to make for a coworker (like mine)

And found this new decorative shape chalk board

So I made this new sign:

I changed out the ribbon for a polka dot one and used a pink paint marker to add some fun.  I plan to hang this on the door to my classroom :)

Project 2:

Lucky Charms welcome treat

Using Google image search, I found a cute image of the mascot for Lucky Charms:

Made a template in word, printed on yellow paper and stapled to a bag of Lucky Charms cereal.

I will pass these out on the second day of school. 

I figure I'll be hungry midday since my body isn't used to only eating at certain times and my students might feel the same.  Cereal is relatively healthy and doesn't make a mess in the classroom.

Project Three:

Plates to decorate a bulletin board

This one isn't  done yet, but I was inspired by a pinterest idea.

I'm going to dicut white or blue letters and glue them onto the plates.  I'm planning on writing "What we're learning" on the plates and using it for the whole year.

My bulletin board is a light green color with a blue and white polka dot border.

I have high hopes of cuteness :) 

Happy crafting!

Ms. Vice

New product: teacher guide for the Lightning Thief

I'm pleased to announce that I just posted my teacher guides for Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief  on TpT.

 

This novel units, like my others, include vocabulary suggestions, pre and post reading questions, worksheets, homework for each chapter (responses to literature) and comprehension questions with suggested answers for each chapter.  

They are both aligned to the Common Core State Standards (RL 5.1 and RL 5.3).  Additionally, they correspond nicely with fourth grade standards on Greek Mythology!

Enjoy!

Ms. Vice

(PS...tomorrow I hope to upload my novel guide for the Sea of Monsters so that all the Percy Jackson books will be available...stay tuned!)

New craft ideas

Starting tomorrow, I have to go back to work.  Next week, I'll have students.  I meet them this Friday which means I have 4 1/2 days to finish my classroom.  I have a few hours during training to set up but most of it will be Monday or Tuesday before I'm officially required to go back.

In preparation for going back, I've been on pinterest looking at ideas.  

Idea One: redo clip boards

 I have a few clipboards in my classroom that have been there longer than me...so there's a little wear and tear.

However, with some duct tape, they can easily become adorable like this one:

I have some Batman duct tape that I could use, but I know Hobby Lobby has a lot of different designs.  With their mobile 40% off coupon, this becomes an inexpensive task.  I can definitely see some pink polka dots and chevron stripes in the future!

Idea two: reusing paper plates on bulletin boards

For my hallway bulletin board, I have a lot of space above the board that just seems wasted.  However, by using decorative plates and dicut letters

I could give that space purpose and not use bulletin board space for the title.

I am a little jealous of the original pinner because I wish my classroom walls were a pretty blue!

Idea Three: Box tops Monster

Our school collects box tops and we have a competition between the classes to see who can bring in the most.  We use these box tops to purchase school supplies.  I think turning a tub into a box top monster would encourage my students to bring them in :)

It's craft time!