Curriculum Must Haves! {Week 2}

I love reading Diane's blog posts on {Fifth in the Middle} and {Fancy Free in Fourth}.

This week's blog challenge is about curriculum must-haves. 

Our district, perhaps like most, is in a state of turmoil.  We've adopted the Common Core State Standards without curriculum to match, expect teachers to make due with out dated text books (seriously, the books are older than my students), and expect teachers to do more with less...including less money.  Yup, we took a pay cut and an insurance hike, so double whammy to the bank account!  To make matters worse, new to state teachers are given a several thousand dollar hiring bonus and to make up for the teacher shortage, retired teachers are invited back.  I have no issue with (qualified) retired teachers returning to the district, but I do have a problem that they receive both a salary and their retirement accounts.  Yup, they're allowed to double dip into funds, yet current teachers all took a pay cut.  

We also adopted the standards (which I have no problem with), but then rebranded them the Nevada Academic Content Standards (NVACS).  Why?  To deal with the critics who are outspoken against the Common Core.

From what I've read of the Common Core (which is not the whole thing, just the elementary portion), I don't really see a problem.  Are the standards perfect? No, of course not.  But the depth of what is expected of our students is much deeper then previous standards,  Seeing how Nevada is consistently at the bottom in terms of educational testing for a wide variety of reasons, I think challenging our students is a good thing.  When you're close to the bottom, you can only go up!

Long story short, we have no provided curriculum and have to rely on collaboration to create our lesson plans.  There are lots of inconsistencies across the district, but at least everyone in my grade level (and school) are pretty much on the same page.

So let's dive into this week's blog challenge and look at some curriculum must haves:

I can't say enough good things about this book.  We start each math lesson with a warm up that focuses on building number sense. 

We've tweaked it a little to roughly follow this format:

Mental Math Monday: The focus is on decomposing and composing numbers for computation.

Ten Minute Tuesday: The focus is on logic puzzles and brain teasers.

Word Problem Wednesday: The focus is on multi-step word problems and making sense of the problems.

Thinking Thursday: More logic puzzles and "tricky" problems.

Fast Facts Friday: Timed tests to focus on multiplication and division facts mastery.

Must haves:
Teachers pay Teachers products!

My novel guides are a life saver! I'm trying to keep track of several different novels at once with my small groups, so it's nice to have all my notes and homework questions in a nice, organized fashion.  

I've also founds tons of free stations that are great for independent and partner practice during RTI time!

As an added bonus, most stores are having their back to school sale right now! I know everything in my store is currently 20% off!  Go get inspired.

 

This book was truly a life saver.  I struggled with knowing how to teach phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency.  I felt pretty good about my comprehension strategies but struggled with foundation skills.  This had great strategies and graphic organizers.  My copy is well loved:

Finally, one of my go to websites: FCRR (Florida Center for Reading Research)

This site has graphic organizers, centers, and games broken into grade level bands (K-1, 2-3, and 4-5).  They've recently added the Common Core State Standards to the center activities so it makes it even easier to find what your students need.

What would you add? Join the conversation!

Clicks and Clunks

This week, our school's power (vocabulary) word is strategy.

In honor of this, I'll share about one of my new favorite strategies: "clicks and clunks".

I'm aware this is in no way a new strategy and is taught in numerous teacher prep courses.  However, it's new to me :)

I read about it in my beloved CORE source book:

And it's really "clicking" with my students.

(By the way, I googled for an image of the CORE book and my own image from a prior blog post came up...weird moment.)

Basically, it's a formative assessment where students analyze thier own learning.  They share what's "clicking" in their heads and what is "clunking" (not making total sense).

We talk about the importance of being honest and talk about why things are clunking.

I have my students give me fist bumps on their way out the door and share their clicks/clunks with me.

Yesterday, one student told me that our weekly phonics skill (/s/, /sh/, /z/) was clunking with her because she was confused about the letters.  Using this clunk, I explained in a different way during our word study this morning and she got it :) 

 (Hopefully others did too but since she specifically told me that was a clunk, I wanted to help her with it)

Speaking of clicking and clunking, here are mine for the day:

Clicks:

Almost all of my students are making growth on RCBM for Aimsweb for their oral reading fluency and words per minute.  One that went down had a very honest conversation that he wanted to try reading without using his finger as a place holder to see if he really needed it.  Turns out, he does need to keep track of his place with his finger but more importantly, he realizes that it's a strategy he needs to use because it helps him. 

Some of my students have grown over forty words since their beginning of the year benchmark.  Yes, you read that correctly. 40 words. In a minute.  They're almost at their end of year ambitious goals.

Clearly our daily repeated reading, buddy coaching and fluency stations are working!

Clunks:

Voice levels still aren't where they need to be.

Our server was down today: no access to my documents, my premade lessons, my email or the internet.  We made the best of it but it was frustrating being without technology.

Happy Friday! (almost...)

Small Literature Groups

While typing up notes for a novel unit on TpT, I realized I needed to revise my SG notes.  What worked for me my first and second year of teaching doesn't work for me now.

When reflecting on my teaching, I often come back to one of my favorite quotes by Maya Angelou: 

"When you know better, you do better"

Well, I'm going to do better.  I revised my units to add  in answers and increased the complexity of the questions by making them more open-ended.  I also included suggested homework questions for students.  These revised units are available on TpT.

I always have my students divide their notebooks into four sections:

I give them four questions to answer based on the chapter(s) for homework and we discuss those in depth.

For my small groups, I have them keep track of characters, analyze shifts in setting and make note of interesting vocabulary words in their small group notebooks.

We spend most of our time in our group meetings digging deep into the text.  I check their notebooks, set them up for the next discussion (usually allowing them to decide how much they want to read because I set the minimum) and then dive into the text.

Since I have six groups and only an hour each period, I can't meet each group every day. 

Here's our run-down:

First 8 minutes: fluency.

Students work with a partner to "buddy coach".  I set the timer for one minute and half the class reads in a whisper to their coach.  The coach keeps track of errors and at the timer, gives feedback on rate, expression, accuracy and phrasing.  After one minute of coaching, the students track their progress on this chart (from the CORE sourcebook).  Then they switch roles and repeat.

My beloved:

(yes, I'm a little type-A with my tabs)

I get my leveled fluency passages from reading A-Z but I know there are lots of websites and teacher's guides available.  I print them double sided so the students keep the passages for two weeks because that's better for our planet.

They chart on their fluency tracker:

After that, we spend a few minutes going over the week's phonics: Greek & Latin roots.

We look at the roots, add them to our anchor chart and then decompose multisyllabic words to decode the word's meaning.

From there,  I divide the remaining time in two and start pulling my groups.  I leave 2 minutes at the end for clean up and transition time.

To make sure all my groups get equal time at stations, I make this chart for my lesson plans:

That way I can make sure all my groups get the same centers.

This week, our stations are:

1. Fluency binder (like buddy coaching except they select the passage and can work in groups).  I've printed poems, songs, speeches and passages for students to read and buddy coach with.  I used FCRR printables to have students guide their discussions.

2. fluency quiz-quiz trade cards: they rate each other on their expression and accuracy, using these guides which are glued in their notebooks:

3. character jenga (I upcycled a jenga game and put open ended discussion questions for students to quiz each other).  This one gets a little loud but I love the discussions students have with one another about the book so it's worth it.

4. Kidblog.  This great, free resource allows students to respond to each other and to my blog questions on a safe, secure site:

If you view our page, that's all you see.  Students need a log in (their id numbers) and I get full approval of their posts.

5. "build-a-word": They take syllables and create multisyllabic words, recording their answers in their notebooks.  

6. "word-o-matic" (an FCRR center) where they create words.  I printed vowels on one color and consonants on another to make for easy clean up :)

Most of my centers are in manilla envelopes with instructions on sticky labels.  It helps keep students accountable for their behavior.

7.  Writing thank you letters for donor's choose :)  We got our new materials and love them! Thank you again donors!

8. Idiom cards: one of our new donorschoose centers to help with figurative langugage, which we've been working on during whole group reading!

I also posted our group norms:

I got this sweet card from a student today:

Happy reading!
-Ms. Vice

Week 2 Recap

Somehow, yesterday managed to be even longer than Thursday.

My to do list also grew, which makes today a catch up day.  When I'm not working on something for school, my procrastination (besides this) will be chores around the house and errands.

We have our groups made since we start switching for math and small groups (reading) on Monday.  To help my students, I put sticky labels on their desks with where they go for AM and PM as well as what they're supposed to take.  I'm hoping it eases down on the rushing back and forth to classes because something was left behind. 

My students are great.  Talkative, but great.  Truth be told, I'd rather have a group that talks with one another then one that sits and looks blankly at each other.

Here are my Batman birthday flowers from a student:

And a Batman Powder Puff girl drawing from another:

I am a very lucky teacher :)

We've spend the second week continuing to establish norms, build community, go over the math practices, practicing good reading strategies, working on our notebooks, reading aloud Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and doing beginning of the year benchmark testing.

Here is one of our fluency lessons, focusing on phrasing:

Phrasing is a component of fluency where students read in meaningful phrases.  The goal is not to read words one at a time, but rather in chunks that aid in comprehension.  Students received a passage and put in lines to indicate where they as readers would want to pause when reading aloud.  We went over pausing at commas and stopping at punctuation marks.  We did the first paragraph together, then they worked on the rest as table teams.  When we were all done, we practiced chorally whisper reading.

The lesson comes from the CORE source book...

...which is amazing :)

We also have started this anchor chart on interesting words from our reading:

As well as this one on what good readers do:

This one on metacognition and reading strategies:

And this one on what mathematicians do: 

My classroom has lots of anchor charts :)

Week 2 is done, 9 days in.  I'm excited for all the exciting learning we have ahead of us on our academic journey :)