Thankful November, day 2: Professional Development

On day 2 of Thankful November, I'm pausing to be thankful for professional development.

The professional development I'll be attending later today is sure to disappoint on so many levels.  Some professional development "trainings" are like that.

However, I've also had the opportunity to attend some really good professional development courses that have expanded my pedagogical understanding of concepts.

Explicit Phonics

In fifth grade, I didn't think I had to teach phonics.  I figured they can read, they're fine.  Then I took Explicit Phonics, which was offered in my district.  The beginning section of the course focused on long and short vowels, blends, digraphs, and short words.  Useful for some, but not applicable to my whole group instruction.  However, the second half of the course focused on affixes, roots, and blending through multi-syllabic words which is totally appropriate for upper elementary.  We worked on flexible decoding strategies and tried it in our classrooms.  

Like most things, it got better with practice.  

I then learned about the workbooks with Words Their Way. I was familiar with the WTW program, which is a collection of word lists with specific phonics skills attached.  I much prefer this approach to spelling than the traditional 20 words of the week that are associated with thematic units.  

What I didn't know is there are five different student work books.

I ordered "D" and "E" off of Amazon.  The word lists are appropriate for my ELL fifth graders and the format is student friendly.

I take ten minutes a day of reading instruction to do explicit phonics with my fifth graders.  By the beginning of November, we've covered the six syllable types, long vowel patterns, inflectional endings, and some affixes.  

The instruction is broken into four or five day mini-units and put into powerpoints, some of which are available {here}.  I'm in the process of adding more as I revise them based off of my students' understanding of the skill.

I'm glad I took professional development on explicit phonics for the upper grades.  It makes my reading instruction better and helps my ELL students.

Nonfiction in Focus

{Last month}, I took a course on nonfiction reading and integrating it with writing.  The course was crammed into three days, but I loved the information on blogging and merging nonfiction with writing.  In elementary school, there should be a 50-50 split between fiction and informational text, but our Reading Rangers program doesn't always reflect that.

It's sometimes a challenge to integrate informational text into a reading block that is heavily slanted in favor of fiction, so this course gave us some ideas about integration with writing.

This also made us examine our reading and writing pacing guide.  Quite frankly, they shouldn't be viewed as separate most of the time.  Reading and writing should be integrated together in a more natural way, which is something we're looking at in upcoming units.  (I say we here because Mrs. H took the course with me).

Text-Dependent Questions

I'm in this course {right now}, it's finishing up by the middle of November, and I'm loving it.  The text for the course is by Fisher and Frey, who are some of my favorites.

Yes, I have favorite educational researchers, don't you?

The course is giving me a lot more information about structuring close reads in my classroom.  Once I'm done, I'll synthesize my learning and blog about it, so stay tuned!

Technology Endorsement

A few years ago, there was an opportunity to obtain a technology endorsement for free by taking courses at Nevada State College.  I had to pay for the courses upfront, but if I earned a B or better, was reimbursed.

The four courses went over the basics of jing, edmodo, wordle, and other web 2.0 tools.

I can't recall the specifics, but it was a year-long professional development and I learned that it's not enough for me to use the technology, I need my students to understand how to use it appropriately because I've got to make them digital citizens.

Mount Vernon Teacher's Institute

As a history nerd, the idea of studying George Washington's life and staying at Mount Vernon was thrilling.  I applied and was accepted in the summer of 2012.  It was an amazing opportunity and you can learn more about it {here} or {here}.

MEMTA

Summer 2012 was a busy one because once I got back from Mount Vernon, I almost immediately headed back to the East Coast to attend the Mickelson Exxon Mobile Teacher's Academy.  MEMTA pairs with NSTA and focuses on science instruction in 3-5th grade classrooms.

Oh, and I met Phil Mickelson.

 Learn more {here} and {here}. 

{DENSI}

The Discovery Educator Network Summer Institute is a week long adventure in learning and connecting with other educators.  My brain frequently feels like it's ready to explode from all the strategies and I still haven't implemented all the ideas that are swirling around in my brain.

I've had some amazing opportunities to learn more and become a better teacher.  I'm thankful for the opportunities to grow as a person, challenge my preconceived notions, and continue to learn new things.

What are you thankful for?

Word Work lessons

Since I have the upper half of the grade level for small group reading, I focus on word work rather than phonemic awareness.  My students aren't learning to read, they're readers.  So our focus is on those irregular word patterns and nuances in the English language that must be explicitly taught to students (especially my English Language Learners).

We've worked on irregular past tense verbs and silent letters, so I created power points.  Our word work is only 5-10 minutes per reading block (sixty minutes) because that's what my students need.  Word work and fluency practice takes no more than fifteen minutes (combined) so the remaining forty five minutes are spent reading, writing, publishing, blogging, sorting, creating, analyzing, comparing, contrasting, or meeting with me for our literature circles.

I've posted my weekly lessons on TpT for a dollar each.  You can edit them if you don't like the font I used or you can download the free font here.

Happy reading!

FCRR Shout Out

I've blogged about FCRR before and it's a wonderful free resource for literacy stations.  I love that it's broken up into grade level bands (K-1, 2-3 and 4-5) as well as into the big 5 components of literacy instruction (phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, phonics and comprehension).  They've also revised many of their student activities to align with the Common Core State Standards, which is also extremely helpful.

I've used the stations with my intervention groups and during my small groups.  I especially like the fluency stations at the beginning of the year when I'm explicitly teaching the four components of fluency (accuracy, rate, expression and phrasing).

Since it was reading week last week, I took advantage of the lax schedule (we had assemblies and Discovery Education testing as well) to play some reading games with my students (when they weren't being pulled to make up missed assignments, since the trimester ended Friday). 

One of the stations they played was "fact and opinion football":

I had a group of football fans fully entertained for a good twenty minutes.  When they ran out of cards, I had them make up their own statements for the group to guess.

The second station was "incredible inferences":

(Yes, my classroom rug is polka dotted...that's just how I roll!)

I used counters from our math kit as pieces, but you can use virtually anything. I'm pretty sure almost every teacher I've met has some sort of kit of pieces.

They had a great time with these reading games and I liked the skills that were reinforced. I know many of my students struggle with getting past the literal words in the text, so this was a fun way for them to practice "digging deep" and making meaning of the text.  They're getting there with inferences!

Happy reading :)

That time has come...

For the first six months of the school year, I ran my small groups with ease.

Okay, not ease per say, but with a relatively stress-free mindset compared to the rest of my day. 

 I knew where to go for my weekly fluency passages (reading A-Z), I had a list of must do's to choose from based on what standards we were working on in whole group and what grade level assessment data revealed.  I've changed up our "word work" a few times, but am now using this great resource:

Based on my notes from our daily fluency practice (and my RCBM progress monitoring), I select what focus skill we'll be using for the week.  So far we've done irregular past tense verbs, silent consonants and soft & hard c.  Next week we're looking at stressed and unstressed syllables.

Over the past several years, I've meticulously created teacher guides for my novels.  Through the amazing generosity of supporters on donorschoose, awesome sales on Scholastic, thorough searching at second hand bookstores, Amazon's fast shipping and shamelessly using my teacher discount at both Borders and Barnes and Noble, I have established a decent classroom library, filled with multiple copies of some great books.  I try to have at least six of each, so I can use these novels with a small group.

However, with twelve small groups, I've arrived at the day I've dreaded.

Some of my groups are ready to read novels I haven't had the time to meticulously prepare...which means I have extra homework!

Granted, reading is by no means a chore.  I love reading!

However, while I'm reading the novel my students are, I'm carefully taking down vocabulary words, writing comprehension questions (with answers so I don't forget), picking out specific parts for a close read, brainstorming homework questions and more.  It takes a long time for me to prep a teacher guide so that I feel confident doing the novel with a small group.  I'm not one of those teachers that can just sit down and read the book with them, I want to be ahead of them so I know if the answers they're giving are correct.

Last week not one, but three of my groups finished their novels and selected new ones that I haven't read yet.  So this weekend's homework is reading at least the first part of these books:

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (the first of 4 novels in Lemony Snicket's All the Wrong Questions series, a quasi-prequel to the Series of Unfortunate Events)

The Lost Hero by Rick Riordian.  Darn, more adventures at Camp Half-Blood!

They selected this book because they noticed the Newbery Award on the cover and concluded it must be a good novel.  How can you argue with that logic?

I figure I won't finish all of them by Monday, but I can at least get part way through and stay a few chapters ahead of them!

(On the bright side, novel guides for these three books will be available within the coming month on my TpT site!).

On that note, I say goodbye for the weekend and am off to read!

Student Input

Since we are doing affixes and Greek & Latin roots during our whole group reading classes, I decided we needed to revise what we're doing in our small groups.

However, deciding what we need for word work isn't entirely up to me.  I'm not in their brains and I wanted to make sure our 5-10 minutes of phonics/word work was well spent in our small groups.

So I asked both periods a series of questions and had them respond with what they wanted and needed:

By allowing them to have input, they feel more of a sense of ownership in our small groups.

It's not my classroom, it's our classroom.

Change can be a good thing

I'm halfway through year five of teaching and my oh my have things changed.

For the most part, I see the changes as a good thing.  I know to truly see a program or strategy's effectiveness, it should be consistent within a school for several years to be able to accurately measure growth.  That's something we're working on at our school.

When I started teaching, we followed a scripted reading program with weekly spelling tests and a story of the week.  I taught comprehension strategies, sort of, but we were expected to abide by the book.  I thought I was doing pretty well following the structure and doing the same things as the other teachers in my grade level.

This blind, naive attitude only lasted a few months and (with administrative approval), I'd completely abandoned the scripted program by my second year. I don't do well with scripted programs anyway.

I brought additional challenges upon myself by having to find meaningful content, but at least during my second year I was teaching standards and not just a story.  My students were becoming more engaged and I was enjoying teaching more.

By year three, I was feeling more confident in the classroom.  I'd finished my masters degree and my Teach for America obligation. I had taken a lot of district trainings and was on a task force to unwrap the (at the time, new) Common Core State Standards.  There were still lots of extra demands on me to find the materials I needed to teach with and lots of long weekends preparing.  I was also in conflict with veteran teachers in my grade level who were unwilling to try new strategies and envied my successes in the classroom.

Year four brought more confidence and a partner.  I was no longer pitted me against the grade level, but rather me and my ally against the veteran teachers.  Slowly but surely, our students rose to our high expectations and outperformed the others simply because we weren't teaching a bland, scripted program.  We were teaching (and reteaching) the standards with a variety of strategies.  Not all of them worked, but our students were rarely bored.  Their high levels of engagement translated into higher test scores due to what I believe was their interest in learning. 

Year five: my dream team.  I work with three other fifth grade teachers and my special education co-teacher.  We are on the same page 95% of the time and always supporting one another.  None of us follow a scripted reading program with a new story a week.  No one gives a spelling test with 20 words that students had to memorize over the week and regurgitate on Friday.

No no, I think we do something much, much better.  

We teach a weekly, grade-level phonics skill with explicit phonics.  We teach the patterns, practice sorting by sounds, encode and decode with text, then on Friday give them a quick formative assessment with five words to see if they can apply the skill.  I don't want to see if they can memorize basic facts, I want to see if they an apply their knowledge of word parts to spelling unfamiliar words because that's a much more true assessment of whether or not they got the skill.

For math, we are using the Investigations program which is far superior to what we previously used.  Based on over eighty years of research and partnership with NCTM, the program has students discovering math concepts through manipulation and discourse, which provides for a more meaningful understanding of mathematics.  They are constantly building their number sense through Number Talks and math games that rely on critical thinking.

For reading, we're loosely following another school district's pacing guide because it draws heavily from mentor text that is rigorous, engaging and within an appropriate lexile level.  Before choosing to go with their plans as our backbone, we read through their plans, double checked that all standards were covered and added in our own notes.  I think it's going fairly well.

We don't give a weekly reading test (thank goodness!).  Instead, we give a monthly one with longer reading passages (to build their stamina) with questions that cover several standards.  I'm not testing how much they remember of a story we'd read together and discussed in class five times (because at that point, it was regurgitation, not knowledge).  We're testing how well they can independently apply the skills we've been working on in whole and small groups to the unfamiliar passage.

I look back at my first year in the classroom and have the overwhelming urge to apologize to that group of students. 

 I did the best I could with what I had, but I would never go back to that way of teaching.  I would never rely on worksheets and a story of the week.  That's not what helps students learn.

As an educator, I'm constantly trying to learn new strategies and implement them in my classroom.  While this highly reflective process can be a tad frustrating when things don't go as planned, I think that learning and trying new things is far better than repeating the same thing over and over again.

In the past five years, I've implemented interactive notebooks and Number Talks.  I do explicit phonics three times a day (whole group and both small groups).  I have students interact with technology rather than me being the sole one to create things.  I have centers and literature circles with novels, something I didn't even attempt until my second year.  I've learned how to do the CORE phonics assessment to see where students break down phonetically and the DRA to determine their reading levels. (Although it's time consuming, I much prefer it to the old diagnostic tests I had to give!).  We're using mentor text for reading and writing, doing mini-lessons and having students publish drafts both on the computers and the iPads.  It's been a tough, uphill battle and I'm proud of the new things I've learned.  I'm appreciative of the trainings I received at my school, from my district and from outside educational entities.

I'm saddened by teachers who are scared or unwilling to try new strategies.  I don't have the same bunch of kids I did when I first started five years ago, so why should I teach the same lesson the same way?

(Poor Harry Potter, subjected to the old ways of teaching)

Change can mean better instruction for students.  Change can mean more engaging, thoughtful, purposeful, driven lessons.  Change can mean teachers have more flexibility and students have more opportunities to collaborate with their peers on projects and activities, rather than just sitting quietly and working independently. Change can bring joy back into the classroom.  I'm not saying every aspect of education needs to change nor that all change should be blindly accepted because that's no good either.  However, if change brings about higher student performance and helps create more critical, thoughtful, passionate young scholars, why not give it a try?

Change can be a good thing.  

Word Work

We've been working on affixes and roots, so here's a snapshot of one of our weekly activities:

They identify the word parts (including the base word) and discuss how the word parts work together to make meaning.  They're doing a really good job with it!  You can snag a sample of our word work ppt here!

Phonics

This is the first year I've ever explicitly taught phonics and I'm seeing such a huge difference with my inclusion classroom!

Before taking Explicit Phonics and Lively Letters with my district, I was falsely under the assumption that phonics was taught in primary grades while my sole job was to focus on affixes (prefixes & suffixes) as well as roots.

While I do teach those roots and affixes, there are also grade level skills my students need help with.

I found this great, simple diagram:

We need to be teaching advanced phonics in the upper grades of elementary as well.  FCRR has some awesome free advanced phonics centers that I know my students love!  

We have been working on the /el/, /en/ and /er/ sounds, so I added these to our phonics wall:

Happy decoding!

New anchor charts!

Here are some of our updated anchor charts:

Theme and constructed responses:

Affixes:

Greek & Latin Roots:

Inflectional Endings (phonics):

I need more wall space!

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...)

Posters

I'm pretty sure I spent my entire prep today working on anchor charts.

Here are some updated images:

Our phonics wall:

We've been working on /s/, /z/ and /ch/ sounds this week.  I'm trying to use different colors each week for our phonics skills so that students know where to look.

Here is our updated writing genres poster (Being a Writer):

We're working on narratives during this writing unit.  We also just got new writing partners, so hopefully that help our writing time.

We also are working on buddy coaching for writing and fluency:

So I made a new pink sign to guide their conversations.

Here is another chart to help them with their partner conversations:

It was created for writing but can work for other academic subjects as well.

Next, here is our sentence starters:

In fifth grade, some of our standards (RL 5.1/RI 5.1) require students to "quote accurately" and "make inferences" from literature and informational text.  We have been working on responses to literature and constructed responses, so hopefully this will help my students with their answers.

Lastly, I changed the background on my classroom blog:

It's polka dots :)

Syllables

This week in phonics, we're reviewing r-controlled vowels.  This aligns with CLOVER as one of the six types of syllables.  To help my students, we did our syllable sort in IE block and small groups:

Students collaboratively work together to sort syllables into the 6 CLOVER categories:

C: closed syllables
L: consonant -le
O: open syllables
V: vowel teams
E: silent e
R: r-controlled

By studying syllables and strategies for breaking apart multisyllabic words, students have multiple opportunites to practice this crucial reading skill.

Students also referred to our ever-growing phonics wall:

I got the ideas from another awesome co-worker. I love that I work with such amazing educators, I feel like I learn something new each day :)

Happy reading!

Snap shots

So in our performance zone in our district, we have a facebook page (which you can follow here).  Our school is clearly overachievers when it comes to anchor charts since we've got over a hundred pictures in our album.  Of those, about eight are mine which gives me some warm and fuzzy feelings.  

Here are two snap shots that haven't been previously mentioned on my blog:

Our QR code:

I was a little hesitant at first but this was actually super easy to create.  I turned my welcome letter and info packet into a PDF, which I then uploaded into dropbox.  From dropbox, I did "share link" and emailed the link to myself.  Then, I copied the link and went to one of the numerous free QR code creators and pasted in the url.  After triple checking from various devices, I printed on pink cardstock and stapled it outside my door.

I'm not sure how many parents have downloaded the welcome letter but it's a good strategy for those with smart devices!

Phonics instruction:

We were doing a power point presentation on the 6 types of syllables (CLOVER) at the beginning of the year.  My students were still working on getting the main idea into their notebooks, so I was modeling what to write down by using the smart board markers with the power point:

Just an easy way to give explicit instruction on exactly what you want your students to put in their notebooks :)

Writing Portfolios

This year I'm having my students keep track of their writing with portfolios.

During the first week of school, I had them fill out a "me as a writer" sheet so I could start to plan out mini-lessons based on their needs.

I read through their writing struggles and made a list:

Luckily, a lot of these concerns are addressed in the CCSS so my instruction can be both standards-based and data-driven.

From there, I found a stack of manila file folders and stapled their sheets inside.

I then added a picture of this chart

about growth and mastery of standards to the outside of their folder:

For durability, I added some packing tape to make sure the growth chart was staying put!

Inside, I stapled a double sided chart of the common core writing and language standards so they could see exactly what we're working on:

We will talk about SMART goals after our diagnostic constructed responses this week.  Students will then generate their own writing goals, which will also be stapled into their portfolios.

Their portfolios can double as privacy shields during independent writing time for assessments.

I made a wordle out of their list of struggles with writing:

At least we have a very comprehensive list!  Plus, the largest issue of "big words" we are tackling right away with explicit phonics and syllable types :)

I turned that wordle into part of my bulletin board, but more on that later!