What's Different? LINK-UP!

Every teacher has that "I'm doing this again!" or "I'm not going to do _____ this way again". It's part of the natural process of reflection, which I believe is critical in developing into a stronger teacher. I'd love to hear what you're doing differently this year versus last year! I'll get it started!

1. Daily Behavior Rubric

I loved my clip chart last year, it functioned well, it was cute and my students knew the expectations surrounding it. I've read all the hype on clip chart or no clip chart and it's important for me to say that these ideas didn't influence me. I'm not judging anyone with a clip chart or without one, this is just what works best for me and what I desire my classroom climate to be like. 

Here's what's new this year: 

What I love about the rubric is that students must self reflect each day before I sign. I love too that I can attach reflection sheets for students who needed to complete one that day. I can't wait to see how this runs in my classroom this year!

2. Literacy Centers

Yes, I LOVE literacy centers just like the majority of teachers. I love the drawer of task cards, I love the organization of the rotation groups. I love that just after one day of practice, students can rotate and know exactly where they are going! But, it is SO much work to keep up with updating centers each week, and it's a lot of $$$ because I purchase task cards a lot. Also, I worry that too much of it turns into busy work because it's so time consuming to prepare...maybe, just maybe...

So I decided I wasn't for it this year, but don't worry, I have a plan for what students will do while I pull Guided Reading groups - Student lead book clubs! Here's how I hope it will go: I create groups (based on reading level), each group is assigned to a book (five copies per group). I choose students to be the Book Captains. These captions are responsible for guiding their group through the book. I also purchased these Tri-Fold Novel Studies to help them out. What's great is while the group is with me for guided reading, the captains will have planning time - just like teachers...expect we don't get in school planning time ;)! The captains will use post-its to mark up their book, write questions for their chapters and even get time to conference with me to go over vocabulary, questions or concerns about their group! I'll blog more about this later!

3. Changed up Morning Work

I consider the morning to be one of the most critical times of the day (and right after lunch!) because it sets the stage for the rest of the day. When my students enter the classroom it's vital for them to know exactly what to do and for this to be consistent EVERY day! Last year I used grammar morning work and I loved the product, however, I longed for my students to have deeper morning work. So I purchased this for students to complete each day AND I'm going to create a Math booklet of morning work as well using this!

I'd love to hear from you! What are you doing different this year?
Here's your blank copy - get started!

Empowering Readers, Leaders and Thinkers

One of my goals this year as a teacher was to empower my students as readers, thinkers and leaders. To move away from teaching reading as a method (do this, then this, then this), and instead teach reading as a whole. For example, I struggled with the idea - do I teach individual skills/standards? Or do I encompass several skills/standards within closely reading a text and chapters of a novel? After a little push and a good chunk of money spent on standard based assessments on TPT, I came to the conclusion to take a holistic approach to reading and student led thinking/discussion/annotating. I have to admit, I still have this inner battle to this day, yes, it's March.

It's been challenging. A transformation had to occur in my thinking and teaching for this holistic approach to be possible, which would be challenging for anyone. The challenge is not just in my thinking and teaching, a challenge has been created for my students. I notice and still notice that my students have trouble guiding themselves through a text, it's almost like they are waiting for step my step directions to begin reading. I noticed this occurring just this week with a few of my students and it scared me! How can my students be successful in college if they are looking for steps to understanding a text?

So what did I do? After a brief moment of anxiety, I reflected. I asked myself, where did I get off track? How has my instruction helped students become independent, close readers and how am I holding them back? 

I took some time to outline what I have been doing since day one to empower my readers, and something amazing occurred. I figured it out - I let the anxiety of "the test" get me off track and regress to my "I'm going to model this skill, they are going to practice JUST THIS SKILL collaboratively, then try on their own". What I lost was the amazing wide thinking that I had witnessed just weeks before.

So now what?
I'm refocusing my instruction on the text, and encouraging my students to use their Reading Toolbox to make understanding of the text. I know what I will see happen - my students will be annotating their thinking and NATURALLY using reading skills (making predictions, summarizing, etc.)


Reflecting on how I've empowered my readers since day one was vital to getting my thinking back on track. Take a look at how I've empowered readers this year.

Reading Empowerment Timeline

Beginning of the year:

• introduced students to close reading strategies such as annotating your thinking, identifying key information and marking it up, using context clues to determine meaning of unknown words. 
• modeled and interactively marked up texts which reading literally and more deeply
• fostered independence in marking up texts through positive reinforcement

Middle of the year: 

• all of the above
• encouraged independent novel reading and marking up text with post its. 
• encouraged a wide range of marking up on post its (summary thought, theme thought, new words, connection thought). All of this is occurring NATURALLY as students read novels and are not limited to one type of thought as they read. 
• facilitated "book talk" that allowed students to share their post-it thoughts with classmates in whole group discussion. Passionate debate often occurred during this time!

At this point: 

• again, all of the above
• encouraged deeper thinking during reading, record on post-its
• facilitated discussion analyzing literal versus deeper thinking
• observing students naturally apply reading skills within novel reading
• students create a reading toolbox of strategies to use with any text. I allowed students to create the toolbox on an iPhone template and they took SO much ownership over the names of their "apps"! For instance, one student created the app named "The Makeup App", when I asked her what it meant, she replied this reminds me to mark up, or "put makeup" on my text. How awesome! 
• daily reading conferences/independent or small group modeling with students on the cusp of proficiency 
• facilitating before, during and after conversation to build essential understanding of the a text, naturally hitting on reading skills and standards.

Until next time, 

Reflections

January 2nd, 2015 marks the end of my first year of teaching. What a year, filled with ups and downs, tears and smiles and most influential, lessons learned. I was fortunate to see two groups of young scholars grow as readers, writers, thinkers and leaders during my first year. Nothing ignites my passion for education more than seeing scholars fall in love with reading, thinking, learning, and leading. 

This first year of teaching has been the most challenging of my life, in so many ways. Those challenges pushed me to what I thought were my limits countless times, then I learned I had new limits. 

The challenges of my first year of teaching, not only pushed me, but taught me so much. 

You're going to make mistakes. I spent the majority of my first year attempting to avoid any possible mistake I might make. I spent endless hours thinking what could go wrong to avoid it happening. It was exhausting. This year I've learned to trust myself and my decision making. 

You can over-plan. This year I've spent countless hours on Sundays planning out my week step by step - to avoid any mistakes. I can't get back the time I should have been spending with my husband or taking care of myself in other ways. 

Don't forget to pee. That's self explanatory. Teachers, we have the strongest bladders of anyone out there. 

Take care of yourself. This a big one. When you're a perfectionist, trying to avoid mistakes, and putting all you having into your job, YOU get lost. While the job is demanding, I learned I need to take time for myself to do something I love, besides teach! Am I perfect at this now? No way, but I try my hardest. If you don't take care of yourself, you're useless to those you need to take care of. 

A deep breath can go a long way. I like to think that breathing changed my life. In college I suffered from an anxiety disorder. When I sought help, I wasn't told to take medication, I was taught how to breathe and how to meditate. This one goes along with taking care of yourself, just breathe. 

Put your family first. My husband is my number one supporter. I never want to experience the regret of missing time with my husband and our future children. 

Finding a balance that works is hard, but worth it. 

Guess what 2nd year of teaching? 

Push me, challenge me - I'm ready for you! 

I'd love to hear from you - what lessons did you learn your first year of teaching? 

Keeping Guided Reading Organized

Guided reading is one of my favorite times of the day. My students also love hearing their guided reading group called! This time of the the days definitely would NOT be my favorite if I didn't keep it organized, its would be chaos and my students would suffer from it!

Before school even started in August, I began thinking about how I would keep myself organized this year. I knew I wanted to have between 5 and 6 groups and I planned how many times a week I would meet with each group. This chart was made before students walked through my door.

Once I did my initial Fontas and Pinell testing, I decided 5 groups would suffice and took away the Blue group. 

One of the tedious, yet necessary parts of guided reading is the initial assessments to determine student levels. Following the initial assessment, I grouped students based on their reading levels and got started working with my groups as soon as I could. 

The basics: 

Every group has a color, each color has a folder with all their groups materials

 Inside each folder:

Notebook (for recording observations)

6 copies of the text

Comprehension Questions 

Group pacing guide

Fluency Routine (not included in the photo)

It's important for students to know the purpose of their guided reading time. Here's how I display my guided reading objectives

When students come to guided reading, I want them to know the routine and it's important to me to keep the routine the same throughout the school year. 

We start our with our fluency routine, a one minute reading of a text at their level, I test one students while the rest whisper read to themselves. They record their words per minute on a graph. 

Then we move into word work, the amount of time spent on this varies depending on the reading level that I'm working with. We like word sorts for some groups and word analysis for others. 

Then I move into explaining what good readers do, show them what good readers do and them loose to try it on their own. While they are whisper reading, I meet with one students at a time and we practice together and I record their reading behaviors and goals for their next visit. 

In the end, we come back together to either discuss our reading and our objective. 

I found guided reading very challenging last year, but I'm loving how it's going this year - and having an organized system has played a huge role in that. If you're having trouble keeping your guided reading time organized, I hope you found this helpful - feel free to leave a comment about your loves and struggles with guided reading - I'd love to chat with you!

I've been busy adding items to my store this weekend, check out some of my goodies AND a freebie!

Text Dependent Analysis Reference and checklist bookmarks!

Here's the FREEBIE!

Have a great week, teachers!

Currently October!

I've linked up with Oh Boy, 4th Grade for Currently, October edition! Loving this month already!

Click below for your treat! 

Why do the Rules Make Sense?

This is a long overdue blog post! This year has gotten off to a great start, but like any other teacher it's been so busy! My energy is lacking due to some nasty germs invading my body, but I'm too excited to share this post to care!

Let me be honest, I have never really loved teaching math. I struggled with math as a child and still find certain mathematical concepts challenging, but this year has changed my mathematical mindset.

Here's why.

When I was in school, I was taught mathematical rules, such as how to borrow in subtraction, carrying in addition, looking at the digit before when rounding.  I used these rules to accurately, sometimes painstakingly, solve mathematical problems. But I never knew WHY the rule worked, why it made sense.

This year, my students are learning WHY certain mathematical rules make sense and HOW to represent these rules in different ways - and so am I!

Today was a particularly remarkable day in math class because I observed students representing 'carrying' using their place value charts.

We began by reviewing our objective (above) and exploring our Launch together in table groups. 

At this point, I did not tell them what a tape diagram was, I just asked them to use the figure below when they solved. I noticed most students using the  3 sections for the 3 numbers, those smarties!

As students worked collaboratively on the problems, I circulated  and observed some students rounding to the nearest thousand, and some to nearest ten thousand. When we came back together to share out, I had two students who rounded to different place value model their work. 

Students came to a concensus that rounding to the nearest thousand gave a more accurate estimation!

Next, we read the addition statement together and represented it on a tape diagram, labeling our unknown with the letter 'w'

Then we modeled it on our place value chart - here's where the magic started to happen. 

As we were adding up our number disks, we realized that there were more than 10 in our tens place. To represent the rule of carrying, we bundled a group of ten tens and drew an arrow to make one hundreds. Here is where students could visually make the connection between carrying when adding multidigit numbers! 

They had some practice with partners, and I was really impressed - check out this awesome, smart mathematical thinking!

Tomorrow, I'm excited to have my students dig deeper into word problems using tape diagrams!

Need some place value resources? 

Check out my newest product!

Currently September

I've linked up with Oh' Boy 4th Grade for my FIRST 'Currently' linky!

Listening -  The violent gun shots got on my nerves and have changed since I type it, haha! Calvin Harris is playing now! 

Loving - my husband and I got an espresso machine for a wedding gift and I just love steaming my milk and adding it to coffee :)

Thinking - I started my first year teaching mid-way through the year last January, so this is my FIRST year starting out in the fall!

Wanting - seriously, I need to do my laundry

Needing - I've got all day, but my anxiety will quiet down if I feel fully prepared!

3 trips - I LOVE going on vacation, but it hasn't happened too much, my honeymoon to Charleston was my first real vacation since before college. I've been to all these places except Boston and would love to go back, especially so my husband can see these beautiful spots! Boston might just be a birthday trip this year ;)

Thanks for stopping by!