Happy Sunday! It's going to be a 4-day week for us! Well... at least for the kids. Teachers have professional development on Friday (I'm presenting on how to use Reading A-Z and RAZ Kids in the classroom), but without kids it's still kind of like a day off! I have a whole lot of things I want to fit in this week, so let's get started!

This week is fire safety week, so everything fire truck, firefighter and safety related goes in the plans! You can check out a past post of mine with ideas for activities, movement, writing and technology, by clicking the link below. I also have a word search freebie you can grab.

 

 

We're starting to dive into nonfiction text features this week and I'm looking forward to using an activity I discovered last year - text mapping.



This was a great way to get my students actively involved in locating and defining text features. I'm going to use the same set of books as I did last year, since we're just getting to the middle of fall here in CT. You can click on the image above to find out more about how I plan to do this.

 

I also have a class set of books that I picked up a couple years ago from our "Books Are Fun" salespeople.

I think there are actually 6 titles in the fall series. I have 4 or more of each one, so they're perfect for reinforcing text features in small groups. There is a table of contents, glossary, index, headings, bold print, fact boxes.... all the text features we focus on. I know the books are available on Amazon, and I'm pretty sure they were in a Scholastic book club last year, too.

 

We have moved on to subtraction fact strategies as our math focus. Oh, subtraction... what IS it that makes this concept so hard for some kiddos? I'm planning on using this week to practice, practice, practice subtraction facts! I pulled out my pumpkin math centers to use as one of our rotations this week.

We're going to need all the practice we can get! (You can see the whole Pumpkin Math resource by clicking HERE.)

 

That's it for now! I'm off for a little family breakfast and then home to settle in on the couch and do some TpT creating. I see spiders in my future...!

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Elementary Stories

UPDATE:  Congratulations, Laura!  I'm emailing your copy of my Character Graphic Organizers now :-)

Well, that was quick... in my last post I shared with you a fun competition I was part of with some bloggy buddies:

Annnnnd.... I'm out.  Yep, out in the first round.  Sigh... bad news for me, but good news for YOU because that means I'm giving away a copy of my Character Response Graphic Organizers!  (You can check out the details in my previous post HERE or by clicking on the image below.) 



And because I'm not feeling so hot today (those kid germs got me despite my efforts to keep them away!), let's make this easy - comment with the name of your favorite NCAA basketball team (even if they're not in the tournament.)  I'll choose a random comment on Wednesday evening and that person will win the resource.  Don't forget to leave your email!

Now on to something school related.

We spent A LOT of time this week doing research for our biography project.  I found a fantastic site full of information not only about famous Americans, but also animals, science and social studies.  It's called PebbleGo and it's amazing for primary students! (I am in no way affiliated with PebbleGo and the opinions expressed here are my own)

I need to be honest - PebbleGo is a paid by-subscription site, but I signed up for a 2 week trial that lets me use the whole site for free.  My kids were hooked the minute they logged on!

There are four libraries, as they call them: animals, science, social studies and biographies.  Navigating the site is easy for young ones and the text is written at a level pretty much all my kiddos could read and comprehend.  There is a text-to-speech feature as well, which was perfect for those who needed a little more support.  We worked with the search bar, navigated through the tabs for each article and used the multimedia options (videos, maps audio and timelines) for more information.

During our research time, my kiddos only used the biography section, but we had other times in the day when they could just explore.  And they were sooo engaged!  At first you could hear a pin drop as they read and listened to information about anything and everything they were interested in.  Then the excitement began:  "Did you know....?"  They were so excited to share what they had learned, I decided on the spot to create a "Fact Board."  Everyone was allowed to choose one fact they wanted to share and write it on the whiteboard for everyone to read.  We did this each day for morning work for a couple days.  By looking at the picture below you can see that one day everyone must have been interested in how big/heavy/long etc. things are!

As we finshed up our research, I had some students who were done before others.  All they wanted to do was explore the site on their own, so I came up with a Four Square Facts sheet to put a little direction into their exploration.  The first one is based on reading coding we do (check out more about that HERE), the second one is 5W based and the third one is for them to practice using the search function.  Confession:  I just wrote these quickly on my Smartboard and my kiddos could choose which one to do.  They folded a scrap paper in fourths and wrote their facts on that.  Apparently I never took pictures of them, so I created these nice ones for you to have.



Just click on the image to download your copy.  You can use them with any informational text.

I'm excited to spend this coming week finishing up our project with our big "reveal" hopefully on Friday.  It's supposed to involve dressing up, speaking and listening and an interactive timeline with videos!  We'll see how far we get!

Don't forget to enter the giveaway for my character graphic organizer before you go!  (Scroll back up to the top if you forgot!)  And I thought I'd leave you with a little sign of spring I found outside our building:

(Jut ignore the piles of snow everywhere else... :-)

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Elementary Stories

I couldn't decide on just one thing to blog about this weekend so I'm linking up with Kacy at Doodlebugs for Five for Friday.  Good stuff this week!

 

Not sure how I feel about this... It definitely was pretty and it didn't last long.  But let's just say I'm not ready for this to be happening too often right now.  Snow means boots and snowpants and the craziness of getting everything ON for recess, then coming back in and taking it OFF... not yet, ok?

We finished up our unit on repeated addition with some fun centers.  In the first one everyone is using square tiles to show arrays of a certain number of rows and columns.  This one got a few of my kiddos confused.  It was good to see some kids having no problems figuring it out and others who usually breeze through all things numbers having to really think.  In the end we all got it and it was great to see everyone help each other figure it out. The ipad center was hit.  They used a drawing app to create arrays based on repeated number sentences.  In the third center it was the opposite - write the number sentence to go with the array. (You can get the cards from TPT HERE.)

 

 



This is my second Stitch Fix and I LOVE IT!  I get to try on things I wouldn't normally even look at and I'm finding some great pieces to add to my wardrobe.  That cream sweater is perfect to keep at school for when it gets chilly and the jeans on the bottom are my new faves!

We took out the laptops for our first research project of the year!  Wow - the excitement was amazing and it's so great to see my kiddos really able to use technology so well.  Last week we visited three sites to learn more about nocturnal animals.  As soon as everyone got busy you could hear a pin drop as they all read everything they could.  Then the chatter started - "Did you know....?"  Wow!  Listen to this!"  It warmed my teacher heart!  This week we'll add information from a few books.  I created a research flip book for them to keep track of their facts.  After the research piece, each student will create a slide in Powerpoint with a fact about their animal, photo and caption and a title.  (Snuck a little nonfiction text feature practice in there!)  We are all so excited to see how the final presentation turns out!  (Click HERE for the flip book.)

Here are the sites we used:

As I was cleaning things up on Friday, I realized this little habit I have just might save some of you a little time.  You know all those resources you have that you use parts of all year, ... but sometimes not every week so you forget which one you used and which ones you didn't.... and you copy it and hand it out only to hear "we already did this!"... I started turning the page I used around the other way when I re-filed it after copying so I knew I had already used it.  Now when I go back to my folder I can see at a glance which pages I've used so far.

Be sure to check out Doodlebugs to see what everyone else has been up to this week!

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Elementary Stories

My students LOVE anything nonfiction.  Whether it is about space, the weather, trucks or animals (a particular favorite with second graders), learning more about a topic is where it's at. 

I came across this pin while I was looking for ideas on how to teach nonfiction text features.

It leads to a quick summary of how the author used text mapping to teach nonfiction text features.  I was hooked.  (Be sure to follow the link to The Text Mapping Project for more information.)

I knew this would be a great idea to use with my kiddos because: (1) It was VISUAL!  My kiddos could see how a nonfiction book was put together in one look, rather than flipping through pages; (2) It was INTERACTIVE!  From putting the copied pages together into a scroll, to highlighting and labeling text features, my kiddos would be actively involved every step of the way; and (3) It was DIFFERENT!  Just the idea of creating a scroll would be engaging for them.

So, step one.  I made copies of 3 of our nonfiction books.  I made sure they had a variety of text features and would work well when placed end to end.  I chose one on leaves, pumpkins and apples to go with our fall theme.  6 copies meant I could have 3 students in each group - very manageable.
Then we made the scrolls.  I actually did this with whichever kids were waiting for buses to be called in the afternoon.  They were so excited to find out what we were going to do and the fact that THEY create the scrolls added to them being more invested in the whole lesson.

I have to tell you - this was not the first lesson we had done on nonfiction text features.  We had already looked at different nonfiction books, worked with features such as the index, table of contents, captions, etc.  I wanted my students to have some familiarity with the features before we did this so everyone would be more successful.

Wow!  The response was amazing!  As soon as I took out the scrolls that had been created, you could hear and feel the excitement.  "I helped make that one!"  "Look!  I see the title!"  "Wait, the glossary will be at the end!"

We unrolled the scrolls and spent a few minutes just talking about the text features they noticed.  This was quick way for me to assess what they remembered and what I needed to make sure to focus on.  After having each person in the group share one example of a text feature - and its purpose - we started mapping!

I went through the features one by one, showing them on a Powerpoint as we found them in the text.  Students sat at the beginning, middle or end of the scroll and the person closest to the text feature we were talking abut got to circle it with the highlighter and label it. 

As we mapped the text, we also added to our nonfiction text features booklet.

 We spent two full days doing this, then each group walked around and looked at the other groups' text maps.  By the time we were done with this, my students could easily locate and identify various nonfiction text features, and had a better idea of how they worked to help support the reader in finding information.

I assessed the final time in two ways - first with flip flap books to match the feature and the definition.  Then when I was meeting with small groups, I gave each student a nonfiction text and asked them to identify certain features, show where they would go to find___, use the ____ to ____.  I had the same questions for each kiddo, but a different text.  This really gave me a good idea of who could just identify the features and who could actually apply them.

This definitely turned out to be a great way to show how nonfiction text features are organized and how they help the reader.  I plan on using text mapping again in a few weeks when we get deeper into understanding the narrative structure of a story.  I can see making a short chapter into a scroll and then highlighting the introduction of characters and setting, the rising action, falling action and the ending so students can really SEE how a story moves along.

Let me know if you decide to try this in your room.  I'd love to hear how it went!

  

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Elementary Stories

Happy Saturday!  Phew!  I am beat!  I went to bed pretty early last night so I never had a chance to finish this post - and announce the winners of my spider unit.  Parent conferences went great!  I loved meeting and chatting with everyone and I know this year is going to continue to be fantastic!

Now, on to the spiders!

As you know, we spent all of last week researching, writing about and loving every minute of spider central.  My plan was to incorporate our unit on nonfiction text features with these creepy crawly guys for a great finished product (you can see that blog post HERE) - and the week did not disappoint!  (My picture... not so much.. we were so involved in everything I forgot to take pictures of every step!)

We started with a "what do you know/what questions do you have?" activity.  We sat in a circle and rolled a ball of yarn to each other.  Each person shared something they knew about spiders or a question they had.  After they answered, they had to hold on to the yarn as it got rolled to someone else.  This created our "web" of ideas to start our spider investigation.

After doing some general spider reading and sorting (these are from my spider unit - you can see that HERE)

we created a list of 6 different topics about spiders: body parts, babies, what thy eat, webs and silk, fangs and venom, and different kinds of spiders.  Everyone was in a group and their job was to read and research and find 3-4 facts about their topic. 

I met with each group myself, along with having them work independently.  Here's what they came up with:

The next step was to take our facts and write a quick expository paragraph.  This turned out to be a great way to introduce nonfiction writing in a blink.  We're focusing more on this next week.  They worked together to write their paragraphs and then edited and copied them for the display.

One text feature that has been tricking my kiddos has been what a caption is - and what it does.  So I used this opportunity to have every group create an illustration for their paragraph and write a caption to go with it. 

Perfect!  They were now finding captions left and right in all the nonfiction books we had, and rather than asking me what the picture was about, I could hear them saying, "The caption says..."  Made my teacher heart smile!

Our final step was to work together to create the table of contents, index and glossary.  For the glossary, each group chose a word or two that they thought was an important word to know.  They highlighted it in yellow and then we wrote a simple definition for the glossary.  My main goal for this part was for my students to really understand the difference between the table of contents and the index.  When we worked together to create both of these using our own information, the difference became much more apparent for most of them.  Success!

Now I have to tell you.. my original plan was to do all this during the week and then put the board up on Friday after school.  But that didn't happen.  My kiddos were sooo excited to share their work with everyone they really wanted to put it up for Thursday after school when parent conferences started.  Didn't want to disappoint them, so here it is!

The were SO proud of their work and every time we go down the hall I can hear them point out the text features and how they help support reading... definitely a successful week!

And since we had everything done and up by Thursday afternoon, I needed something different to complete our spider study on Friday morning.

I used Amy Lemons' quick and easy spider poems for a great way to review parts of speech.  And they turned out so cute! (The spider poem is glued inside the spider do you can't see it in the picture.)

Now on to the winners!  Earlier this week I decided to give away one of my spider units to one lucky person who left a comment with a spider book idea or a spider fact.  And since we had such a great spider week, I'm going to give a unit to everyone who commented!  Congratulations to Angie, Cherie, Lori and Paula! Check your email!

Enjoy the weekend!

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Elementary Stories