Building Our Community and Our Stamina: Freebies for Your Class

If your reading stamina is good and you made it through my long, long post yesterday, you'll remember that I promised you some freebies!  We'll here they are!

In chapter 2 of the Daily 5, the sisters talked about trust and building a classroom community.  I have a freebie that can help you with both of those things!  Obviously to make your classroom a trusting environment with a strong sense of community, you have to know your students!  But I think they need to know you too!  This freebie is a heart mapping "worksheet".  Heart Mapping is not my original creation.  It is an idea developed by author, Georgia Heard.  She writes about it in her book Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School.  It's a great way to learn what's important to your students and can be a great addition to a writing journal (for those times they just don't know what to write about)!  It can also be a great way for your students to learn what's important to you.  I would suggest completing your own heart map on chart paper while your students create theirs and then giving everyone time to share after you share yours!  Click on the picture to download your freebie (with an example of how it's used).

The sisters also talked about stamina.  After reading about building stamina, you wonder why you haven't always done things this way!  We do in many ways, but I have never referred to it as such.  Starting small and building up from there is basically all there is to increasing your stamina with anything.  I'll definitely be helping my kids build their reading and writing stamina in my class next year, but why couldn't they build their reading stamina at home too?  Many teachers already assign nightly reading for homework, and that homework can be perfectly combined with building stamina.  Your second freebie is a worksheet that can be sent home for weekly homework.  It's a modified reading log that requires students to record the time they started and finished reading and how long they read each night (with help from an adult in earlier grades).  They can see their stamina improving at home, and parents are involved too!

I'm linking my freebies up with TBA and their "Freebie Friday"!  Go Check it out for more great freebies!

And I'll leave you with a picture of my heart map!

 What are the important things in your life?

Writing in Our Classroom

I am sharing my love of the written word in partnership with the Superb Writers’ Blogathon. Sponsored by Grammarly grammar checker, this series is bringing helpful hints to aspiring superb writers all across the world wide web.


Writing in our little corner of the school is constantly evolving and growing!  Like most subjects, the way we teach writing changes from year to year, class to class, and often student to student.  This year I was surprised to find that a lot of our third graders had poor handwriting...a few were nearly illegible!  I kid you not!  So I started with the basics.  We generally begin teaching cursive at the beginning of third grade, but my kiddos were not ready for that this year!


I had to improve their handwriting skills, so we talked and talked about the importance of neat handwriting.  I wrote on the board in different levels of "sloppiness", and we discussed how easy or hard it was to read the different examples.  

I found a great way to illustrate and discuss neat handwriting that was relatable for the kids thanks to Rachelle at What the Teacher Wants. I introduced "the handwriting house" to my kiddos soon there after, and it made it so easy to talk about neat writing!  Here is a peek at the handwriting house anchor chart I made for my class!




All capital letters and the tall lowercase letters touch floor and the roof.  Most lowercase letters like a, e, m, and v sit on the floor and look out of the window.  Letters like g, y, and p sit on the floor and hang out in the basement.  It's a really easy way to talk about letter formation with the kids. It's something they can all relate to pretty easily!


Since we straightened out our writing and learned the correct letter formation we could move on to doing some real writing!  My biggest problem obstacle in writing is grading their work and giving them feedback...especially timely feedback!  I was always so overwhelmed with all of those papers...all of that writing staring back at me, page after page.  There always seemed to be something more pressing that I had to do!  When I did manage to get everything checked and make all of the notes they would need, there was so much on the page that the kids were overwhelmed!  They didn't know where to start to make their corrections!


I think I have finally found a solution that works for me and for the kids!  I've found that it's unreasonable to expect my third graders to do everything right at the beginning of the year, so now we take it a little bit at time.  Instead of marking every mistake on their very first piece of writing and destroying their confidence, I focus on the things that I know they have learned!  I'll check for capital letters, end marks, and complete sentences in their first piece of writing, and we add more conventions of writing to that as we progress through the year.


Another thing that I have begun doing this year is allowing more time for peer editing and self assessment of the kids' writing.  I love allowing them the opportunity to look for mistakes before I do.  It gives them an extra opportunity to improve their work and more practice in finding the little mistakes that we all look over sometimes.  We do this from the beginning of the year on, and we always remind each other of the importance of checking our friends' work respectfully.  I use checklists or rubrics to lead my little editors in the right direction and remind them what they're looking for.  Whenever possible I print the checklists or rubrics on sticker paper, and we stick them right into a corner of the work we're looking over.   

This is one of the checklists we used about 3 months into the year.  We had already learned about the parts of a letter and practiced writing letters together in class.  


We used this peer editing checklist after writing a letter to Santa!  As the editor looked over their friend's letter they marked any mistakes they saw and then filled out the checklist.  Click on the picture to download your own copy! {{Updated May 30 to correct download link - sorry for the mistake!}}


I've used peer editing and self-assessment in other ways in my classroom as well.  You can see one of the checklists I used near the end of the year in my blog post about our adventures with the hilarious "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" by Louis Sachar!  Next year I want to keep improving my writing instruction and implement writer's workshop in my classroom!  

How do you make grading writing assignments and giving feedback a more manageable task in your class?  Do you have any tips for a writer's workshop beginner?  

There's always more to learn!

Happy writing!

My Summer To-Do's and a Giveaway

Summer has arrived!  Sort of...I'm still packing up my classroom for our big move.  I did take a couple days off last week and went out of town for the weekend, but it's back to work this morning!  Back to cardboard and packing tape and stacks and stacks of boxes....

I have a lot of plans for this summer to make the next school year even better, and I thought the best thing to do was blog about them!  Accountability, you know?  So here goes...

Summer To-Do's

1. Make my plans for writer's workshop!  We wrote so much more this year than last year.  However, I want my kids to write something every day!  So next year, I want to do writer's workshop in my classroom!  I really wanted to this year, but just didn't get to it last summer with the class I was taking...excuses, right?  Anyway, I have already been reading up about it and taking my notes!  Corinna from Surfin' Through Second left me a sweet comment with a couple of suggestions for good resources on my last blog post too!

2. Create materials for Flat Stanley literature circles and a unit to go with Muggie Maggie which I hope we can get!  My kids this year loved chapter books and I hope know my kids next year will too!  We'll be reading Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown as a class next year (we did that one this year too), and then doing literature circles using some of Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures.  I'm hoping we can get a class set of Muggie Maggie by Beverly Cleary for next year because that book is just too cute!  If you haven't heard of it before, it's about a little girl (Maggie) in 3rd grade who does NOT want to learn to write in cursive.  When she tries writing her name in cursive, her teacher says it looks more like "Muggie" than "Maggie" so she decides she will never read or write in cursive.  But then Maggie is appointed class messenger and suspects that some of the cursive notes are about her...how will she solve that problem??  It's a super cute book, for my third graders especially, because we work on cursive!

3.   Design a class website & new labels and beginning of the year activities to go with our new theme for next year.  Our elementary school decided to use a school-wide theme, so I'll be decorating with tie-dye, peace signs, hearts, and smiley faces.  Our 2012-2013 school year theme is Peace, Love, & Dogs (our mascot).  Any great ideas floating around out there to go with our new theme?

4.   Create units, centers, and activities for math and cross-curricular journal prompts for reading!  I want to develop lots of fun and useful activities to supplement our math series this year and make our learning even more hands-on!  I've already started working on a place value unit!  For reading, I'm working on cross-curricular journal prompts.  They will each include sentences with grammatical and/or spelling errors, and those sentences just happen to be math problems, gasp!  Aren't they always so shocked the first time they see a math problem in reading?  I have the prompts for the first week ready and for free download in my TPT store.  We use the Scott Foresman Reading Street series, so this set of prompts goes with the story Boom Town by Sonia Levitin.  If you use Reading Street as well, I'd love to know what you think about the prompts as I finish up the first unit!

5.   Get organized...as much as I can in the midst of the move!  I am trying to pack smarter and put together the things that I will need to be together.  I have lots and lots of pins on pinterest about organizing your classroom.  My mom even has some pinned for me...she knows my weakness!  So this summer I want to scour through those and get some ideas for my room!

I think that's a pretty good start...Wish me luck!  If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them, and remember, if you have any feedback on the Boom Town journal prompts please let me know what you think!  Come back tomorrow for a post about writing in my classroom (what worked this year and what I'll try next year)! 

Before I leave and head to work this morning, I'm checking out Jen's awesome giveaway at Hello Mrs. Sykes!  You should too!  She has reached 200 followers and is saying thanks by teaming up with some other great bloggers to give away lots of items from their TPT and TN stores!  Make your way over to her blog and enter to win! 

Happy Monday!  

Hope you have a  great week ahead!

It's Coming to a Close

The end of the year is quickly approaching!  We have 9 days of school left...single digits!  I can't believe it!  We're working hard on the K-PREP state assessment this week, so I've been trying to come up with some worthwhile activities that the kids can enjoy doing in the afternoons.

Source: 2nd Grade Pad 

I found this great pin on pinterest and we'll be doing this activity this week.  Special thanks to Cynthia at 2nd Grade Pad for the inspiration!  I can't wait for summer to be out on the lake!  I'll have my writing workshop books with me, but I'll be on the water!



Since our transition day is coming up soon and the second graders will be visiting us I thought it would be great to have a little gift for them!  We have done some prewriting to come up with ten helpful tips for them before they start third grade.  I made a top ten list for the kids to write their final drafts on using the cute, cute font, alphabet soup, from KPM Doodles.  While I was at it, I made top 5 pages for K/1 and top 10 pages for kindergarten through 5th grades!  You can download them for free at my TPT store!

Amber at Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher is having a 300 follower giveaway!  Congrats to her for reaching that milestone!  Go check out her terrific blog (click on her button below) and enter her giveaway for an e-gift card, items from her TPT store (she has great stuff), or a handmade pinterest inspired magnet board!  Yes, I just named 3 different items for 3 different winners!  3-6 Free Resources is having an amazing Mayday giveaway too!  There are too many prizes to name!  Definitely click on their button and check it out!

            
So, what are you doing to mark the end of the year with your students?

Easter Themed Measurement Activity

If you're looking for something to do tomorrow that will tie in the Easter holiday with your math curriculum take a look at this measurement activity from my new Teachers Pay Teachers store!

We completed this activity last week, and the kids really seemed to enjoy it!  They, of course, love hands-on learning like most kids do!  I numbered 20 different plastic eggs (I have 18 students) and filled them each with a string that I had already measured.  We started out by each choosing one egg, measuring the string inside to the nearest half inch and recording the length on the exit slip.  We did this three different times, and each time the kiddos had to have a different egg.  After measuring all three strings, they found the total length and then had to write specifically telling how they found the total length of all 3 strings.  We ended the activity by estimating 3 more items that would be about the same length as the total of all 3 strings.

This was a fun activity for the kids and something that we can include in our writing portfolios!  Hopefully it will be of some use to others!  If you'd like to download this freebie, you can get it at my TPT store!

Changes and Chapters!

We took a two week vacation from our reading series recently! Rather than continuing with our weekly story and same ol', same ol' routine, as a class we read a chapter book. I chose "Sideways Stories from Wayside School" by Louis Sachar for my reading group! Mrs. Gorf's apple antics and all of the other humorous characters had my kids hooked from the beginning! Over a two week period we read the book aloud, built our comprehension and improved our extended response answers with questions about each chapter, learned many new vocabulary words and built our dictionary skills, and completed a writing task at the end of the book.

Special thanks are due to The Teaching Bank for their novel units from Teachers Pay Teachers. This was the first novel for both my students and I, and needless to say I wasn't sure exactly where to start. The unit I purchased from The Teaching Bank really helped me know where to start with this chapter book and saved me quite a bit of time too!

Of course I added to the materials I purchased! Each of my kiddos wrote a 31st chapter for the book with themselves as the main character! In my reading group we've really been trying to work on reflecting on our own work and helping our classmates edit their work. So, with that in mind, I created a peer review and self-assessment checklist. In addition to that, I created a teacher assessment rubric to evaluate the students' work based on criteria that we have been working on in class. I also created a simple exit slip or bell ringer with an answer space similar to what will be on the KPREP test.

Peer Editing and Self Assessment Checklist

Sideways Stories From Wayside School - Ch. 31 Writing Assignment Rubric

Sideways Stories from Wayside School Exit Slip or Bell Ringer With KPrep Template

My kids have loved reading this chapter book and were so upset that they didn't get to read another one this week! They moaned and groaned when I told them to bring their text book to class on Monday. But I love how much they loved it! Hopefully someone out there can use these documents!

Check out Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher for an amazing giveaway!  She'll draw for a winner this Wednesday at 8 PM so hurry on over and don't miss your chance to win everything from her TPT store!





I would love, love, love to read another chapter book with my class soon! At the very least, we will be reading more of them next year! What chapter books have you read with your classes? Any recommendations for my 3rd graders?

I've linked up with "Manic Mondays" at Classroom Freebies! Head over for a look at lots and lots of great blogs all offering you freebies!

Field Trips (Oh so fun!) & Writing

Can you believe tomorrow is ONLY Wednesday?? We had a great field trip today (minus lunch - short supply meant my lunch was no longer mine) to a nearby camp that provides educational day trips every fall for schools.  This year we investigated the differences (mostly in weather and climate) of countries around the world.  We traveled to Costa Rica, Alaska, Brazil, Japan, England, and Africa, gave weather reports, and learned about weather sayings/myths (the fish always bite before it rains, red sky at night sailor's delight, red sky in the morning sailor's warning, etc.).

The kids had a great time, learned a few new things, and got to use some of their knowledge from a couple of our past reading stories (which I was thrilled to see them do)!  To make this experience even more meaningful, we'll be using it as a starting point for our next piece of writing - a brochure to share information about the locations we "visited" at camp!

How many of you have used Jog The Web?  It's a great resource, especially for those of us with elementary age kids!  You can create "webBOOKS" that include specific websites that your students will need for research or other purposes (maybe educational games for centers) and keep the kiddos on safe sites!  You can "jog" the one I made for the kids to research the different locations before writing their brochures by clicking here.   I made graphic organizers for kids to record their information.  They are specific to the location, so probably not useful to many, but this is what they look like.  You can leave me a comment if you'd like the power point version.  I used the fonts SF Orson Casual Shaded and Annoying Kettle.

I also made 2 different brochure templates (hopefully they'll work when I print and fold)!  Each has picture boxes on each panel, one also has lines for writing while the other doesn't.  You can download them here.

Brochure Template - Blank and Lined

Don't forget, I love to hear your comments and suggestions! Let me know what you think!

If you've used jog the web in the classroom have you had success with it? any problems? Would you like to use it?