Assess Me! Week One

I was catching up on my Bloglovin' blog reading just now and came across this fun linky. This is from The Tattooed Teacher. It is the Assess Me! link up party - a fun little get to know you activity. So here goes...

1. I don't talk to myself, but I do talk to my pug, Wiggles, and my cat, Boots, ALL the time. I don't think that's the same as talking to myself...is it?

2. I am not superstitious at all, but my children are. They both say we have a ghost in our house:)

3. I do not crack my knuckles - and I hate it!! One of my friends cracks her knuckles, her back, her neck - you name it! I beg her to stop...

4. Am I hungry? When am I not hungry, that's the real question.

5. Yes, my television is on and it's on way too much, but most of the time it's background noise while I do work for school or posts like this:)

6. I got all four wisdom teeth pulled and it was terrible. 

7. I have not showered today. I showered last night and then drove for 12 hours. I'm about to shower, as soon as I'm done with this fun assessment.

8. I went to Disney World when I was 5 with my family. My favorite thing to do was It's a Small World ride.

9. Unfortunately, I've reached the age where I need reading glasses. 

10. After living across the continent in Oregon for 20 years, I moved back to my home state of Alabama in 2006. I not only live in my home state, but my hometown of Birmingham, and five minutes from my mom and dad, who still live in the house where I grew up.

Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley Book Trailer

I have fallen behind in my book trailer creations, so I got back to it this morning.

During the later part of the school year, I read all kinds of book buzz about Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley. I ordered my copy from Amazon and read it in June. It was wonderful! It was one of those books I just couldn't put down and finished in two days. I think this will be added to my read alouds for the year!

Monday Made It! - July 27th

I'm joining Fourth Grade Frolics for Monday Made It again this week. I've been on vacation this last week, so my creations are computer generated.

My first Monday Made It! is a morning check-in for my kiddos for their reading. I used to have a calendar for each student, and in the morning, I would call out each child's name and they would tell me the title of the book they were reading and what page they were on. I like checking in with everyone, but honestly, it takes some time.  This year, I'm changing it up just a little bit. I created this form that I will post on the whiteboard, located next to the attendance board. When students move their number for attendance each day, they will write their name, title of the book and page number. I'll keep these in my notebook, so I'll be able to do a quick check from day to day and keep an eye on their reading life to use in individual conferences. This will leave time in our first period for our read aloud and a mini lesson.

My second Monday Made It! is a handout for my kiddos to keep for the year and refer to regularly. I have a large one printed and posted on my classroom wall, too. I try very hard to teach my students about a Growth Mindset. I think it's really important for them to know that I want them to take risks in their learning. Yes, they may fall/fail, but it this is an important part of learning! I will be there to help them and move from "I can't do it" to "I can't do it, YET".

My third Monday Made It! are my team's welcome letters for our fourth and fifth graders. We're departmentalized beginning in fourth grade, and our team teaches both fourth and fifth grade. Our welcome letter for our fourth graders is a way to hopefully reduce their anxiety about moving up to fourth grade and having four different teachers for their core classes. For our fifth graders, our welcome letter is really a welcome back and we're excited to teach you again this year. We'll send these out the week before school starts.

My fourth Monday Made It! is something for the first week of school. Our first full day of school this year is on a Tuesday. Our parents' night is Thursday of that same week. I like to have some type of writing up for the parents to see. In order to do this in two days, it has to be a pretty quick activity, so I created a newsletter for the kids to write articles about themselves.

My fifth and final Monday Made It! for the week is cards that will have my students' log in information for different websites such as Google Drive, our school website, Typing Pal, etc. I'm just waiting on their log in info from our IT guy and then I'll finish them up and laminate them. I'll attach these to the first page in their agendas because they take their agendas to every class and home every night. I'm hoping this will alleviate the nightly emails of "Johnny can't log in to Google Drive for his homework".

That's all for this week! What did you make this week?

Global Read Aloud 2015

This year's Global Read Aloud promises to be another great experience! Pernille Ripp is the fabulous creator of this experience. If you want to connect with classrooms around the world, go here to sign up.

We're going to read Fish in a Tree by Linda Mullaly Hunt. Here is a trailer for the book:

The schedule for the read aloud is:

Week 1:  Chapter 1 – 8

Week 2: Chapter 9 – 17

Week 3: Chapter 18 – 24

Week 4: Chapter 25 – 33

Week 5: Chapter 34 – 42

Week 6: Chapter 43 – end

During the month of October, you can connect with other classrooms reading the same book as you through Twitter, Skype, Kidblog, Edmodo and more. The Twitter group for this book is #GRAFIAT.

Join us, won't you? You won't regret it!

Writing About Reading - Round 2

A couple of weeks ago I participated in an online book group that read Cynthia Lord's A Handful of Stars. (If you haven't read it yet, pick it up immediately! It is an awesome book.) We were interested in our writing about our reading. We all have our students write about their reading, so we thought we'd practice what we have them do. It's not an easy task!

During the first book club, we all put our notes in a shared Google Doc. It was great being able to read everyone's thoughts. Many people took pictures of their notebooks and uploaded them into the document. It was great to see how differently everyone jots while reading. The other thing that I really enjoyed was reading everyone's notes and comments and being able to reply to other's comments. I found my thinking became much deeper and taken in new directions after reading the thoughts of others.

For the second round of book club, we broke up into groups of 3 to 4 and chose different books. My groups is reading Gordon Korman's Masterminds. Although we're only on chapter 10, this book is excellent! It really grabs you from the very beginning. We started with a shared Google Doc but someone from our last group introduced Padlet to us. If you have used it before, it's super easy to use and would be great for all kinds of things students can do in the classroom. So, most of us decided to try Padlet for taking notes this time. What I found so far is that by each of creating our own Padlet, we've lost the conversation feeling we had in the first book club. We're posting in our own Padlet page and then putting a link in the Google Doc. There is an option to share a Padlet page with others, so I'm hoping my group with either be willing to post together on one Padlet page or go back to the Google Doc. We'll see. I'm definitely still enjoying it, but I can tell my thinking isn't moving as much as it did the first time.

If you haven't tried Padlet, I would highly recommend it. It's super easy to use and would be very easy for the kids to pick up on and use.

Monday Made It! - July 20th

I'm joining up with 4th Grade Frolics again for Monday Made It! I don't have quite as many things completed as I had hoped to, but here they are: (sorry for the terrible picture quality!)

My first Monday Made It! is name tags I printed, laminated and cut out. Then I added them to 3M clips. I attach these to the wall outside my classroom, where I display some of my students' writing throughout the year.

My second Monday Made It! is numbers for my cubbies. The students from the other fourth grade homeroom use these to keep their LA things in. This helps stop the "I forgot that" or "I left that in my desk" situation.

I don't remake these every year - just when I am ready for a new color scheme:)

My third Monday Made It! is the display for my kiddos' birthdays. I printed, laminated and cut these out. Once I get my class list, I'll add the student names and birthdays, then post in my classroom on my birthday wall. These are for sale in my TpT store if you're interested. It also has birthday toppers for pencils, crazy straws or whatever (which I posted in a previous post you can find here: Monday Made It! July 6th edition).

My fourth Monday Made It! is for my classroom door. I'm going to have a bee theme, so I got my bees printed, laminated and cut. Like the birthdays, I'll add the names to the bees once I get my class list. I also made the letters for the saying on the door.

And finally, my fifth Monday Made It! is new library labels. I needed to replace book baskets because many of mine are broken. I found these plastic bins at the Dollar Store, so I bought 25 new bins and created labels. The picture is terrible - sorry, but they're made with a chalkboard background and different colored lettering. I love how they turned out!

That's it for this week. What did you make?

Monday Made It! - July 13th

Yay! It's Monday again and time for Fourth Grade Frolic's Monday Made It!

For my first Monday Made It, I printed and laminated Catherine's, from The Brown Bag, Subway Synonym Art to hang in my classroom. We're always working on word choice in our writing, so these are awesome.

My second Monday Made It! is also for display in my classroom. I'm going to teach my kids root words, prefixes and suffixes, and this resource is awesome, too! This is from Teaching to Engage, her Super Roots. 

My third Monday Made It! is actually something I saw from another teacher on Monday Made It and thought it would be the perfect to add to my classroom. We already do booktalks to share our love of books and recommendations, so I thought this would be a great way for my kiddos to get help finding a new book to read (from my 1000 book classroom library) when browsing the library. This is Book Buzz from Tales of a Tenacious Teacher.

My fourth Monday Made It! is some letters for my library area. I'm really pleased with how they turned out.

My fifth and last Monday Made It! is for my house. I desperately needed some new curtains. These were from Pottery Barn and have just been looking old and faded.

So these are the new ones - I love the way they turned out.

What did you make this week?