In math, we are deep into our geometry unit.  Right now, the students are learning about solid shapes, nets, surface area, and volume.  We will be coming upon plotting points on coordinate grids very soon.  So I thought we could combine all of those for our concept lesson today. I gave the students a set of coordinates that, if connected together, created a cube.  Let me tell you, creating that is no piece of cake!  My hats off to the people who make those coordinate grid pictures for a living.  Just getting the pieces to connect in a way that made sense was tough!  But enough about that...back to the lesson ;) The kids worked in pairs to put the "puzzle", as they called it, together.  This was really, really tough for some of them. I let the students work in pairs to complete this project.  Since they had never plotted points before, I didn't want them to sit there doing nothing.  This proved to be the right move for my class at this time.  They definitely needed...
I have been having some "partnering issues" in my class.  The kids are just getting very comfortable with each other and settling in to their little cliques.  They always choose the same people to pair up with and I am just not very happy with it.  For one thing, the students never hear any other strategies or points of view since they are always with the same people.  Another, more heart-wrenching by product of the "I only pick my friends" mentality that is developing in class, is that the students who aren't necessarily in the in-crowd don't get picked.  So I decided I wanted to stop this problem before it escalated into an unmanageable issue.  I had seen the "Clock Partners" before, and I thought that doing something like that would be a good solution.   However, I have 30 students.  The clock only has space for 12, and I knew if I kept it at that, there would be the same "I only pick my friends" thing going on.   I created my own si...
We have been learning about the 13 colonies in class for the past few weeks.  To help us learn about they "typical" daily life, we read Sarah Morton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Girl and Samuel Eaton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Boy .  These books chronicle the daily activities of a Pilgrim child living at Plymouth.  I have to say, my students really enjoyed these books.  They are simple, to the point, and provide enough information that the kids grasped what it must have been like to be a child living in the colonial days. In response to the literature, the students created a Flow Map of both the girl's and the boy's typical day.  Using the information as presented in the book, this was actually fairly simple to do.  Then, we read excerpts of Colonial Life (Historic Communities) , focusing particularly on the daily activities of the children in colonial days.  As we were reading this, the students could chose to swap out some of the cho...
This is a long one.  It is worthwhile though :) Last year, my school instituted a common schoolwide time dedicated for test prep.  This was 30 minutes where we all had to be doing some sort of test prep with the students. If you have been following my posts, you know that I am the sort that likes to embed my test prep in everything I do, so I really didn't want this to be a time where we just did "fill in the bubble on the practice test" type things.  That is just plain boring, and frankly, wasteful (in my opinion).  What I decided to do instead was have Test Prep Stations for the week. Having 36 students, I set up 6 different stations, with 6 children at each station.  All of the areas were skill based testing prep.  They were practicing strategies and Language Arts skills no matter which station was chosen. The Basic Set Up On Monday, the students chose what station they wanted to visit and placed their number on the Monday board.  I pre-wrote the numbers of ...
I will be honest with you.  I have spent most of my teaching career teaching whole group.  I figured that is the way math should be done.  And for me, it pretty much worked....until I had a very, very low group.   That particular year, whole group instruction just wasn't working.  The kids weren't getting anything out of my instruction as, about 10 minutes in, 1/2 of them weren't listening, and 1/4 of them were carefully trying to conceal themselves with the other 1/4 that were raising their hand and participating.  With 36 kids, they all knew that I physically couldn't be next to every single one during the lesson and they took advantage. Something had to change.  For me, that was the year that Math Workshop was born in my room. The system I use in my class is a compilation of many different things that I have seen all over the place.  It isn't one prescribed method but rather a mixture of all the great things I have read combined into a big ball th...
I am in love with the Dr. Seuss book Oh the Places You'll Go.  So much so, I used it as the basis for the 5th grade culmination ceremony two years in a row.  Now, I know what you are thinking.  It is ONLY February.  We haven't even gotten through testing!  Why are you talking about culmination?? Well, let me tell you.  I was on year-round for 12 of my 14 years of teaching.  I was usually on the "early" track and we were done with school in April.  But since the rest of the world didn't end school until June, no one ever thought of poor little us.  We were always left out in the cold, scrambling.  Well, I am here to give those year rounders a head start (and the rest of you too) Here are a few ideas from the ceremony that I wrote that you can adapt for your own culmination, or even to use at a different time of year (for those of you who aren't teaching 5th grade) Thinking About the Future The whole idea behind this book is that there are endless po...
Inferring is such a hard task. Subconsciously we are making inferences at any given moment of the day, yet asking a student to infer what an author means or reading between the lines, is so, so difficult!  One thing I have done in my class to make inferring a bit easier....well, more accessible because it never truly is "easy"....is to use picture prompts.  You find an interesting picture -- it could be from a magazine, newspaper, the internet, even one you took -- and place it on the doc cam.  The students look at it and write one sentence describing what they think is going on.  This becomes the topic sentence.  The sentences which follow are a compilation of evidence from the picture, justifying the inference. Using a picture like this is a great way to get the kids started.  In most cases, students have some sort of connection to people getting married -- either in real life, through television, or some other way.   Seeing a picture like this, they can make the infere...
You may remember that I was planning on doing a surface area concept lesson for Valentine's Day.  This lesson was a precursor to my formal algorithm teaching of the skill and was designed to get the students thinking about what surface area actually means rather than just rote memorization of the rules. WELL....I didn't do it on VDay.  Just too much to do.  BUT I did do it the day after, and I am back to report about it with SUCCESS!!!!!! I started the lesson asking the students how they would go about covering a present that they received.  Many of them knew to wrap it (and a few would just put it in the bag of course...like me ;) )  We talked about how, when you wrap a present, you want to cover the entire box so that the person getting the present can't tell what it is...that would ruin the surprise after all. Here is the page I gave the students Then I put the requirements for the concept lesson on the ELMO.  I asked one student to read it aloud while the other...