Today, you are all in for a treat!  We have a guest poster :)  Kathie has so graciously agreed to talk about preventing the dreaded "summer slide".   (and make sure you check out my guest post on For the Love of Teaching Math !) Hi Everyone! My name is Kathie, some of you may know me as the Not So Wimpy Teacher, from The Diary of a Not So Wimpy Teacher . I am really excited to be guest blogging on Stephanie’s blog today! As summer picks up speed and we zoom into July, I hope to share with you some great information that you can use with your children and/or students to help prevent the “summer slide”.  Many of you are probably already aware of the term “summer slide” or “summer slip” …(summer slip and slide 0_o)…. The “summer slide” is no theme park adventure. In fact, it’s no fun at all once school starts. It is the term many researchers and educators use to describe the regression of skills many students may experience during the summer months. “Summer slide” affect...
At the beginning of last year, I asked my students to fill in a "get to know you" questionnaire as they entered my room on the second day of school.  On it, I had some personalish (I know that isn't a word, but I am feeling rebellious today ;) ) questions such as list your favorite food, what is something I should know about you, what you do at home, etc...The purpose of this was just to give me a little insight into the CHILDREN that my new students were.  Here are a few of them. Now, you might be asking, what does this have to do with anything?  Well, let me tell you, I actually did use these for something!  At the end of the year, for my parting "gift" to my students, I used them to help me write "The Important Thing" pages for them! If you have been following my blog from the beginning (or even have just read back to the first few entries) you will know how much I love The Important Book . I do so much with it, from learning about reference ...
I was lucky enough to be invited to see an advanced screening of this new Disney movie (at the Disney Studios no less!!) and I thought I would share my thoughts with you.  These opinions are my own, even thought I was invited :) Brave is a tale of a young princess who is torn between her mother's wish for her to stay true to her destiny, and her own longing to be true to herself.  Merida, the main character, is a fiery free spirit who wants to buck tradition and live life on her own terms.  Her mother, the Queen, tries to teach her the ways of a proper princess.  Pushed to the edge, and led to a witch by some magical wisps, Merida goes to great lengths to change her fate.  In the end, this story is a love story...between a mother and daughter.  This clip sums it up rather nicely. Now, this movie is rated PG for a reason.  It really is scary.  There are some very large, very ferocious, very loud bears who take center stage for a good portion of the film.  Because of this, m...
I am asked about my Calendar Math more than anything else I blog about.  Because of that, I thought I would put together an FAQ section for you all...just in case you had some similar questions. How do you choose the numbers for the calendar? I ALWAYS use the date, or some combination of it.  I feel like that keeps it consistent and within the concept of "calendar math".  I do manipulate the numbers a bit so that the students aren't always using the same.exact.numbers each day, but I don't ever pull in numbers that don't appear in the date in some way.  Here are a few examples from the pages I already started to write for next year. This is the geometry/area and perimeter sheet.  At the beginning of the year, it is area and perimeter.  You can see that I use the numbers of the date in some way here.  I do NOT make it to scale.  The kids just get used to that.  As the year progresses, it becomes the "Geometry" sheet because I put triangles, drawing ...
The last few weeks of school I found myself wrapping up our new reading series with the students, and applying all of the skills we had learned throughout the year.  Our last unit was heavy on non-fiction text, so I was combing through my brain thinking of new and different ways to respond....when on my doorstep appeared Laura Candler's new book, Laura Candler's Graphic Organizers for Reading: Teaching Tools Aligned with the Common Core.   It showed up just in time to save the day!  Let me preface this by saying that Laura did send the book to me, but my review is in no way clouded by that.  The opinions stated here are my own. As I browsed through the book, there were quite a few of these organizers that caught my eye...mostly because they DIDN'T NEED COPIES to use!  You see, this isn't a worksheet book, so much as a book with things that can be reused or created into foldables using plain paper.  Case in point, this one. This is an Informational Text Respon...
I love graphic organizers.  I just like how easy they are to get the kids thinking.  Especially when it comes to reading, I think that if I ask the kids to use their strategies and process skills in a fun organizer (instead of just writing it on a plain piece of paper) they tend to internalize their response a bit more.    For years I have been using my Reading Log to do just that at home.  Since implementing this log, I have found that the students are actually reading and writing their thoughts in a more meaningful way. Well, I wanted to try to do something like this in class.  I have already written about the Strategy Logs I have used in the past.  While I think they are great, I found I wanted something a bit more.  The kids were getting used to the logs and their thoughts and responses were suffering because of it.  The Strategy Logs also required a lot of copies, and frankly, this year I am out.  (I like to save them for Calendar, Math HW, Reading Logs, and Morning Message)  ...
No, I am not leaving.....but our office clerk is and my class signed up to create the Farewell banner for her retirement luncheon.   The spur of the moment activity we did for it came out really cute, so I thought I would share! First, I had the students draw a picture of their hand very close up.  They actually just traced their own hand.  Then they drew themselves behind the hand as if we were looking at the hand really close up and they were behind it.   I did discuss perspective at this point (I can't let a lesson go by without *some* standards in there ;) ). Then, after the students colored the picture, I asked them to write a paragraph (with topic sentence, supporting details, and concluding sentence....again, gotta get *some* standards in ;) )  about our office clerk, all she did for the school, and how she personally connected with each child.  We did a little peer editing/revision, and then the kids wrote their final drafts on a speech bubble. I had them...
One of the hardest parts of setting up my classroom economy was the store.  I kept thinking of all the logistical nightmares that came with running a store AND the real money I was going to have to spend buying knick knacks for it.  It honestly was the major reason I held out so long on actually having an economy in my room. When I finally gave in and implemented an economy in my room, I thought I would just do the "cost of living" thing.  Kids had to earn money to pay rent, buy their way to the bathroom, etc... At first, that worked.  But then, the economy lost steam.  Kids didn't care if they had money or not. And why would they?  I work so that I can pay my rent.  But I also work to have money to go to the movies or out to dinner.  That is the incentive for me.  The kids needed the same incentive.  So I created a store that didn't cost me a lot of money, but that would provide the kids with something to actually earn their money for. I found that the kids wou...
Checking in homework is something that, if I let it, could take all day.  Seriously.  Going through 30+ homework folders, checking off for completion, dealing with the kids who didn't do all of their work, chasing after kids who forgot to put their folder in the bin or a piece of work in their folder....the whole thing was taking me FOREVER to do, and I was simply just checking it in.  (we do go over homework daily during the designated times of day, which is when the correcting and checking for understanding comes in)  The 20 minutes it was taking me daily to check the homework in was taking away time that I could be working in a small group.  So I had to do change something. I decided that my Table Captains would be the ones to do this clerical work for me.   Now I will preface by saying that I did do the check in myself for the six weeks of school, until I could fully trust my students to do it themselves.  But once I felt they were ready, about a week of training was all it...
I like to integrate my teaching as much as possible (since we all know the sheer quantity of content we have to teach nowadays is staggering!) So instead of simply reading a biography about Betsy Ross during our unit on the American Revolution, I used the literature as a springboard for two different classroom courses of study.  You know about the Hanger Biographies .  The Betsy Ross Biography was a model that we used when filing in the whole class graphic organizers. What I haven't told you about were the flags.  The "main idea" of the Betsy Ross legend (as we learned, there are various schools of thought on whether or not she ACTUALLY did create the first American Flag) is that she is the originator of the flag. So each student put themselves in the role of Betsy and thought about what they would do if approached by the founding fathers to create a flag representative of the new nation.  We talked about what the symbols and colors on the flag meant. Enchanted le...