Testing is over!  YAY!  So now I can put my room back together, and get back to teaching :)  Whoo hoo!!   So with that said, I just wanted to share a little thing with you that has been working to help get the kids into their seats each day.  As we all are well aware, you can be the best teacher in the world but if the kids are absent, it doesn't really matter.   A few years ago, we were really struggling with an absenteeism problem at my school site.  Kids just weren't coming to school.  For one reason or another, they were taking days off like crazy. So I thought that if they actually *knew* how many days they were absent within a given month, it just might help to make them think about coming in.  To help them keep track, I created this little postcard on Vista Print .  You can see that all the days we are in school are written on the card, from September to June (this is actually a Vista Print image of the card from a few years ago, so the dates don't match up to ...
One thing I really like to do (though I suspect we all do ;) ) is connect the language arts skills we are learning about to the reading we are actually doing.  If the kids see what it is that I am telling them good writers do while they are reading a book that is considered good writing, I feel like there is more buy-in.  So while teaching about appositives, I took the opportunity to have the students dig into our novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH , to find the skill in action. This lesson came AFTER we had taken notes in our grammar journal, done a few workbook pages, and even had some small group lessons on it....so it wasn't an introduction.  The kids already had some working knowledge of what appositives were.  However, that didn't make this any easier ;)  It is one thing looking in a workbook and figuring out what the appositive is.  It is quite another finding it in actual text...where you aren't even sure there are any to begin with! So, after creating thi...
This week has been a crazy (and draining) week for me.  We are in the midst of state testing and, well, you know how it goes.  It is just a stressful time for all -- me and the kids -- that my brain is mush.  I feel like I have SO much to write about (as we are still doing things in the class that I would love to share with you all!) but I just can't.  I also blame the baby for the mush brain ;) So, to reward you all for hanging in there with me, even though I am not blogging as much, I am taking after my soon-to-be for sure Teacher of the Year friend Elizabeth at Fun in Room 4B and having a Pin It to Win It contest.  All you have to do is visit my TpT store and pin ANYTHING you would like to own.  You can pin one thing.  You can pin everything.  Then, come back here, with a link to your pin, and tell me why you wanted that particular product.  If you pin more than one thing from my store, comment separately for each one (with the link to the pin and why you want it :) ) On Su...
We have been working on dialogue in class, so I thought I would tie it in to our studies on colonial life with this fun little project (that could be adapted to really any unit of study...we just happened to be working on the colonies :) ) So let's see...how to best explain this.  We started with looking at the various clothing that the colonial people would wear.  There is this AMAZING site from Colonial Williamsburg (that a 4th grade colleague pointed out) that is chalk full of information about the time period.  I used the part about what the different people wore at the time.  This is an interactive website where you actually get to dress members of society. (click on the blue link above to go directly to the site) We did this together, with me on the board, and them choosing the clothing.  The LOVED it.  Really, it was quite fun!  I also had them fill in a circle map with all the clothing as we were going so that they had a record of what each piece was called.  You can gr...
I don't know about you, but I have seen these Hot Dots all over the web.  They are cards with multiple choice answer and a fancy pen that lights up when you choose an answer.  Cute, right?  But, to be honest, I thought that there was no way they would work in my room.  They are WAY too babyish.  Boy...was I wrong! Educational Insights sent me a set of their Hot Dots for spelling .  There are a whole bunch of funny jokes on the cards, with a word misspelled within the joke.  The kids then need to find the correct spelling of the word.  When they find it, they use the nifty Hot Dot pen to check their answer.  By putting the pen on the black dot next to their choice, it either lights up green for the correct answer or red for the incorrect answer.  There are also sound effects....which is what my kids LOVE! Now, to be fair, some of the words are fairly easy for them.  However, to up the rigor with the cards, and to truly use them as a test prep tool, the students are...
We are full swing into our Colonial unit and I just had to share the latest response to literature writing project the kids finished.  I am in love! Now, I actually shared the version we did last year with you here .  But I made some changes, so I figured it needed a new post. We started by reading the books Sarah Morton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Gir l and Samuel Eaton's Day: A Day in the Life of a Pilgrim Boy .  My fabulous teammate Kristi has an entire class set of the books, so it made that part very easy.  When we finished, the students made a flow map of each of the children's day.  I asked them to really think about the chores and tasks, making note of each. I then gave each student a non-fiction sheet with information about what a typical child living in the pilgrim plantation would have experienced.  While it mirrored what the two reading books said, there was far more information, so the students weren't boxed in to only those activities...