Ok...so that is a bit dramatic.  But really, I am not exaggerating. If you have read my blog for any length of time, you have no doubt heard me talk about how much I love Calendar Math .  I mean, I have written about it more than any other single subject on my blog.  It is something I feel so strongly about that I preach it to anyone who will listen (especially you, my faithful blog readers :)) But, a second math component that I talk about occasionally, but really has just as much impact on my math teaching is my spiral math homework .  I literally could not live without it. Let me tell you why I love these two pieces of my math block puzzle.  You see, these both take care of those rote standards that I need my kids to know, yet they just don't seem to grasp from that one lesson I teach that one day of the school year.  Things like place value (have you ever tried to get the kids to remember to write expanded form in March????), plotting on number lines, or general multipl...
Not sure if you are noticing a pattern here with my posts, but I am seriously working on fiction and narrative in my class.  I just feel like getting them to really understand literature well enough to then have to write about and like it (on THE TEST at the end of the year) is going to take a lot of front loading and targeted instruction on my part.  So this week, we focused on *conflict* in a story.  We have tackled plot , character , and setting , so it seemed only natural that conflict would follow.  Here is the basic rundown of what we did. I began the week, like I have with all of the other weeks, with an anchor chart.  I just really like how week after week I can go back and refer to them for the students.  Everything is building upon everything else, so it is easy to reference the charts that we have made together. Our chart laid out what conflict is in a story.  Basically, it drives the story and makes it interesting.  Without some sort of problem, the story would be so ...
One of the hardest part of teaching writing is offering feedback.  There are SO many things that I want to help the students with, but if I start correcting every little thing, by the time I am done 1)  I have spent every last second of my free time correcting the papers and 2) I have basically re-written every paragraph for the students. Doing that does no one any favors.  The kids are immediately deflated and defeated by all of the corrections on the page.  They can see that EVERYTHING they did was wrong and that really doesn't motivate them or make them want to write.  And selfishly, it wastes my precious time as well. So what do I do to make sure that no one walks away from a completed paragraph feeling like a total failure and despising writing? I focus on one element of writing for the student to work on. Usually, at this time of year, that one element is structure.  Does the student have proper paragraph form?  Does the topic sentence introduce the paragraph topi...
Now that you have the basic overview   (if you missed this post, I would highly recommend going back and reading it) of what is happening during Reading Rotations in my room, I thought I would show you what I have done to organize it all and get it going with my students. I have 4 different groups in my room.  I named them....and you will be blown away by the creativity here....A, B, C, D.  I know.  I told you.  So creative. My reading groups are homogenous.  I think that, for me, I am able to target the reading needs of my students better this way.  There are many times during the day that we use heterogeneous groupings in my room, but this just isn't one of them.  I know some of you prefer to mix your reading groups up, and that is fine.  Either way will work in these reading rotations. Once my students were grouped, I gave each child a schedule for their own group.  The schedules look like this. You will notice that there are three rotations.  At this point, you are pr...
Halloween is just around the corner and, if you are anything like me, you are searching and searching for the perfect costume to wear to school.  I mean, it has to be something comfortable, relatively affordable (read: cheap) and easy to put on after lunch before the parade.  So I asked my friends, both in my network of teacher friends and on Facebook in our Teaching in Room 6 community, if they had any ideas for costumes that fit that bill, and here is what they came up with. Now, if you teach preschool, I KNOW you know who this is.  Or if you have toddlers around the house these costumes might ring a bell too.  Well, this particular year, each of us had toddlers hogging up the TV, so we dressed up like DJ Lance and the gang.  Can you spot me? What a wonderful peacock Heather, from Teach It Today makes!  Just a tutu and some feathers created this easy costume. This middle school team from Oregon decided to go as the Duck Dynasty gang last year.  They nailed it!  ...
Like most of you, I spend my summers trying to refine my classroom practice so I can best service all of my students.  I want to make the most of my limited classroom time, so I sit down and brainstorm what went well in previous years, and what didn't. Over this past year, I feel like I finally refined my math rotations to the point that I feel very successful in its implementation.  So much so, I decided to do the same thing with reading!  I plan to do a few different posts on it for you all, but with this one, I am going to lay out the basics of what is happening in my room. My entire language arts block is actually fairly long.  I have a good 2 hours in the morning for grammar and reading and then can take another 30 minutes later in the day for writing.  Grammar, skills, root words , etc... (and morning business, like Breakfast in the Classroom and stuff) takes place in the first hour of the day.  The second hour is dedicated to Reading Rotations. So here is what I do (...
One of my favorite things to teach at the beginning of the year, when we start to really dive into our read alouds and novel studies, is setting.  Teaching the setting of a story is something that the kids can easily grasp and really feel successful doing. Usually, I just point out the time and the place, we talk about it orally, and that is enough.  But now, with Common Core and the push to find evidence for everything (since they will have to write about it on the state test at the end of the year), I have taken my lessons on setting up a notch. We start with a basic anchor chart.  This serves as our introduction and also as a handy reference for later on, when the going gets a bit tougher ;)  The students take notes in their journals and we discuss.  No big deal and the kids seem to get the idea that setting is the time and place the story action occurs.  They also understand that it can be the landscape or environment of a story, and that weather and other features can play a...