Homework.  It is definitely a love-hate relationship that I have with that word.  On the one hand, I think the practice time is incredibly valuable for the students.  On the other, I know that with after school activities and the fact that the kids spend 6 + hours at school, they need a break.  With this in mind, I have formulated a homework plan in my room that is quick, to the point, easy to follow, and, most importantly, useful. For me, as I am sure is the case with many of you, homework consists of pages that I *would* assign during class if time allowed.  It is not busy work.  It is useful items that I believe provide consistent and necessary practice of skills that we are learning in class.  So what do I assign? Nightly, the students have the following. Read for 20 minutes. Complete a reading log response for the reading. Math Review Page Comprehension Paragraph of the Week Root Words I know...looks like a lot.  But it actually isn't all that much.  Let me brea...
Analyzing nonfiction text is something that we have been focusing on this year with the full implementation of CCSS.  I am always on the look out for new resources to help me with this, and when Zaner-Bloser contacted me to review their new "I Read to Write Kits", I jumped on the opportunity. Disclaimer:   Zaner-Bloser sent me a class set of these kits in exchange for an honest review.  Though they did send them to me, the thoughts on the program below are my own and not influenced in any way by this. The I Read to Write kits are consumable workbooks for the students to use to dive into text.  There are three units in the 5th grade level, one about Space Exploration, one about the American Revolution, and another about Sports that use math.  Each of the stories are highly engaging and very relevant to what my students are interested in (and what I am interested in as a teacher....hello American Revolution!!) I have been using these with my class to get them to read ...
Culminating tasks for novels and other fiction stories are always something I am looking for, so I thought that you, reader, might also be in search of some.   We have finished reading our novel study of Tuck Everlasting last week, so this week, we have been responding to the story as a whole class.  I wanted to share with you two of the culminating responses we have done.  Both of these can be done with ANY piece of literature, not just Tuck (though, I have to say, both my students and I really found ourselves immersed in the story!) The question is from Got To Teach's Pack for Tuck! First, I had my students answer some higher level, deeper thinking questions about the story.  To do this, we did a Graffiti Wall style poster.  Basically, I took 6 questions that were text dependent upon Tuck Everlasting and wrote each one on a separate piece of 17" x 17" paper (I used those dimensions because the window pane glass is that large and I wanted to display them there......
We revisited character traits and combined it with a lesson on inferring this past week. Our class novel, Tuck Everlasting , is filled with vivid descriptions of the various characters that lend themselves to deep inferences.  So I asked the students to think about a character that they connected with, and list 10 character traits that could be used to describe the character.  (They used this chart that we had previously glued into our journals from Read, Write, Think) Once they had the list of character traits, the students had to list text evidence from the novel that supported their character trait inference, AND their own schema that led them to the inference. After the list was complete, the students did two things.  First, they wrote a paragraph describing the character from the story using the character traits and the inferences.  I had them use this form (which is from my Character Traits in 5 Days pack, but you can download for free here ) to help them really keep ...