Reader's Notebooks

Now that we are really into the swing of things over here, we have gotten well into our Interactive Student Notebooks for Reading.  At the beginning of the school year, I purchased these 2 amazing products from Teachers Pay Teachers (where else?!):  the Interactive Reading Literature Notebooks pack & the Interactive Reading Informational Text Notebooks pack.  I cannot say enough about these awesome packs. They have made notebooking SO much easier!  Not to mention, my students LOVE these.  And to be honest, I was a little skeptical at first...not of the product, but of my students' interest and involvement with them.  But my class has surprised me and they really do love using their notebooks.  It's been a bit of an interesting transition using scissors, glue, colored pencils, and markers with them, but they are doing a great job!

We are currently reading Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech and the notebooks have been the perfect partner for our learning.  My students have been doing a great job keeping up with their notes and their own learning, and are starting to make those connections throughout their school day.  Check out some of their work!

Hello?

Well...it's been a while.  I've been less than successful in my attempts to keep up with this blog.  Life just got in the way.  The school year ended, & I never even looked at this blog.  Yikes.  But!  It's a new [school] year, & I'm determined to get better at this.

Full disclosure:  I may have said this last year at this time, too.

The  new school year has started, & after 3 days, I'm exhausted!  Imagine that.  It is 90+ degrees in my classroom, so the kids & I are definitely spent by the end of the day.  We've spent the first days of this year getting to know one another & familiarizing ourselves with 6th grade policies, procedures, & general *life*.  This year I have 2 sections of 6th grade to teach, so I'll spend the morning teaching Reading, Writing, Spelling, & Social Studies.  Then we'll switch around lunch time, & I'll do it all over again with the other class.

Things are going to be a bit different this year with the hybrid new & old standards (Common Core, anyone?!), so I suspect there'll be an interesting learning curve for all of us throughout the year.  My Social Studies standards have changed considerably, too, so it's an understatement to say that I'm mildly overwhelmed.  I'm hoping to explore some new resources & adapt my way of teaching so my students are really ready to change their way thinking!  Sounds easy, right?

One really fun thing that I'm excited about for this school year?  My son (3.5 years old) will be attending the Montessori preschool in my building, so he'll be with me every morning.  I can't wait to look out my classroom window to see him playing with his classmates on the playground!

Trashketball!

     State testing starts next week.  (I can only assume a rant & rave post about that will follow soon after).  In the meantime, here's a review game that I played with my students to help them with figurative language!
     The game is called Trashketball, and the Powerpoint & instructions can be found here.  To be honest, it's a review game that could be easily adapted to any standard or skill your kids are working on, but it was a perfect culmination to our frenzied figurative language unit.
     I gave each group of 4-6 students a marker and 10 sheets of paper.  While viewing Powerpoint slides, the students work in groups to answer questions about the type(s) of figurative language displayed.  They have about a minute to come up with the correct answer, then we go over it.  Any group with the correct answer gets to save their answer sheet.  Wrong answers go straight to the recycling bin (I'm nothing if not eco-friendly).  After all 10 questions have been answered, the teams get their correct answer sheets back.  Some groups had all 10, others had as few as 6 or 7.  Then they get a chance to shoot their correct answers into the recycling bin (see?  eco-friendly!).  We drew lines with tape on the floor too represent a 1-point line, a 2-point line, and a 3-point line.
     At first, the kids thought the lines were too close and it would be super easy.  They were totally wrong.  We had several shots bank off the whiteboard behind the "basket", and quite a few also bounce right off my (ceiling-mounted) projector.
     The team with the most points at the end won the game-and they couldn't stop talking about how much fun they'd had.  Apparently, I should try this strategy more often.

Genre Hangman

We're finishing up a quick review on genre in our class, and this is a fun site for the kids to practice what they've learned!

Play Genre Hangman