Building a Classroom Community during the Holidays!

Hey Y'all! It's Erin from The Elementary Darling. The holidays are upon us. I am so excited to spend some family time over Thanksgiving! During my Thanksgiving break, I always plan my December lessons and make a wishlist of items that I will need to complete crafts, snacks, or activities with my students.I send home my wishlist before December. Some may say that I over plan, but the holidays are crazy enough as it is. We MAP test and benchmark test in December. Add that to the crafts (that you strategically matched to your standards) and the excitement and it gets a little crazy in the classroom. So today, I am going to share my favorite idea to build your classroom community during the holidays!

With all of the business, my students started getting stress some of my friends needed a little reminder to be nice and thankful. I wanted to spread joy and love throughout my classroom while building our classroom community, because let's be honest, we work on this ALL.YEAR.LONG.

So I decided we would build our classroom community by writing nice things about our friends on our paper chain. TWO in ONE deal my friends! You get classroom decor AND kindness from students in one fell swoop.

We filled our room with these strips. Each day, the students would receive two pieces of paper. They were encouraged to write to different people each day, We filled them out in our "spare time" and I asked them to watch their friends to see all of the wonderful things that each of them were doing during the day. I read them and the kids loved hearing all of the fabulous things people were saying about them. I filled them out as well so that all of the students would have great things said about them.

Each afternoon, I would add the strips and the students would watch our chain grow and decorate our classroom. They loved it, and so did I. It really brought out all of those good Holiday Feelings. The best part is, you can do this for very little cost! You can use cut strips of construction paper. If you don't want to do that, you can get the ones that I used from Oriental Trading. They have some really cute ones here or the plain red and green ones here.

How do you build your classroom community during the holidays? Leave us a comment and let us know the wonderful things that you do in the classroom! Happy Holidays, Friends!

-Erin from The Elementary Darling

Spring into April - Using Found Poetry to Dig Up Main Idea

One of my favorite ways to have students connect with a passage or story is through found poetry. With found poetry students can identify the main idea and supporting details in a text.

Found poetry takes specific words and phrases from a piece of writing and organizes them into a poem.  This can be done numerous ways. Students can highlight or underline on a page that is copied. If the text can't be copied (such as a textbook)  students can lightly underline the words/phrases with a pencil (they can erase these marks when the lesson is complete).

                         

Once the words or phrases are chosen, the students will cut or write the words.

Students will then organize the words into a poem. The poem will usually be a free verse poem.  

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Sample Lesson Plan

Essential Question: What is the main idea? 

Objective: Students will create a found poem using the important words and phrases from a reading passage. 

Standards: RL.1.1, 2.1. 3.1, 4.1, 5.1 

Procedure: 

1. Introduce the topic: "Today we are going to go on a dive to see if we can find some poetry. Everyone put on your scuba gear, grab your pencils, and let's go swim with the sharks!"

2. Read this Bull Shark Passage. (Just click to access the FREE download) 

3. Read the passage as a whole group, in partners, or independently depending on the level and purpose of your lesson.  Tell students to read for the purpose of learning the most important thing(s) about Bull Sharks. 

4. Then have the students reread the passage.  Have them underline or highlight the words/phrases they feel are the most important or those words really stand out to them.  

5. Students will cut out or write the words they chose.  

6. The words will be organized into a poem (free verse is typically the easiest for this lesson) 

7. Have an Author's Share.  I usually start with 2-3 students and then have the class break into smaller groups to ensure that all students get to share.  If you want to learn more about author's share time, read this post.  

Assessment: 

Ticket Out the Door - What is the most important thing you learned about Bull Sharks? 

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Here is the poem I wrote. 

Bull Sharks

By: Jessica Zannini

Zambezi, Slip-away

most dangerous shark 

head-butt snout

highly adapted kidneys

Atlantic, Indian, Amazon lake

fresh river

tiny eyes diving

shrinking

close to shore

murky water

safe? 

Looking for more ways to teach poetry?  Check out these posts:

You can also follow this Teaching Poetry Pinterest Board for more engaging poetry ideas.  

Follow Notes From the Portable's board Teaching Poetry to Kids on Pinterest.

Spring into April: Making the Most of Share Time

It is so hard to believe April is here!  Just a few more weeks and SUMMER, oh glorious SUMMER, will be here.  Not that we are counting, right!?!?

I know that April can be a tough month.  Spring break and testing can really throw a wrench in daily routines.  Not to mention all the special events looming. Let's see... Field Day, Career Day, end of the year party, and I could go on and on.

One routine that is so easy to lose in the shuffle is share time for writing.  It is so important for kids though. It validates them as authors and allows them to celebrate learning, as well as seek advice from peers.

So, how can you make the most of share time, when time is SO precious at this time of year? Here are a few ideas!

 

Is time short?  Can you barely fit in the five minutes of share time in your reading and writing workshops to begin with?  I highly suggest using a very predicable structure with ingrained routines. 

 When I taught second grade, my kids came to the carpet and sat in a circle.  This way we could all look at each other, and not just me, the teacher! LOL! They brought their writer's notebooks and a pencil.  The writer's notebooks and pencils HAD to lay in the floor in front of them and their hands in their laps. If they were playing with their notebooks or pencils, they went back to their seats.  I was a meanie on this one #sorrynotsorry. I didn't have an author's chair.  Honestly, any extra movement just took time.  We shared from our spot on the carpet.

I love this anchor chart with procedures for the author's chair.  Although, we didn't have a physical author's chair, the procedures were pretty much the same.

source- sorry for the dead link :(

Sometimes, when I was conferencing with students I would ask them to share during share time.  Often, this was because they had done a really good job of applying what had been taught in the mini lesson.  It was also a good way to celebrate struggling writers that would not volunteer on their own.  It prepared them for the share time, so they knew exactly what they would say before we ever sat down in the circle.

We were also really specific in what we shared.  Students could read their stories. Then, they could ask for specific help.  This worked best with my gifted students.  They often knew what they wanted the outcome of the writing to be, but weren't sure exactly how to get there.  They were often able to explain this to classmates and get feedback.  They REALLLLLLY liked helping each other!

Looking back, I should have had these sentence stems to help kids give each other appropriate feedback.   These look great.

source- image only, sorry for the dead link

I love how this one has expectations AND the sentence stems together.  Very smart.

source- yet another image only :(

This one is pretty and has suggestions on complementing and  how improve a peer's writing.  

Some of my friends loved to share.  Others?  Not so much.  They would rather pick at the carpet and melt into the background. I get it.  Sharing can be stressful for some kids.

However, I did feel like all students need the chance to shine.  To make sure that all students had an opportunity, I simply kept a class list on a clipboard by the carpet. Whenever students shared, I jotted the date next to their name.  This helped me remember to call on some kids that rarely shared.  

Looking for ways to change up share time?  Maybe it is getting stale by this time of the year.  Consider these suggestions:

Let EVERYBODY have a chance to share their work or writing by pairing kids up. You can make this as structured as you want.  You can set a timer and when the timer dings, the students must switch so the other partner has time to share.  This keeps one partner from dominating. I would suggest keeping pairs about equal, as far as ability.  This does not embarrass a struggling writer and frustrate a gifted writer. Also, often gifted students tend to push and challenge each other.

(source)

I loved this chart with guidelines for writing buddies or pairs because it gave them sentence prompts and also suggestions of what to fix.

This doesn't need much explanation.  Have small groups of students share.  This can be the table groups they already sit at our you can mix it up a bit.

A gallery walk is always fun this time of year. In this activity, students leave out their writing and classmates rotate around the classroom and comment on each other's writing. I find that this works best with an end of unit activity or a final draft.  We sometimes did these as our publishing parties.  

Students each got a lunch bag and a small stack of blank papers. They would leave out their writing.  Students would rotate around the classroom and comment (using the same procedures for positive feedback as whole group share) on the small slips of paper.  The slips then went in the paper bags so they didn't lost.  I kept the rotations structured and we switched seats at the ding of a bell, like we did when we played Scoot.

When we were done, students could read the feedback in their paper bags.  It was a lot like Valentine's Day! LOL

Do you have any other ideas or suggestions for share time?

For even more ideas from The Primary Peach, be sure to follow us on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook to catch all the latest news and updates!

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A Teaching Pot of Gold: Show What You Know!

Hey Y'all! This is Chandra from Teaching with Crayons and Curls! I hope that you've been enjoying our posts this month and have learned some magical new ideas to use in your classroom with our Teaching Pot of Gold: Making Learning Magical blog series!

I don't know about you, but I truly believe that for my students to LEARN, they have to be ENGAGED! So, I'm here to share some magic about how I try my best to keep my students engaged!

My  husband is also an educator and many of our conversations are school related. He has been so fortunate to attend many more education conferences than I have, and has always been willing (and excited) to share the information he has learned with me! At one of the conferences that he attended, he was very lucky to learn all about Kagan Structures. I had never heard about Kagan Structures before, but now I am completely hooked! I have to figure out a way to be officially trained or find a way to attend a workshop!

If you've never heard of Kagan Cooperative Learning, but you are looking for ways to engage your students and provide them with experiences for cooperative learning, I highly suggest looking into these structures! This book is absolutely incredible!

One of my favorite structures is Show Down! My students absolutely LOVE this activity and it's a great way to review for a math test while also allowing them to work cooperatively- hello Speaking and Listening standards!!!

You can read about the specific directions for how to complete this activity from the creator, Laura Candler, on her blog! I changed it up a little bit in my classroom for my firsties, but it's still very similar!

My students always use dry erase boards for this particular strategy. I LOVE using dry erase boards in my classroom because they are fast and easy, and my kids love using them! Win, win!  I have my students work in small groups of about 4 students and they sit in a small circle. We usually sit on the floor for this activity and I walk around the classroom to take observations on their work- great quick assessment tool!

In the actual directions, there is a team captain that switches a task card over! However, I usually just display the problem students are solving on the Smartboard. The task cards are a great way for you to differentiate the problems each group is working on, but since I usually use this activity for a test review, we are all working on the same problem! Once the problem is up, students get to work independently. I have them try to keep their dry erase boards hidden from the other members of their group, so that they are working independently. 

Once I notice that most students are done working, I yell "SHOWDOWN" and students turn their boards around so that all the students in their group can see their work. This is when they work cooperatively to discuss how they solved their problems or completed the problem. They can celebrate successes or tutor each other on how to correctly solve the problem. This is NOT a game, nobody wins or gets point! It's truly about working together and teaching each other! My students get so excited everytime I tell them we are about to complete Showdown, which makes my teacher heart so very happy!

I would LOVE to know what Kagan Structures you love using in your classroom! Make sure to comment below with your favorites!

For even more ideas from The Primary Peach, be sure to follow us on Instagram, Pinterest, and

Facebook to catch all the latest news and updates!