The African Library Project - Tried It Tuesday

I'm linking up again with my BBB Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper for her Tried It Tuesday linky. This time I'm going to talk about something my intern Chelsea, and the intern next door named Steph, have been trying! She's been leading my school's efforts towards helping The African Library Project this year! 

If you've never heard about it, The African Library Project is a non-profit organization that coordinates book drives in the US with schools in Africa to help set up libraries in those schools. As their website states, "1,000 books, $500, and a little elbow grease is all it takes to create a library in Africa!" The project is a great supplement to our study of Africa this year.

Chelsea and another intern at our school set up this basket and sign in our school's lobby. They've made the school aware of the book drive by speaking on the morning announcements and sending home some info about the project. My school has had similar book drives in the past, so luckily it didn't take a lot to get people started on brining in books.

Once the basket is full the books are
temporarily stored til sorting.

My community is always eager to donate to something like this. We're lucky enough to have a community member who covers the shipping cost of the books. And with teachers thinning their classroom libraries, and kids constantly "growing out" of books...before you know it the basket fills up! In fact, it fills up over and over again!

That's when the elbow grease has to kick in! Here you can see my kiddos putting in some work. We had the kids start by sorting out any books that aren't really appropriate to send. With this many donations it's inevitable that a few slip in that aren't kids' books. Then the kids sorted the books by size to make packing them easier. That's when Chelsea and I would count the books as we packed them into boxes (which need to be plastic lined)! Chelsea and the other intern ended up packing up a ton more boxes after school too.

To keep track of the school's progress, Chelsea and Steph made a classic goal thermometer. As you can see, we are well on our way to the 1,750 book goal! Our school has a day at the end of the year when we have a giant book giveaway for students. Any books that can't be sent to Africa due to quality, excess, size, etc are contributed to that project, so they still get into the hands of a child in the end!

If you're looking for a good Service Learning or Community Service project for your class, consider The African Library Project!

Tried it Tuesday - April Fool's Day Jokes, with a freebie!

I'm linking up with my BBB Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper for another Tried it Tuesday! My tried it this time was a fun one! Every year that it falls on a school day, the kids come in with the "You have a spider on your face" type April Fool's Day jokes. I pretend to laugh and say, "Ha! Good one!" But I've never in my 13 years of teaching taken the time to prepare April Fool's Day Jokes for my kiddos.

Well, today I had a few planned, and I think they were pretty funny. If you're a pinterest fanatic like myself then surely you've seen this one. On the way back from specials this morning, I told my kids that I'd 'prepared them some brownies and already passed them out on their desks.' Of course they got excited until we got back to class and they saw the brown E's that I had prepared. I let them think I was an awful person for a minute before revealing that my intern Chelsea had actually baked them real brownies.  :)

"The person who finds the most words gets
a special surprise!" Mwahahaha.

When the kids walked in the door in the morning I had this waiting for them on their desks. An April word search. Seems legit. Until a few frustrating minutes into it when the kids are realizing that they're having the darnedest time finding any of the words. Well, keep on lookin' kids but you'll never find them! The words are not in there at all.  Haha.

If you're a faithful Facebook Fan of mine like you should be, then you may have grabbed it last night, but if not grab yourself a copy of the Fake April Word Search to use tomorrow or next year by clicking on the image!

I also told the kids a few white lies just to rile them up a bit.  
1) That from this point forward only cursive handwriting would be accepted, and that even in math I expect to see "cursive numbers." (Which they "should have learned in 2nd grade.")
2) That because they hadn't filled in the bubbles on their state tests in cursive we'd have to take the ones we've done over again.
and...
3) That it was much too cold outside to go out for recess. (It's actually one of the first warm days we've had and we've been doing state tests all morning!)

And of course, I have to play a couple good-natured pranks on my colleagues. So I left this in the teacher's lounge on the lunch table. 



And I prepared another little treat for the hallway outside our classroom. For those of you that don't know, I have a 3 foot long corn snake as a class pet. People are always asking me if she can "get out of her tank." Well, I made it look like she had. Good times!

Did you play any April Fool's Day jokes on your kids? If so, what did you do?

Tried it Tuesday + some giveaways!

Hi all! I'm linking up with Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried it Tuesday!

My class finally finished our informational writing unit. We've been working really hard on some heavy duty writing as part of my Biography project. So I though it'd be great to do our poetry unit as a little bit of a break before delving into opinion/persuasive/argumentative writing.

I know, I know, April is poetry month. But so be it. We are taking our big state tests at the end of this month and I didn't want to do persuasive when my kids' brains were fried. Also, I have my kids submit an anthology of their poems to my school's SLAM Fair. That's our Science, Literature, Art, and Music Fair at my school, which is a really well attended parent night. So I wanted to have plenty of time to get that ready.

So, we started this week off by having the kids work on the cover for their anthology. While it's not a true form of poetry, I think it's fun to have the cover be a Wordle made up of words that the kids feel relate to them. It's kind of like a stream of consciousness piece!

Today we wrote acrostic poems. Now...I've taught acrostic poems to kids for years. But the bulk of that experience is back when I taught 1st and 2nd grade! I've never taught them to 3rd and 4th graders until this year. I have to say that privately I've always considered the acrostic poem to be the lamest of all poems. I'm really used to teaching them like this, almost acronym style:

Thoughtful

Energetic

Artistic

Caring

Helpful

Engaging

Respectful

In first and second grade the kids can barely spell the words they want to use, so you end up with O standing for Osome(awesome) and stuff. It ends up being aggravating to the kids when they want to use words that won't fit, and it ended up being aggravating to me because I don't believe instructional writing time is a time to be obsessed with spelling...especially poetry. And isn't one of the main points of poetry to express emotion of some kind? I never felt like the acrostics my kids produced really did that. So my history with acrostics hasn't been pretty. 

I decided to choose to have a new mindset when it comes to acrostics. I wanted to make the focus of writing them change from just fitting the formula of what an acrostic is, and focus more on the expressing of emotion. AND my intern found a great example of how they can be written as full sentences! So I started the lesson by reading Spring by Steven Schnur. (There's one for the other 3 seasons as well!)  

Then I asked for a word from the kids and of course I got "BURGER." We talked about how the words we choose to write these poems will be more meaningful as part of our anthologies if we choose words that mean a lot to us, but Burger would be fine for the example. I think the poem we came up with turned out great. If nothing else it expresses some humor. I especially like that we have referred to burgers as "edible treasures." And I have to say that both my kids and I have some newfound respect for the acrostic poem! My change of mindset really helped me frame the lesson better for the kids, and their poems were better as a result. 

In retrospect, I really think I could've been pushing those 2nd graders to do this years ago! Sigh! 

So, did I fool you or did you guess that my Tried It Tuesday is really that I tried changing my mindset about something, not just teaching acrostics! 

But anyway, in other news...

Have you heard? My one year blogiversary is coming up on Saturday! This little blog of mine will be a whopping one year old! Woohoo! I'm having a giveaway to celebrate of course! A $50 Amazon gift card and 17 other wonderful prizes from some of my favorite bloggers are up for grabs! Be sure to stop by!

And now you should rush on over to Fifth in the Middle because she is gearing up for her March Madness Giveaway, which begins later this month! She's having a pre-giveaway giveaway! What?! 

See you on the 8th! I'll end up with 4 lucky winners, but everyone who stops by will get a little something...hint hint, wink wink! And you might just want to "Like" me on Facebook so you're sure to get notified about some Flash Freebies that'll be happening that day!

Tried It Tuesday on a Snow Day

Well, much to my dismay I'm sitting at home on a Snow Day, so I'm linking up with Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper with another Tried It Tuesday! 

I know, I know, a lot of teachers love a snow day every once in a while. The problem is that I had a bunch of awesome things planned for today that kind of won't make sense when we get back in December since half of them are Thanksgiving related. And I was hoping to wrap up some ongoing projects today that have to be pushed back too. 

Of course, tomorrow is a "Records Day" here, so the students stay home but the teachers report to work on progress reports and catch up on planning and classroom things. (But we may have that day canceled now!) Most of our teacher planning days are taken up by planned professional development, so I was looking forward to a planning day that I could actually use for planning. Plus, if we get called off tomorrow I STILL have to do the progress reports and the planning...just on my own time! Sigh!

And we have to make this day up on December 20th too. So, yeah...not a fan of snow days. But I digress...

I thought I'd share a little about the research projects my kids have been doing. In my district in 3rd/4th we've had the same social studies and science units for nearly 20 years. With the push for math and language arts, our units just haven't been updated. So it often falls on the teachers to take the basic theme of the unit and update the activities from our old units to match the current standards. One of the units we study is Africa. Africa can be a really daunting subject to take on due to size of the continent and the dramatic differences in culture from one side of it to another. It's really hard to teach kids generically about "Africa" because of those differences. 

So, along with another teacher on my team, I decided to break the continent up into 8 pieces, assign triads of kids one of the regions each, and provide them with materials to do research on that region. Having another teacher onboard was great because we could divvy up the responsibility of finding the different research resources. Kids have taken the last several weeks to do their research, and the last week preparing their presentations.

One kiddo brought in this
homemade smashed banana
treat from Madagascar!

This turned out to be an excellent example of how a teacher can set high expectations for the kids, and the kids will rise to meet the challenge. I asked kids to present about at least 9 out of the 12 topics I had them research, and they had to present using at least 3 forms of media. They rocked it. Every group ended up preparing at least 4 types of media, and several presented on all 12 topics!

Media types ranged from iMovies, Google Presentations, and ComicLife comics to homemade food, dance routines, reader's theatres, illustrated folktales, travel brochures, and posters.

Couscous (from Morocco) lovingly made,
but unfortunately smashed on the way to
school...it SMELLED delicious at least.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous that I'd set the expectations too high for the amount of time I was able to give the kids to work, but they did it by working on it (unasked) from home and during recess. I had parents ask to come and watch the presentations, and I think they were happy with what they saw. In the future I think I might take the number of research topics down so that the amount of time needed for the project is less, but otherwise I'd call the project a success! I was hoping to wrap up the last two presentations today, but alas...it just had to snow...Oh well!

Not the prettiest lady...

So I'll leave you today with a chuckle. We had one of our infamous "too cold to go outside" inside recess days yesterday, so some of my kids got another chance to work in the Book of Awesome Tasks that I made for them. So I present to you a couple of pictures from one of the kids' favorite pages. Apparently, monster, ninja, robot, etc. just wasn't interesting enough, so they decided to draw me as "other."

Enjoy your Thanksgiving!

Classroom Management and some new (for me) Whole Brain Teaching methods

I'm a little late to the party, but I'm linking up to Tried It Tuesday with Holly from Fourth Grade Flipper! I DID start this post on Tuesday...

So this week I decided to implement another level of Whole Brain Teaching methods in my classroom. If you're not familiar with it, check it out here. Now for the longest blog post in history! I hope you hang in there and earn the freebies I've included!

I have had a lot of success with the "Class - Yes" method for the last several years. I love using different attention getters that have a choral response. October's was the ever popular "Hocus Pocus - Everybody Focus."

For the last several years I have mentored a yearlong intern from Penn State, and each year I am reminded what it is like to be in a classroom as a brand new teacher with limited classroom management skills. This year I was able to attend a brief training about whole brain teaching and it made me think that there were some things I could put in place to help my intern. I decided to give two of the Whole Brain basics a try in my classroom that I had heard of but never tried. I've been really impressed even after just one day!

The two things I'm trying are "The Rules" and "The Scoreboard."

The Rules are simply a list of 5 expectations. The catch is that kids are expected to learn them, and be able to repeat them AND a motion that matches the rule, on command. I modified two of the rules slightly, so here are my "rules" and motions.

Rule #1: Follow directions quickly and quietly. 
(hand shoots out at quickly and comes back as one finger to lips at quietly) I added the "quietly" part.

Rule #2: Raise your hand for permission to speak.
(hand raises quickly then drops to mouth level and makes talking motion)

Rule #3: Always be in just the right place.
(kids point straight to the ground with both hands over and over)
This takes the place of the more typical "Raise your hand to leave your seat" as that goes against other procedures in my class, ie. getting a tissue, going to the bathroom, getting a sip of water, etc.

Rule #4: Make smart choices.
(kids point to their temples and twist their hands back and forth, like winding gears)

Rule #5: Keep your dear teacher happy.
(kids use their two index fingers to make a heart shape on their chest at dear and then do jazz hands at happy)

Whenever kids are sent off to a situation where one of the rules will be in effect it is good to say something like, "Okay, before you go...Rule #1?" Then the kids say the rule, make the motion, and off they go quickly and quietly to follow the direction!

Now comes The Scoreboard!

This has already been a lot of fun. And it is pretty basic. The teacher simply draws a simple scoreboard on the markerboard. One side has a smiley face (that's where the students' earned points go) and one side has a frownie face (that's where the teacher's earned points go.) Whenever the kids are following the rules flawlessly they are given a point. If they aren't following the rules, or something grievous happens then the teacher earns a point. If the kids have more points than the teacher at the end of the day then they win.

Now, here's another fun part of this. Anytime the kids get a point they get to have a "One Second Party" while I write the point. Anytime I get a point the kids have to let out a "Mighty Groan." When the party/groan is over the kids are focused on the teacher. It is recommended that to use the scoreboard correctly, the students should never be more than 3 points ahead, so a little system manipulation is needed. I think breaking that rule occasionally would be okay though, just to show that it can be done.

Click the image to grab the
tags for free!

In my class we decided to implement a leveling system like in a video game. We're at Level 1, and we need 10 experience points to "level up." Each day any points that the kids have over me go into that pot. When we reach ten points we'll level up, receive a reward, and then start over. Just like in a game, higher levels are more challenging and rewards are greater. Our reward for reaching level 2 are these sweet little brag tags I whipped up using the template from Fifth in the Middle!

I'm really looking forward to seeing how these methods play out, and I'm hoping that they are valuable to my intern when she begins teaching some lessons and being in front of the kids more and more.

Now, to toot my own horn for a second, even before implementing these things I have always thought that classroom management is a strength of mine. Disclaimer: Let me start by saying that it is a HUGE pet peeve of mine when fellow teachers discount my hard work in this area when they say things like, "Well, you're a man so kids must listen better." Aaargh!

Aside from basic attention getters, and the whole brain things I've mentioned, I excel at classroom management because I do these things:

I build a strong classroom community.

We take time at the beginning of the year, and throughout the year to learn about and celebrate each other. Positive reinforcement is the norm. Additionally, I make it a mission to get to know each and every one of my kids. I have a kiddo that is obsessed with Star Wars, so I watched all 6 movies again one Saturday so that I could actually talk to him. Otherwise I'd have had no chance of getting to know him. 

I plan for every part of my school day.

I literally have a plan for every minute of every day. I make that plan a week in advance. I then e-mail that plan to all of the paraprofessionals that work in my classroom throughout the day, and all of the learning support teachers that serve any of my kids. I'm not required to do this. If kids are going to need a material for the next lesson, that material was prepped the day before. Little things like "we need index cards for this and I don't have any" or "hmmm...what are we going to do next?!" are the quickest way to wreck your day in my opinion.

I follow through on everything I say to kids.

If I say it, then it will happen. Conversely, I don't say things or fight battles that don't matter or that I can't win or back up. Empty threats are pointless. I'm always ready to follow through on any claim I make. Usually I don't have to back up a "crazy claim" more than once. Case in point, if my kids are riled up on Halloween and having a hard time lining up quietly for lunch...we'll sit down and line up again until they get it right. Late for lunch? Oh well. I'll tell the next teacher to jump us in line.

I have high expectations for behavior, independence, and academics. I expect respect.

I know all of my kids can learn what I need them to learn. I know they can do a lot of activities independently. I trust them to make good decisions, and I give guidance when they don't. I expect students to treat everyone with respect and I let them know how completely shocked and flabbergasted I am when they don't.

I make consequences match the offense.

We don't use a card pulling system or a clip moving system in my room, though I did for many years. I became disillusioned with it for a couple reasons. They seemed to focus on the negative, and the consequences seemed rather static. I know some teachers have clip charts that go in both directions (kids start in the middle and can move up OR down in level of behavior) and I think that helps a lot. 

My biggest problem is when a kiddo moves two clips and then has to lose 5 minutes of recess. Why? What did she move the clips for? In my room the consequence matches the offense. Kiddo purposefully writes on the board in sharpie? She gets to locate the head custodian and ask for the supplies to clean it. After she cleans it, she sends an e-mail to him (CC:ed to Mom and Dad of course) to thank him for the use of his materials. (This activity may have had to happen during recess or another desirable time of course!)

Obviously there are always some exceptions to the rules. There are always going to be those kiddos who just have a really hard time following rules or being kind to others. Special circumstances may call for special solutions. Good classroom management isn't magic.

But while there are always going to be some cases where nothing I know works, I've found that classroom management mostly takes care of itself when I do the things I do. That makes me a happy teacher! What do you all think about classroom management?

And if you hung in this long and want a copy of my rules...grab yourself a set here by clicking the image of Rule #1 to the left!

Tried it Tuesday - Zoo Building!

Oh boy! I've become one of those slacker bloggers...sigh.  ;) Seriously though, I think I've fallen into the trap of working myself into temporary burn out. Sometimes I need to sit back and accept that not every cool idea needs to be done this year with my kiddos...

Speaking of traps, check out my class's Venus Fly
Trap! It's an attempt to cut down on our fruit fly
problem, which is caused by terracycling
juice pouches for the school.

Every time I've finally gotten myself to the point where I'm a good week ahead of the game in school, I notice all of the "home life" things I've been neglecting. It never ends, right?!

I definitely need to find that balance between working on school stuff, my personal life, and going to bed at 1 AM. Right now my time allotment is way out of whack leaning towards the teachery stuff. And I think it's time to come to terms with the fact that I'm not young enough to stay up til 1 o'clock every night anymore. I need to spend more time on "me things" too.

I'm so lucky to have such a great bunch of kids this year! They've made my transition into 3rd/4th a lot smoother than it could have been. One thing I love about the multi-age class is that I get to keep all of my 3rd graders next year as my new 4th graders!

But..on with the show:

I'm linking up with Holly for another Tried it Tuesday! This week we started regrouping for Math. I have taken on teaching the fast-paced, gifted learners group. We have a lot of those in my district, so my math class has 27 kiddos in it. That's a whole lot of kids that need constant challenge in order to be kept engaged. My plan is to do a lot of project based learning along the way. 

Matt over at Digital Divide and Conquer has a great project based product for teaching Area and Perimeter (and great practice for a bunch of other skills too!) that I am starting with this group. It basically tasks the kids with building a zoo and meeting multiple parameters while doing so. It comes with a lot of extension activities too, which I really like. There's also an entire set of the papers that allow a teacher to differentiate for a lower level group! We're also currently studying Africa, and this'll be a great way for me to hit some of that with the animals in the zoo. 

I love the fact that this product comes with everything ready to print and use, and that it can be done to different levels. For example, if a student finishes building the zoo, there are sheets to have the student "zoom in" on one of the animal enclosures, or write a quiz about their zoo. Definitely go check it out! At just $4.50 I'd say this is pretty much a steal. 

My mentor texts this week have included I Need My Monster (which goes along with Jivey's Mentor Sentences), Fake Mustache, and Galimoto.  We're a little more than halfway through Fake Mustache right now, which I use as our text to model our CAFE strategies. This week in reading we are focusing on recognizing character traits (personality and physical) and visualizing. Some of the activities in my Fake Mustache Unit have made planning for this week easy-peasy!

Galimoto was our writing mentor text, where we're focusing on having a bold beginning for our narratives. It also ties in well with the Africa unit I am teaching in social studies. It's the story of an African boy who goes along trying to find wire so he can build a "galimoto." The kids slowly discover what that is, so it's good for predicting and inferring as well. But we focused on the first page of the story, where the author begins by telling us the things this boy has in his possession. It makes you want to know why he has those things and what he's going to do with them. He wasn't introduced right away, and the setting wasn't discussed initially. It is a different way to begin a story, and it hooks the reader. I challenged the kids to write a piece with a bold beginning after we read the story.

I figured I'd throw in some of my favorite Halloween books too! Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich (and Takes the Cake) are both hilarious books full of rhyming short stories, comics, etc. I usually read a little each day to the kids just for fun starting a week before Halloween. Monster Museum is a funny book of poems about the different monsters. Vunce Upon a Time is the story of a vegetarian vampire who also likes candy, but has run out right before Halloween. I use these stories to reinforce the skills we've already introduced, but we read them mostly just for fun.  :)

And if you haven't already, it's not too late to start up some Monster Battles in Math! I recently finished my Multiplication Facts (tables 0-12) battle tournament. I also have multi-digit addition and money addition tournaments. The multiplication tournament has a totally different set of pairings and a different winner than the addition tournaments! Each tournament comes at the ridiculously low price of $5! We actually completed our tournament already and the kids LOVED IT. They want to do another one later this year!

In other news, my BBB Jess over at I Heart Recess is having a giveaway! I've donated my Roll and Draw a Monster activity! Go enter if you haven't already!

Tried it Tuesday - Raw Rhubarb and Cursive Writing!

So, just a quick post for Tried It Tuesday with my BBB Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper! Though some of these are cheats because I didn't try them all for the first time recently. But they were new for my kiddos at least!

The first is raw rhubarb! We read "My Rotten Red-Headed Older Brother" this week in class, and if you've read the story then you know that at one point the siblings have a raw rhubarb eating contest. Well, I (much like Ricky in the story) don't LIKE raw rhubarb, I LOVE IT and snack on it often. In fact, I grow a ton of it in my garden each year! It's a perennial and I don't think I could kill off the three plants I have going if I wanted to actually... 

So, with free access to mountains of rhubarb, (more than even I can eat) and a story that mentions it, I thought it'd be a great time to bring some in for the kids to do their own little "Tried it Tuesday." I wish I could post the picture I took of their mouths puckering when we counted down from 3 and all took a big bite at the same time. One kid comedically fell out of his chair when he ate his. Hahaha.

So, my second tried it is Cursive Handwriting! I introduced our practice books this week as part of morning work. I won this fun and cute booklet in a giveaway! It's from Funky Fresh Firsties, click the link to find it in her store! I've never had to worry about cursive before this year! When I taught primary they were too young, and when I taught 5th they'd already learned it. Now that I'm in 3rd/4th I am supposed to be in charge of it...well my cursive stinks! 

Of course that's assuming my kids can tear
themselves away from their Book of Awesome
Tasks long enough to focus on cursive!

And I'm not sure how I feel yet about cursive. I think that I am going to require my kids to learn how to READ cursive, and to sign their name. I don't want to spend class time teaching it... 

I have provided each child with the cursive handwriting practice book, and I will hold little cursive writing teaching/practice sessions as an option during indoor recess days for the kids that want to do that though.

I'm just throwing these in here because a couple of
people have asked what the books look like when
they're constructed. Lots of fun!

I will admit that cursive is something the kids want to do. That's why I love doing it during indoor recess (it rains and snows here a lot!) because usually a third of the class is quietly engaged doing that rather than getting out of control and stir crazy! How do you feel about cursive?

And PS, find the Book of Awesome Tasks in my store for five measly clams! Book 2 is in the works!