Wow, things got crazy! Plus, Mentor text linky!

Things got really crazy one day when plans
were messed up by things out of my control.
Luckily, I had Jivey's unit for "Knots on a
Counting Rope" handy! The activity
included about having the kids write
about color turned out truly amazing.
Some of their pieces could truly be
published as legitimate poetry.

So, things have been really crazy lately. I'm sure it's the same for everyone else...unless you're one of my lucky Southern friends who are already on summer vacation! (What?!) We still have 13 days of school to go!

So, I apologize for never making Tunes Tuesday happen this month. I think it is going to go on hiatus for the summer and be back in time for the new school year. I will continue to sporadically post some lifehacks throughout the summer though! So be on the lookout for those!

I originally planned to share about all the craziness in a Five for Friday post...but then Friday and Saturday were crazy too! And stretching it Sunday seemed like a little too much... But I figured I'd throw in a couple of fun pics! If you're interested in Jivey's unit, find it here! It's a really great book, with some amazing examples of personification and figurative language! But that's not even the mentor text I'm sharing! Keep reading to see those!

First, I have to give a quick update on my trout! In case you missed it, I've been raising Trout in the Classroom this year! (well, really Trout in the Hallway...the tank is too big and noisy to keep in my room) We hatched the trout from eggs and raised them to be 2-3 inch fingerlings. It was finally time to say goodbye, so last week I drove them out to a nearby stream and released them into the wild! That's my buddy Dave pouring them in after we acclimated them to the temperature of the stream. Bye little trout! We'll miss you! *Sniff*

So...I wanted to share a few books as part of the Collaboration Cuties' Mentor Text Linky for Social Studies. 

I know we're used to thinking about Social Studies as things like American History, etc. but when I taught the primary grades for the first 10 years of my career I knew social studies truly as the name sounds. We were learning how to be appropriately social, how to treat each other, become good citizens, etc. My school still has a big emphasis on this in every grade level, and so today I'm going to share three books that get back to Social Studies at that more basic level. (I know we're supposed to focus on one, but I couldn't help it!)

Ian's Walk is narrated by the girl pictured here. She's annoyed and aggravated by her brother's unusual habits (he is a child with autism). He likes to watch the fan, smell brick walls, etc. At one point, he goes missing on their walk. That moment of fear the sister has when he is missing makes her realize how much she loves him despite his strange habits, and she spends the walk home allowing Ian to do the things he likes, and trying to experience them with him instead of being annoyed by them.

Because of my district's size, we have some schools that have autistic support classrooms, and some that don't. My school does host one of these classrooms, and as a result it is very common for most classes in my school to include one to three students with autism. I have always loved working with these students, though it is true that some of them present unique challenges, and occasionally these challenges can impact the other students in the room. This book is a great reminder that while students with autism might behave differently sometimes, the value they add to our lives as people, along with the unique opportunity to see the world differently that they provide more than makes up for the challenge.  

Speaking of differences, The Sandwich Swap is a great book that highlights how the differences in people are what makes the world more interesting. The two girls pictured are best buds, but each think that the other's sandwich at lunch looks disgusting. (One has a PB&J and the other has Hummus on Pita) A fight ensues, but in the end, they taste each other's sandwiches and discover that what they initially thought looked strange (because it was different) actually turned out to be delicious.

One of my favorites in this same vein of social studies is The Invisible Boy. If you've taught even one year, then surely you've had that one kiddo in your room that just seems to blend into the background. He or she is quiet, doesn't cause trouble, but doesn't excel necessarily either. This book is for them. I like how it kind of brings attention to the kids like that in your room... not just for the kids, but as a reminder for us teachers too. Even in the book it is mentioned how the boy is sometimes invisible to the teacher. With everything going on in a classroom it is sometimes too easy to let kids "fall through the cracks" on a social level. I think the book also lends itself well to a frank discussion with the kids in your class about why it's important that we don't allow kids to be left to become "invisible."  

So, I'm hoping to get my act together and share some more about some of the cool things we've been doing lately, and some of the cool things we've got coming up! It's going to be an exciting last month of school! And if you're a lucky one who is already out (I know you probably go back before me! So, HA!), I hope everyone will keep in touch and keep reading over the summer! If you're like me then your "teacher brain" probably never really turns all the way off!

Tunes Tuesday - Social Studies Edition!

I'm excited to be bringing back Tunes Tuesday again! I hope if you're a blogger you'll consider linking up a new or slightly used post about how you've used music to teach Social Studies!

I'm going to share about something I did for the last two years when I was teaching about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution!

Of course I'd already spent some time talking about sparks of the revolution and my class did that fun simulation where I was the governor and they had to pay taxes (in chocolate of course). But I take it to another level...we set up a whole village, each kid picks a trade, makes a store sign, earns a wage dependent on that trade, etc. When the quartering act hits I even take away some of the kids' chairs for the day.

When the kids have finally had enough, and we've learned a lot about taxation...I show them this fun video.

And then we go through the Declaration and read it. I mean, really read it. I think it's important for kids to know what this document meant, so I made this powerpoint that breaks the document down one paragraph at a time and shows a translation in today's language!

It's just $3 in my store!

So, hopefully we have some link ups for you to check out below!

An InLinkz Link-up

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!

Five for Friday - December already?!

It seems like I was just writing my post for November!

It's been a bit since I've been able to make time for a decent blog post. I have had so many half-written in my mind...but I suppose they only count when I actually type them up to share!

So I'm going to link up to Doodle Bug's Five for Friday and try to cover it all in one post!

1. Vacations

This week was a short one, but a doozy. We had Monday off because it was the first day of hunting season. Last week we had school Monday, a snow day on Tuesday, and a teacher planning day on Wednesday. So needless to say when the kids walked in the door Tuesday morning they were not totally in school mode. I fear it'll only get crazier seeing as Christmas break is just 10 school days away! 

2. Language Arts this week

We finished Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes pretty quickly, and have moved on to reading The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I love this book, though I know it's not everyone's favorite. It's about two kids who run away from home to go live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That's where they discover a mystery to solve. The book provides a lot of opportunities for teachable moments, and has some great vocabulary.

My mentor sentence activities came from Trouble with Trolls. It's always fun to read a Jan Brett book and point out all of the hidden things, and side pictures. Mentor Sentences are still going really well. I've even turned on some colleagues to using them. My favorite part of the week is Thursday when we write our imitation sentences. The sentences my kids are coming up with are awesome. 

We've moved into informational writing now too! So, Jivey basically writes one out of ten of my lesson plans, because I heard about this book from her blog too. Haha. It's called Animals Nobody Loves, and is great because it packs a lot of interesting information about some unique animals into just a couple paragraphs per page. Because we've only just begun this unit of writing, we mostly used it to talk about the differences between narratives and informational writing, and the idea of choosing "expert topics" to write about. It's surprising how many kids want to write their first piece on something that they know almost nothing about. One of our first projects for informational writing is to brainstorm a list of Expert Topics and Sub-topics. 

I have a product in my store that I've just updated with a couple more cool things. It includes a poster about Informational Writing, a graphic organizer to help kids work on formulaic writing, and my brainstorming organizer. Check it out! Just two smackeroos!

3. If I Had a Million Dollars Project Based Learning

My kids started a new project based learning project this week! They really loved the Zoo Design project we did a while back (from Matt over at Digital: Divide and Conquer) and I really love them having a go-to project to work on as one of their math workshop centers!

So today at the beginning of math I played the song "If I had a Million Dollars" by the Barenaked Ladies, and then explained that the kids would be given an imaginary million to spend. There are rules of course. They have to buy a house, a vehicle, and set aside money for college. After that they get to go wild! We spent some time on zillow.com today and every kid found a house they would be happy with in the city of their choice. They're excited to see how far they can stretch the million. I think the real compliment was when a kid came over from his class (I teach kids from all the different classes during math time) during indoor recess today to ask me a question so he could work on the project some more. 

I put together the materials I made in a small packet, and have the packet available in my Teacherpayteachers store for just $2.00! Click here to go check it out! 

4. Centering Activities

This year I am part of a team of people in my school who are working on instilling both a growth mindset and mindfulness into our students. As part of that I've begun doing "centering" activities with the kids. These can be as simple as turning the lights down low, sitting in a circle, closing our eyes, and listening to soft piano music while thinking. Today I had the kids sit in a circle with me, we shut off the lights, closed our eyes and I rang a Tibetan singing bowl. When the kids couldn't hear the bell anymore they had to clasp their hands together. 

I borrowed one of these from my teaching bud down the
hall. It's a Tibetan Singing Bowl.

I think the kids really enjoy doing the activities, which serve as a great 4-5 minute brain break, though I have found that some of the activities don't mesh well with one of my students with autism. I'm eager to keep experimenting though!

5. Japan

This week we finally started our Japan Unit! We had a fun activity where I placed artifacts from Japan at centers around the room and the kids rotated as they tried to discover the items' uses. They also were asked to determine if the artifact is unique to Japan or if we have something like it. This activity led to a great class discussion afterwards.

I also read "The Way We Do It In Japan" to the kids. It's a great book that meshes narrative and informative writing. It's about a boy whose family has moved from America to Japan. A lot of great comparisons are made throughout the story.

And that was some of my week! What great resources do you know about for teaching Japan? What about Informational writing? Do you take time to get your kids centered? Any great tips to share? I'd love to hear them!

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!

Favorite Chapter Books - Workshop Wednesday

So, when my BBB Jivey mentioned that the topic for this Wednesday's linky was to write about ONE chapter book that we use in class, I knew that I'd have a really hard time with it. 

I mean, of course I want to write about Wonder by RJ Palacio, but I've already done that! Go check that post out if you're interested in hearing more about that awesome book, and check out my novel study unit for it while you're at it! I can't rave about this book enough.

I could always talk about Fake Mustache by Tom Angleberger too, which is a super fun chapter book to do with kids, but I've done that already too! I made another novel unit and lapbook set for that book as well.

So, I figured rather than rehash the same info about those two books I'd talk about one that won't just sound like an advertisement!  ;) 

Picking just one chapter book to focus on is impossible! We always have a novel going on in my classroom, whether it is a full blown study of the novel or just a class read-aloud. I have so many favorites! I know a lot of teachers have some old stand-bys that are favorites of mine as well like Frindle, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Phantom Tollbooth (which this very blog is named after!), Holes, etc. but in the end I figured I'd share about our next read-aloud, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes.

We are about to begin our next Social Studies unit, which is all about Japan. So obviously this is a perfect time for me to read this book with the kids, but you could read it whether you have a Japan unit or not! It tells the true story of a girl named Sadako Sasaki who was two years old when the bombs were dropped, and ten years later develops leukemia from living in Hiroshima. In the hospital she set the goal of folding 1,000 paper cranes, but only makes it to 644 before she succumbs to her illness.

Sadako's memorial

I've read this book with my 2nd graders when I taught the Japan unit in GA, and I think every year the kids were absolutely shocked that this book doesn't have a happy ending. We're reading Gooseberry Park right now, and I have several kids worried sick about Stumpy the Squirrel (who has gone missing during an ice storm)...but today I overheard one of my boys say to a girl, "Chill out, you know everything's going to work out...these stories always have happy endings." The story of Sadako doesn't end happily, but I think it does do a great job of showing kids that sometimes our actions can have lasting implications. Being exposed to a story that doesn't end with everything wrapped up in a nice bow is a good experience for them, and this piece of historical fiction really cements one of the big ideas behind why we study history...to not repeat the mistakes of the past.

The book is pretty short and easy to read. I will probably finish it with the kids in a week and a half. I usually use it as a whole class read-aloud, and will model some of the CAFE strategies as I read it with the kids. Noting the point of view, character traits of the characters, cause and effect, and making predictions based on evidence from the text are all good places to go with this book.

There are a ton of activities available to go along with this book out there on the web. I've included a couple of sites you might consider checking out if you plan to read the book with your class!

Kids Peace Station - an illustrated timeline of Sadako's brief life.
The site also has a place to send and read letters to Sadako, and lots of other information about the bombings, Japan, and peace.

Fold a paper crane - this includes step by step videos for folding a perfect crane. In past years my classes have folded 1,000 cranes and shipped them to the shrine in Hiroshima.

Don't have time for the chapter book? Consider checking out the picture book version! Sadako by Eleanor Coerr is illustrated by Ed Young, and tells the story in a somewhat shorter version that the illustrations make up for greatly. 

Be sure to stop by all the other links to learn about some more great chapter books!

Social Studies Mentor Text Linky

I know, two posts in a day is taboo...but they're both short ones!

I'm linking up with Collaboration Cuties' Mentor Text Memo Linky. This week they're looking at historical fiction texts. 

When I was a kid the biggest fad in books were these fun and weird "Choose your own adventure" books. I think I must have read 30 or 40 of them. I still have some in my classroom now! I loved reading through and seeing all the different endings. 

Well, some smart people have taken this idea and applied it to historical fiction! 

I read this one on Colonial America to my kids earlier this year and they loved it. I have several books from the series. Each book comes with 3 or 4 different stories from that era. They have these books for everything from Ancient Egypt to the Titanic. 

Usually the kids beg me to "go back in time" and read the story over again from the last choice...just like I did as a kid. 

The stories in the books are interesting, accessible, and historically accurate. I'll definitely be looking to add more of these to my library in the future. 

Check out some of the other books in the linky! I see some of my other favorites there already!