A Personal Narrative - My Middle School Candy Empire

I recently attended a workshop on teaching writing. As part of the workshop we were tasked with writing a personal narrative. We brainstormed the ideas for our narratives by drawing a map of our neighborhood and then noting on the map where some of the interesting memories that popped up in our minds occurred. 

Since I took the time to write it, I thought I'd post my narrative here for anyone with a burning desire to get to know me a little better! Please forgive the fact that I have only mildly edited the piece for any typos/errors. I was afraid that if I edited too much that I might be tempted to change the story! Sadly, this entire story is true. Haha.

When I was in 4th grade I managed to hobble together ten dollars and seventy cents that I had earned from odd jobs. I had been saving it up for quite a while for a specific purpose. I had a plan. Months before I had noticed that the Wal-Mart down the street from my house had 10 lb bags of jolly ranchers for sale for $10. At one buck a pound I knew that was a great deal, and I saw great potential in that colorful bag of sugar.

I walked up to the check out counter with my money and the giant bag of jolly ranchers, and the tired looking checkout lady said, "How you gonna eat all this candy, boy?" I nervously chirped, "Oh, it's not for me," slapped my money down on the counter and rushed away before the receipt was even finished printing. I lugged the bag all the way home in my bookbag and hid it in the closet in my room. The next morning I took out a handful of jolly ranchers and headed to school. 

In my first class I showed the handful to a few kids around me and whispered, "10 cents." Before I knew it I had sold out of the jolly ranchers, making the fastest dollar I've ever made. That dollar could buy me another pound of jolly ranchers, and it had only taken a fraction of that to make. But even better, I had a feeling of exhilaration that I normally didn't have in school. That first taste of doing something sneaky while making money, yet not hurting anyone, was just the beginning of a quickly growing addiction. 

Over the course of the next couple weeks I quickly sold out of the entire ten pound bag of jolly ranchers. I never ate a single one. I saw that candy as a stack of money, and the idea of eating away my money was abhorrent. By this point I had accumulated a huge stack of comic books, and a couple of new games for my Nintendo. I'd also found a new problem...where to put all the coins? And I couldn't keep paying for my comics in coins; The old man at the comic shop was starting to get suspicious. I finally figured out that if I rolled them up I could exchange them for bills at the Wal-Mart, though the thought of having to buy the little paper rolls bothered me. By this point I had started to get requests for other types of candy, so I took some of my profits up to the store and bought more jolly ranchers, now-and-laters, sour gum, and atomic warheads. The checkout ladies always gave me the strangest looks, but I didn't care. 

At one point in my journey from small-time candy pusher to candy kingpin, my mom discovered my wad of cash and asked me where I had gotten it. She feared the worst, that I'd been stealing it or doing something else unsavory to earn it. I had no choice but to come clean about my growing candy empire. Surprisingly, she wasn't upset, instead I think she was impressed by my entrepreneurial spirit. 

In the coming months, I noticed a few copycat businesses appearing. One kid sold commissioned drawings for a dollar each. Another sold his cootie catchers and other origami creations. I saw other business go from birth to death in a matter of a week or two. No one could compete with candy. And for some reason, no one chose to try and compete with me in my business. I had a monopoly. November was my enemy. The first few weeks following Halloween were the worst. Demand had slumped so low that I couldn't give my candy away. By the end of Thanksgiving break I was back in business though!

I continued to grow my candy empire, under the radar, over the course of the next 3 years. Somehow I never got caught by the school administration or teachers, and they never figured out where all the candy was coming from. (Or if they did, they decided not to intervene.) As the business grew beyond my ability to manage, I enlisted the help of my best friend. I realized that by expanding my territory into other classrooms, I was increasing my profits exponentially. By the end of 8th grade I had two employees in each of the grades below me selling candy and keeping five cents for every quarter they made. I passed out the candy to my minions before school each day, and collected my cut at lunch and after school. Profits were handed over due to a mixture of the honor system and a bit of intimidation. If I felt I was being cheated, a kid would be cut off from the "family" and couldn't sell OR buy candy. Only one kid ever crossed me, and he quickly learned the error of his ways the next day at lunch when the rest of us were all counting our coins and he realized he'd lost out on future profits by stubbornly keeping one day's worth. 

Thanks to my complete lack of respect for the "No candy in school" rule, for most of my middle school career I was rich (by kid standards) in my neighborhood! I spent most of the money on school lunch, video games, and comic books. To this day, it's still the easiest money I've ever made! I'll always remember the last day of 8th grade, when I handed the business over to my most trusted 7th grade employee. He shook my hand with both of his, with tears in his eyes, and so ended my career as Don of the Rothschild Candy Empire.

Surviving Spring to Welcome Summer Blog Hop! - with a writing freebie!

My best blogging buddies and I have gotten together to do the best kind of blog hop, one with freebies and giveaways! Hop from one blog to the next, picking up a freebie and a secret word at each stop, and don't forget to enter the giveaway! If you're not already following one of these blogs, now's a great time to start! And if you are a reader already, this is our way of saying thanks! There are some great TpT gift certificate prizes, and someone lucky will win the best pencil sharpener ever (I know because I have two in my room!) from Classroom Friendly Supplies.

Our hop's theme is basically all about how to make it til the last day of school without losing it! :)  If your kids are anything like the couple hundred I've had over the years then I'm guessing with every passing day they are getting a little more antsy. 

My freebie is for writing! Towards the end of the year I try to plan some highly engaging writing lessons that are more focused on instilling a love of writing in the kids than anything else. While I'm at it, I figure I might as well get something in the queue for next year. (I'm always thinking ahead!) So my kiddos take some time to write a letter to my future students! Then next year during the first week of school my new students read and respond to the letters. I've used a couple of varieties of the form the kids write on, but I think my favorite is "A letter to the kid sitting in my old desk." Haha. The freebie includes 3 versions, and each of those come with two different sized writing lines. 

I've done this activity several times over the years, and each time it has been a big success. The kids just love the idea that sometime next year there is going to be a new student reading all the things they've written. And when they get their letters a couple weeks into the school year, they're excited all over again! Double win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Now, hop on over to my bud, Jess from I {Heart} Recess to get another freebie and another entry in the giveaway!

Lifehack #3 and Poetry Month is coming!

Time for another quick lifehack! This one is for my Mac peeps! If you're a PC person, then your tip for the day is to get a Mac!  ;) 

Have you ever wanted to look up a word super quick, but didn't want to have to open another tab in your browser to check out dictionary.com, or go grab a real dictionary, or even worse...don't have internet access? Use your built in "look up" dictionary! It works offline!

I'm also linking up with my bud Jivey for Workshop Wednesday! 

So, April is Poetry Month, and it's almost upon us! But I couldn't wait to get started with poetry, so we've been working on it for a while now! :) I've been using AMC's (from Looking from Third to Fourth) Poetry Posters and writing frames to help along the way!

I like to have my kids create a Poetry Anthology that we share with parents at one of our big school nights. So over the course of the month I ask the kids to write lots of different kind of poems. 

My intern has been doing a lot of teaching with writing, and has been reading some great books to the kids. She just discovered one called A Kick in the Head by Paul B. Janeczko. It has an example and definition of most of the kinds of poetry that we study. But the definitions in the book are written as footnotes and are super tiny.

I love that AMC's pack comes with a colorful poster that gives the definition of each kind of poem, and another poster that includes an example. I have the posters printed out and laminated, but I think it's cool to project the poster for each type of poetry as it's introduced. No trouble reading THAT definition!
There are handy writing frame organizers included in the pack too! It's great for cinquain or diamante poems because the "rules" for those poems lines are listed. Once the kids have written a good one on the organizer, I ask them to write more on regular paper. 

AMC's poetry poster pack is just one of the products you can get in this new Educents bundle! I have all of the items in this bundle, and can say they're all top notch. For just $10.99 you can't beat it! That price is kind of ridiculously low if you ask me. There are 11 products for less than 11 dollars...you're basically stealing them! Click the image below to go grab it up if you haven't already!

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!

Monday Made It - Capitalization poster freebie!

Just a quick post today to link up for Monday Made It!

When I taught primary I felt like I must have gone over the rules for capitalization a bajillion times. Then when I got to 5th grade and realized all my efforts were in vain for about half those kids, I nearly lost it.  So, now that I'm in 3rd/4th I figure I may as well make a last ditch effort to get as many kids on board with correct capitalization as possible so that at least half have it before they get to 5th!   ;)

It's great to just be able to say the word "Mints!" to serve as a helpful hint to students that they might need to edit for capitalization. This isn't my idea, and honestly I'm not sure where I saw it originally because one version or another of this poster has been up in my room for years, but since I made a new matchy poster for my classroom I figured I'd share it with all of you in case you can use it! It's a forever freebie (as are ALL of my freebies) and positive feedback is all the payment I'll ever request for it! Click the link to grab your copy! Enjoy! 

I know that was a quickie...but can you believe that it was my 100th post?! Thanks so much for reading!

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!

Five for Fraturday - Science, Math, Writing, Reading, and More!

So, I DID start writing this 5 for Friday post for Doodle Bugs Teaching's Linky on Friday! Once again things got busy and it just wasn't in the cards to get this post published before the clock struck midnight!

So this was another busy week that just seemed to fly by! Here goes:

1. Pictures!

This week we had Fall Picture Day! I was sooo busy on the first day of school that I never managed to get my kiddos' pictures! Aagh! So I just decided to wait til Picture Day to get them because I knew they'd be dressed up! 

I hung this fancy green frame with fishing line from the ceiling. I had prepared these photo booth props for kids to use for the pictures and they turned out really cute. There were several mustaches, lips, bow ties, and glasses to choose from, each attached to the end of a dowel. 

2. Ecosystems Scoot!

We've been studying biomes and ecosystem stuff in Science lately, and this set of cards was a perfect check-in to see what we knew and didn't know still.

The kids LOVE playing Scoot, and the best thing is that they don't even realize that they are basically taking a test! 
Grab yourself a lifetime supply of copies of this game for just $3 by heading over to my store!

3. Read Bead Board version 2013!

I've talked about my Read Beads in previous posts, but didn't have a picture of my display board for this year until now! Here it is! 

I leave the board up all year long. Those fall leaves will turn into snowflakes, then spring flowers, then green leaves as we pass through the seasons. 

Kids LOVE collecting the read beads, and I think it makes a handsome display outside my room's door and takes the pressure off constantly worrying about changing the board.

4. Writing Workshop - Mentor Texts & Writing Activity

This week in Writer's Workshop we took a break from writing Small Moment Narratives to do a different kind of activity. I started the week by reading the book Fortunately to the kids. This book follows a pattern that goes back and forth between things like "Fortunately I was invited to a party!" "Unfortunately the party was in Florida, and I live in New York." "Fortunately a friend lent me his plane!" and so on. Unfortunately (ha!) this book is lacking in strong adjectives and vivid verbs. After reading it to get the pattern down, the kids begin writing their own stories. 

The next day I read Fortunately, Unfortunately to the kiddos. This book follows the same pattern, but features an occasional adjective that spices up the writing. We make note of that, and then we begin editing our stories by adding in interesting words.

Finally, I read That's Good! That's Bad! to the kids on the third day. This story follows a similar pattern, but the difference is that nearly every page is packed with strong adjectives and vivid verbs! The kids really can see the difference that those interesting words make. We pull out Fortunately at this point and practice by sticking in good words. The kids continue editing their pieces at this point (and now they really have the hang of it!)

On the fourth day we don't read a picture book, because instead we share our own "Fortunately" stories!

5. Measurement and Addition in Math

In Math this week we started working on lines, segments, and measuring perimeter of triangles and quadrilaterals. One of my independent centers this week involved the use of my newest TpT product, these Insect Measurement Task Cards. The cards have detailed photos of some unique bugs on them. I post the cards around the room, and when kids get to that center they get to walk around the room with their record sheet and go on a "bug hunt." I asked my kids to measure all of the bugs and then add up the measurements. Anytime you can practice multiple skills while keeping the kids highly engaged is a win in my book! Task cards beat out a worksheet any day...but they are essentially getting the same practice! Grab up a copy of my cards for just $2 and use them in your classroom for years to come!


So that made up a big portion of my week! Of course a whole lot more went down than that, but those were definitely some of the highlights! I managed to make it home with a little less work on my plate than the past three weekends! I'm hoping that I'll keep getting ahead a little more each week!

Writer's Workshop this week!

So, last week was all about setting up expectations and routines for Writer's Workshop. We made an anchor chart, we talked about the writing process, we thought up a go-to list of ideas with my 50 things I love sheet, and most importantly I introduced the concept of my VOICES board.

One of my favorite examples to model is
when I talk about the big idea of my
marriage. I could write a lot about that. But
a great example of a small moment is that
moment when I saw Killer B in her wedding
dress for the first time walking down the
aisle. Even the boys are interested when I
vividly describe that moment to the class.

This week I focused in on the VOICES strategy "Choose a narrow topic" by talking with my kids about small moments. I was first introduced to the idea of teaching kids about small moments when I read Lucy Calkins' set of writing books a few years ago. Ever since then I've always launched my writer's workshop by modeling some small moment stories of my own, and then having the kids think up some ideas and begin writing their own small moments. I don't spend nearly the time Lucy does on this though (I think she does it for months!)

I remembered seeing a cute little graphic organizer on Ideas by Jivey where she talked about Watermelon ideas and Seed ideas. I got it all ready to go, went to my school copier with it last week...and the copier was broken! Aargh! It's STILL broken! So I just made my kids draw their watermelons! Haha.

Before that I read them a perfect example of a small moments story in the form of the ever-popular "The Paperboy." If you haven't read it, it's a simple story about a boy getting up to do his paper route, but it seems like so much more because of the author's craft. I make up a different version of the story where we glance over the paper route, but I include all the events of the paperboy's day from waking up to going to sleep that night. It's boring. The kids see how much more interesting it is to get vivid details about a small moment, rather than basic info about a lot of moments.

Today, we read the story "Roller Coaster." This is another great example of the excitement and detail that can go into writing about a small moment. Tomorrow we'll read "Goggles." And alternately in the past I've read "The Shortcut." If you're looking for mentor texts for small moments, these books can't be beat!

So after the mentor text each day, followed by a modeling mini-lesson and some brainstorming...the kids are raring to go and ready to write their own small moments. We'll write several this week and then pick one to publish later!  As they write I'll circulate around the room and check-in and confer as needed. Next week we'll add a couple new strategies to the board from the Conventions section of my VOICES menu (probably the ones dealing with end punctuation and capitalization so I can refer to them all year long), and we'll publish a small moment story to put in our portfolio! 

I'm eager to share more about how Reading Workshop is going, but that's for another day!

Mentor Text - Ish for overcoming anxiety in writing

 I'm linking up for Collaboration Cuties' Mentor Text Linky with a great book for helping kids overcome anxiety in writing.

I know a lot of teachers have read Peter Reynolds' The Dot, but I'm not sure if Ish has gained the same number of followers. It's one of his three "creatrilogy" books. (The other is great too, Sky Color.)

Basically, it is the story of a boy who loves to draw until his older brother discourages him. But his little sister comes along and gives him confidence and helps him see his art in a new light. Before you know it, he is applying this new attitude to his writing.

I like the fact that this book is really short, but has a powerful message. It's perfect for a writer's workshop mini-lesson on overcoming discouragement and anxiety about writing not being good enough. If you haven't read the book, you can find a very British reading of it here on youtube! 

Not to toot my own horn, but I think my "Book of Awesome Tasks" would pair up nicely with a reading of this book!

There are 45 opportunities for kids to get a little "ish" with their art and writing! And at just $5 for an infinite amount of copies, that's a steal!

Be sure to stop by Ideas by Jivey on Facebook tomorrow! There's a giveaway going on to win a set of my Editable Classroom Newsletter Templates!