Not Very Fancy Show and Tell from First Grade

Today I'm sharing a few bits and pieces from my classroom and life. I've got a bit of spontaneous greatness, some adorable student creativity, one of my favorite reading strategies, and a piece of advice I got in the teacher's lounge. Visit the Show and Tell Tuesday link up for more great classroom tidbits. 

We learned to add and subtract 10 from any number a couple months ago. This week I tried to introduce a game using the skill to some of my more advanced students, and it became very clear we needed some serious review. I set the game aside and broke out the cubes. After a quick lesson, most of the kids seemed to be remembering. When it was time for my next group, something came up and my attention was needed elsewhere. Not sure what to do, I handed the cubes to a couple kids and asked them to teach the next group what I had just taught them. It worked beautifully! They were engaged like this for the whole group time!

Our building is slowly transitioning from PBIS to Responsive Classroom, which I've written about before in posts about morning meeting and teacher language. During this transition, our official school-wide expectations have been a bit ambiguous. Recently we rolled out "BARK." (The bulldog is our mascot.) B-believe in yourself, A-Achieve new goals, R-respect our community, and K-keep it safe. To help my kids remember, I put some motions to the words. Believe in yourself is giving yourself a hug. Achieve new goals is climbing a ladder. Respect our community is clasping your hands in front of your chest. Keep it safe is just making your body into the shape of a K. We went over these at the end of the day before packing up, and one of my students got really into it. She decided to do "the K walk" all the way to her locker. Her best friend joined her. The next day, it caught on, and I had 20 kids doing the K walk to their lockers. It made my week!

I had a major breakthrough with a couple beginning readers this week. I broke out these CVC word blending roads, and they started decoding! They were so proud of themselves! This strategy has never failed me! Once kids have their letter sounds, this bridges the gap to decoding. If you have a couple kids you think would benefit from this, you might want to check out my post, Teaching Tips for Blending CVC Words.

I'm concluding my show and tell with a non-school related picture. This is my dog, Java (named for coffee, not computers). He's about 14, and not doing so well. He can't see anymore, and his hearing is not great either. Unfortunately, he's also starting to have a little bladder trouble. I tried getting some dog diapers, but he took them off or they slid off. I was talking to one of my teacher friends about this problem, and she suggested a bandana. I folded up a cloth baby diaper for a little extra absorbency, and he kept it on! It definitely looks cuter than a dog diaper! Teacher friends are such awesome resources for all of life's challenges. 

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Teaching Kids to Accept Their Assigned Partner

Like many of you, I'm starting the new year by reviewing social skills and procedures. As we prepared to play double bump today (nice free lesson by KidsKnowMath, by the way), I did a quick review of how to accept your assigned partner. 

Well, I thought it was going to be a quick review. First I modeled:

When you find out who your partner is, some of you might feel excited. If you feel excited about your partner, I want you to look at your partner and make this face. *Head nod with a big smile.*

Some of you might not be very excited about your partner. If you're not feeling very excited about your partner, I want you to look at your partner and make this face. *Head nod with a big smile.*

What did you notice?

One or two kids noticed that the faces were exactly the same, so we moved on to students practicing. I randomly picked two kids and asked them to show what they were supposed to do when they learned they were partners. It went reasonably well, so we practiced as a class. 

Show me the face you'll make if you are really excited about your assigned partner: Everyone smiled. Now, show me the face you'll make if you aren't so excited about your partner. Everyone frowned. WHAT?  So I went back and modeled again, then we all practiced again. Still not good. After the third practice we finally got the idea.

After that little incident, I decided I'd better make a little reminder, so here it is:

Hop over to my TPT store and grab it for free. While you're there, I'd love for you to follow me and leave a little feedback! Hope you're 2016 is off to a great start!

Incase you're wondering, the partner work went fairly well. I snapped this picture of a couple kids working together. Trust me, this is quite a victory!

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We Definitely Need Those Remaining 176 Days!

We just finished day 4 of first grade, and holy smokes! You know when you attend a professional development class and they show you videos of the strategies in action? It looks so lovely. You think, "Yes! This magical approach will make everything better!" 

Then you go back to the classroom. It's not like the video: it's hard!

Get this: The kids don't say what they are supposed to say to your open-ended questions. Who could have predicted this!? [you're getting the sarcasm, right]

This is teaching in real life.

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I went across the hall to my teammate to tell her my problem: My class is struggling to develop our class rules because we have no idea why we are at school! And we are to the point where we need some rules. 

***It's not like I'm allowing complete chaos, it's just we're doing lots of discussing, and noticing, and wondering, and modeling. It would just be much simpler to say, "Remember, we said we'd __(follow the rules!)____." Also, I'd like to get to the part where we have set procedures to follow if someone is not following the rules!***

My teammate's response to my problem was: I'm so glad to hear you say that! I thought is was just me!" (We both attended "advanced" Responsive Classroom training this summer.) I completely love Responsive Classroom, and I really believe in it. I'm just sharing my experience because I think we all try things that just don't go according to plan from time to time. I'm all about telling it like it is, and it is....SOMETHING.

I started out by talking about developing a safe community in our classroom where we could all learn together. I read Me...Jane, which is a fantastic, award winning book about Jane Goodall. The book tells about young Jane loving animals, learning about nature, dreaming of going to Africa, and her dream coming true. I also read You're Wonderful to emphasize they are filled with dreams. In retrospect, You're Wonderful may have been a little too much of a feel good book. I think I'll save that as more of a celebration for AFTER we've identified our hopes and dreams. Later we read Do Unto Otters to prepare for the "what do we need to do to achieve our goals" portion of the process.

Then we began discussing their dreams. It started out with playing, so I pushed that to be making friends. Then the next dream was to ride a horse. Um......I wrote it down, hoping it would lead to more dreams about things they hope to do one day. Someone talked about being a cashier at a store. I twisted it around and eventually turned it into owning a store. We're moving forward. Then someone said, "cousins." Hm. I'm not sure we're really understanding what hopes and dreams are. We got back on track with the goal of being a doctor, but then the discussion turned to kittens, unicorns and rainbows. I kept pushing for bigger dreams. 

One student said he dreamed about food. I suggested maybe he would like to be a chef, and I wrote that down, but he clarified that he just wanted to eat a lot. 

So...I tried to link the conversation back to the goal of being a doctor or a store owner and squeezed the words math and reading onto the chart at the end. I thought maybe when I directed them to draw their most important hope for first grade they would remember the suggestions of reading and math, but no. 

I arranged the hopes and dreams into a little quilt, then I told them that we were going to get more specific about our hopes and dreams and make some goals for the year. I read Morris Goes to School to try to get them thinking academically. It got a little better. Learning to read was a big goal.

Next I asked them why they wanted to learn to read.

Crickets.

Finally someone said, "to learn words." Well, learning words was good. Why would it be helpful to learn words?

Nothing. 

Hm. This little tangent is a bit more complicated than I expected.

How does reading help us?

"It helps us know our letters."

So I started going through my entire weekend and listing all the different things I read. Text messages from my sister, an email from my mom, the TV guide, a recipe, signs while I was driving, stories to my kids, information about teaching...

Then I asked, why do you think I read these things? Why did I read the TV guide? Why did I read the recipe?

No ideas. I gave some explanations.

Whoa. There is lots of work to be done here! I got some books out of my class library and began holding them up. Here's a funny looking book about a mouse. Why might someone choose to read this book?

"To learn?"

To learn what?

"words."

Oh dear. Finally someone said, "can you read it to us?" Why do you want me to read it?

Silence. 

"Um...it looks funny?"

It looks funny! Yes! It would be fun to read this book!

I held up a book called "Why Does It Rain?" Why might someone choose to read this book? 

Blank stares. Finally one kid says, "um, so they would learn why it rains."

Yes! Exactly!

We eventually managed to put together a reasonable list of reasons why people might choose to read. I also sent home a note to parents with a homework assignment: Have a conversation about reading with your child. Tell them all the different things you read each day (and I listed possible things they read), and why it is important for you to read those things. Explain to your child why it is important for them to learn to read. 

We took a little break. When we returned to the hopes and dreams discussion. We listed the things we needed in order to reach our goals. We got a very long list. We went through the list and found things that went together. 

Finally we ended up with these rules:

*Be good to others.

*Be safe.

*Take care of our room and our materials.

*Focus on learning.

In the end, I think we have a good list. 

Isn't it amazing how we stumble upon such enormous holes in their understanding? I never would have thought that they had so much confusion about what they're doing in school! They all knew to spit out the word learning, but absolutely no clue about the purpose of learning or reading.

What serious confusions have you discovered in your students' understanding?

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What to do During the First Days of First Grade

When you're beginning your career as a teacher, you have a vision of what you want your classroom to be like. You put lots of time and effort into the organization of your classroom. You hear advice like, "you can't be too harsh." (Yes, I saw that just the other day.) You hear that you need to be firm and teach routines. It can be really overwhelming.

For the first few days of first grade, I just like to have lots of things planned and prepared, but I base the sequence mostly on how much time I have before a required transition and how the kids are feeling. I repeat activities. I break activities down into smaller components.

It's important to realize that the kids can't sit and listen all day. You also have to realize they will get really tired! I always thought I should have lots of active things planned, but by the afternoon they were way to exhausted to do anything!

I've put together a document that I use as my plans for the first few days. I have the sequence vaguely planned before the kids show up, but it's very flexible. I've included lists of procedures to teach, books I like to read, the steps to establishing rules or a class contract (two possible procedures), activities for the first days, and a few free resources. (Including the poem below and a beginning of the year survey.)

I'm sharing this with you for free. It's Not very fancy, though! ;)

I hope it's helpful to someone!

One of the things I do is a craftivity to supplement Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. I just have the kids make coconut trees with their names on the trees. We display it in the hall with a sign that says, "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! Look at who's in our room! If you want to use the patterns for tree tops and trunks, the letters, and the sign, you can get it in my TPT store for a dollar.

I've also been creating some new decor. I use a transportation theme. I've made a 0-20 number line with 10 frames, an ordinal word train, a color words display with cars, and months of the year. With the months is a page of cupcakes. You can edit it to include student names and birth dates and display it as a graph if you'd like.

Finally, if you read my last post about my thoughts on starting the year, you know I'm trying a new approach to meet the teacher night. I made a power point presentation. I'm going to have it printed and posted around the room. I'm also going to play it on a loop on my interactive white board. For my own classroom, I added pictures of supplies from a Google image search.

The details will be different for everyone, and I can't share the supply images, but if you'd like to use the templates, I have an editable file for you.

If you like these freebies or the transportation decor, I hope you'll pin them so others can find them as well. Thanks!

You may also like these posts focusing on Back to School (they include more freebies):

Getting started with morning meeting

Organizing your classroom library

Building Community with Little Tommy Tucker's Dog Song and Dance

If you found this post to be interesting or fun, I'd love for you to connect with me!

photo credit: New Colors. via photopin (license)

Back to School Thoughts

The first day of school only happens once a year, so it takes lots of years of teaching to make it work the way you want. (At least I assume you actually get it the way you want eventually!) I'm seeing lots of how to guides for teachers. This isn't really a how to guide. Writing helps me clarify my thoughts. Sometimes hearing others reflect helps me, so I'm sharing them with you. :)

My first year teaching I just had everyone drop off their supplies on various tables, then I organized and sorted later. It was awful. It took me so long! Things have improved a lot. Last year I felt like I had too much for them to do with labeling supplies and putting them places. I had things all written down clearly. I had signs posted around the room. Only a small handful of people actually followed the directions I wrote out. I basically had to tell each person what the paper said, then they did most of it. I had lots of papers with information. Everyone seemed to lose the information. Some things need to change.

I'm trying to figure out exactly what is the most important.

1. I want them to put the "big stuff" in the right locations: tissues, baggies, disinfecting wipes, hand sanitizer, and dry erase markers (these aren't big, but it will be helpful for me to have them all). I'm going to have big signs for these items posted around the room.

2. I want the wrappers taken off the glue, scissors, erasers, dry erase markers, and headphones. (holy moly is headphone wrapping a pain!)

3. I want names on scissors, pencil boxes, headphones, and any "special" notebooks/folders. We ask for plain stuff, but I always get lots of Spiderman and kitty stuff. The kids get all upset if they don't get theirs. It's not worth it. They brought it, they can label it. Maybe I'll have stickers made up for them to put on their take-home folders. That would probably help.

4. I want them to sign up for Remind. If you haven't heard, Remind added a chat feature last spring. You can text individual parents, small groups, or the whole class. I'm going to try to have them sign up right there on the spot.

5. I want to know what the dismissal plan is. I think maybe a brightly colored half sheet that they need to fill out rather than just telling me.

6. I want permission to share student work and photographs of students online.

7. I'll give them an introduction letter, a survey, a schedule, and contact information.

I'm going to have parents just put supplies in the students' desks. I'll collect most of the supplies, but I'll just do this during class. It will be good practice for the kids learning what things are called. Otherwise it gets really confusing because kids are bringing in supplies gradually throughout the first few days. During the first few days, we'll go through the supplies and use interactive modeling and guided discovery.

On the first day, the routines that need to be taught are lunch sign in, morning meeting, transitioning from desks to carpet, restroom procedures, quiet signal, lining up, and going home. I'll do interactive modeling with these. Then I'll repeat shorter versions of the interactive modeling lessons for the next few days. I need to remember to use lots of reinforcing language.

I'm looking forward to math this year. Last year we were very tied to our curriculum. It was awful. This year we get to teach the standards. There will probably be required testing. If there's not, I'm still going to want to do some one-on-one assessments, so I need to get the kids going on stuff they can do independently. We'll start with some guided discovery of math materials: cubes, blocks, pattern blocks, other random manipulatives (I have a large collection!).

I want to go back to a procedure for introducing math manipulatives I used to use with a twist. I still want to do a little bit of guided discovery with the main materials. When we begin centers, I give them a basket. They sit down and look at it. They think about what they could do with it to work on math. We brainstorm all the ways they could work on math with their materials. I give them a piece of paper to record their math work. It's pretty amazing. With just that direction, I'm able to differentiate. Some kids barely write anything. Other kids create graphs! I let them work for a few minutes, then we clean up and reflect/share.

I'm so happy to not be strictly tied to a reading curriculum this year! I consider my primary goal to be getting them to like reading. We know that kids who read get better at reading. In first grade, it is critical for them to learn to enjoy reading. I do this with awesome read alouds. Some of my favorites for the beginning of the year are Helen Lester, Robert Munsch, and Mo Willems. If you are new to my blog--I love books! I've written lots of posts about books (and how I use and organize them).

This year I decided to focus on making my room more comfortable and welcoming for my students. I got some colleagues to help me find room for a reading nook, and I got some pillows. I recently found this pin showing kids lounging on upside down chairs with pillows. I want to allow this kind of freedom, but I'm going to have to do lots of modeling to make sure it works.

So, was any of this helpful? What are your thoughts on going back to school? Let me know in the comments!

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photo credit: Classroom Materials via photopin (license)

Guide to Classroom Library Organization

If you are an elementary teacher with lots of books you need to organize, this post will help you organize logically. This system allows for growth without a need for complete reorganization as your collection grows. I will take you through each step of the process. I suggest organizing by topic rather than by level. I base this suggestion on advice from leading experts in literacy.

Your library is one of the most important features of your classroom. We spend lots of money collecting wonderful books, so it’s important to have a good organizational system in place for our students and for ourselves. A good organizational system will help make your books more usable.

I've been asked by several colleagues for advice on organizing their classroom library, and I've seen lots of questions about it online. When I started thinking about how I actually did it, I was pretty surprised. 

Classroom libraries are always growing. It’s  best to have an organizational system that allows for growth. I used my knowledge of children’s literature, elementary curriculum, and teacher preferences to design this system of organization.

I started out by creating a concept map. This is how my mind works. 

Click here to get a better view!

See why I was surprised? It looks pretty overwhelming. My goal is that it will all makes sense by the end of the post! Don't worry, you won't actually have all those categories.

My rule of thumb is to have between 20-50 books in a category. I store them in baskets and crates. Since I have such a large volume of books, I aligned them to the 6 week themes in my reading curriculum. I rotate my books every 6 weeks. If there’s an extremely popular category (like Dr. Suess) it will stay out longer. I assign a number to each category; then I put a sticker on every book with the category number. By clearly labeling the books, I make sure it’s easy to replace them. I can easily give this task to any student with confidence. It took me forever, but I’m so glad it’s done!

I also recommend getting a stamp with your name on it from an office supply store.

With my system, the seasonal category trumps all others. I use this rule when sorting all my other files as well (computer, Pinterest, centers, etc).

One thing you will have to decide is how to classify books about all the seasons I put these with my science books, but I could see the logic of putting them here. I rotate these books according to the season. I break down some of my seasons into smaller categories.

I base my decisions on when each season begins. This is important to know because some holidays are somewhat between seasons. For example, I categorize St. Patrick’s Day as a spring holiday. I put my apple books with fall. You will need to make decisions about this and stick with it. 

If you don't have many of these, just call them "seasonal," otherwise, make a category for each season. Continue breaking the categories into more specific groups until they are manageable. 

Concept map pictures can be found in this Google Doc.

Most reading experts advise organizing books by topic rather than by level. My system is topic based, but it does allow for a small section of loosely leveled books. Primary teachers often have a collection of very simple books for students to read independently. These books have strong picture support, patterns, short sentences, or decodable text. It makes sense to keep these together. This is supported by the 2 Sisters (developers of CAFE and Daily 5, see the blog post and video listed below). Primary teachers may also have some students reading chapter books with no picture support. Since these texts aren’t accessible to most of my students, and I don’t have many of them, I keep them separate.

I have debated about what to call my easy readers. One of my colleagues told me she calls her books “hard,” “harder,” and “hardest.” She talked about all kids wanting to think they are reading hard books. I used this method for a while, but too many of my students were intimidated by the word hard, so now I have an “easy” basket.

Regardless of how you choose to label any books you want to level, experts advise organizing the majority of your classroom library by topic.

Fountas and Pinnell (see page 14) 

The 2 Sisters 

Donalyn Miller 

Dr. Joanne Meier 

Most teachers develop collections of authors and characters they and their students love. I have a basket for favorite authors and a basket for favorite characters. I also added one for teacher favorites this year because I just wanted them to be accessible all the time. I didn’t want to have to dig at all. If I have a sizeable collection, I separate that author/character to their own category. 

I use the basic subjects of school to help me determine my big categories. I do not strictly sort books by fiction and non-fiction, but I did design my concept map this way because I thought it was helpful. If you have a very small library, you might want to be clear about fiction and non-fiction, but with a large library, I like to be a little more relaxed. I look at the content of the book to decide where to place it. If a book has a dog in it, but the book is more about being a friend than being a dog, I would put it in the “friends” category. If a book is about a pet dog that goes on a fictional adventure, I’d probably put it in the dogs category.

If I am teaching about fire safety, it is convenient to have Daisy the Fire Cow in the same location as a book about what it is like to be a fire fighter. This sets me up to discuss the differences between fiction and non-fiction, and it makes it easy to find books for compare/contrast lessons.

I suggest beginning with these categories: science, social studies, health, language arts, math, fiction

Science: the first way I divide science is living vs. non-living. Chances are you will want to do this right at the beginning. One of the trickiest areas of sorting is where to put books about habitats. Generally, they would go in science under living things.

Concept map pictures can be found in this Google Doc.

Social Studies: This is a very broad area. Books about maps, landforms, people, sports, arts, communities, and history all go here.

Concept map pictures can be found in this Google Doc.

Health: I put the topics covered by elementary health curriculum here: safety, mental health, the body, food, and social skills.

Language Arts: ABC books, books about being a writer, books to help you teach about language go here. This is also where I would put books I like to use as mentor texts. It just makes it easier.

Concept map pictures can be found in this Google Doc.

Math: These are easy to identify for the most part. Remember the point here is for you to be able to find and use books. If there’s a book you like to use in association with a math lesson, it should go here.

Concept map pictures can be found in this Google Doc.

Fiction: this will be your largest category. I put songs and poetry here, they will probably be sorted out later. Honestly, I try to put books in other places if I can. For example, a book like Tacky would go in with my social skills or favorite authors section rather than my fiction section. Fiction is harder to sort, so if a book fits somewhere else, I put it there!

Concept map pictures can be found in this Google Doc.

I think fiction is hard to sort! The obvious method would be to sort by genre, but then I end up with really large sections of fantasy and realistic fiction. Additionally, I'm not quite sure what to  do with stories that would be realistic except that they are about a family of otters.  The big categories I decided on are People Stories, Animal Stories, Fantasy, Rhythm and Rhyme, Humor, Folktales, School, Movies and TV. Most of these categories can be broken down further. Take a look at the outline in my downloadable guide.

If you followed this procedure, you have your major categories established. The number of books in each category will vary based on the size of your books and the size of your container. For optimal use, you want students to be able to flip through the books easily; I think 20-50 books is a good size. For more detailed listing of the sub-categories, get this outline (and concept map sections). 

 I tried to make sure I had lots of subcategories for each major category. I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to use all the categories I include in my concept map, but teachers tend to acquire large collections of books related to the topics they teach.







This year I'm adding two categories: new books and book hospital. When I get new books mid-year, it's hard to find time to categorize and label them. I think a new books box will get them into circulation faster. Hopefully giving the students a book hospital will prevent them from interrupting me to tell me about a damaged book.

This post turned out to be a bit more involved than I'd originally planned! If you found it helpful, I'd really appreciate hearing it in the comments! I created some labels to go with all these categories. The  product covers much of the same information in this post, and it includes over 200 labels. There's also an editable page if you need to add anything.

The outline with the concept map pictures that I've mentioned several times also includes this little quick guide.

If you found this post to be interesting or fun, I'd love for you to connect with me!

photo credit: Dr. Seuss collection via photopin (license)