Not very fancy--just nerdy

This month I'm giving you a glimpse of my teacher-nerdiness and a peek at just how "Not-very-fancy" my life truly is! Visit the Show and Tell Tuesday link up for more great classroom tidbits. 

My little girl somehow got really excited about Valentine's Day. This is the best I could do for a celebration. I cut out some hearts and she taped them to the door. I suppose someday she'll realize how incredibly inadequate this truly is, but for now she's thrilled.

School has been taking a lot out of me lately. When I get to my car and find a frosty windshield, I just turn on the defrost and wait. It's about the only rest I get all day, so I just enjoy it, but I feel ridiculously lazy.



I have been teaching my students the three sounds of "ed" for years, but I have never really understood the rule. It seemed that there should be a pattern, but I never knew. This is the story of my discovery.

I showed my students this digraph video about Mr. H and his 4 girlfriends: Miss S, Miss C, Miss W, and Miss T. In case you're curious, Miss T was actually is ex-girlfriend. Whenever they saw each other, they would stick out their tongues. Sometimes quietly and sometimes noisily. I used it as a springboard to explain the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonant sounds. This is helpful for kids because they often have confusions with reading and spelling sounds like d/t, v/f, s/z, p/b, etc. It also helps them learn to whisper!

Later that week I was explaining the sounds of "ed" to my reading group when it dawned on me: The /d/ sound and the /t/ sound are the same, but /d/ is voiced and /t/ is unvoiced.

Then I started looking at my word lists and realized the rule:

When a word ends with an unvoiced sound, the "ed" says /t/, like "asked." When a word ends with a voiced sound, the "ed" says /d/, like "called." When a word already ends with /t/ or /d/, the "ed" says /ed/, like "wanted" or "added."

I was, and still am, way more excited about this discovery than any person should be.

After my discovery, I updated my Monster-themed Reading Strategy Posters to include the poster above. The set of 18 strategies for emergent readers can be found in my TPT store.



 ***UPDATE: a day or two after I published this post, I heard this Grammar Girl episode (see what I mean about nerdy?) about the -ed ending. She talks about some of the exceptions to the rule, incase you are as abnormally interested in this as I am.***





Recently some of my colleagues were intrigued when they saw me cutting and pasting to make some large printed posters for my classroom. For some reason many teachers are unaware that single page PDFs can be printed and assembled into larger posters. If you've been wondering how to do this, pin this post so you don't forget! It's easier than you think!

Open the PDF print window.

See the little button that says "poster?" Click there and adjust the tile percentage. To enlarge this landscape single-page to a 4 page poster, I used tile scale 185%. You can see how it will look by clicking in the viewing window. Clicking on the viewing window will give you alternating views of the whole poster and individual pages. For some reason I'm able to use tile scale 210% on portrait pages. It is a bit of a pain to assemble these nicely, but it can certainly be done.

Head over to Forever in Fifth Grade to see what other teacher-bloggers and showing and telling about this month!

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

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. 

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

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!

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