Mid-March catchup

Being stuck at home recovering from the stomach flu equates to some much needed catch up time. Fortunately, for y'all, that means getting our blog up to date! The kids have been loving their role as Instagrammer of the Day, so I'm writing today to fill in a few highlights with shots that I've taken over the past few weeks (for the second time, since blogger didn't save my original post...)

The first two collages are of our first Page Turners meeting. Most of the shots are from our reading forts, and one in the second collage is of Kari sharing from The Long Winter. The kids were totally enthralled with the part of the story that she shared and with the photos of the real Laura.

A few weeks ago we attended Living Ag at the WF Fair Grounds where students were immersed in everything ND agriculture. The shots here are just a few of the ones that I posted on our Instagram feed as we toured each booth. Student favorites were definitely the live animals, honey, and dairy, and we also learned about corn, soybeans, beef cows, pork, and ag related jobs. 

Jeff Thomas of Cornerstone Bank is our Junior Achievement presenter this year. He is teaching the class about entrepreneurship and all things small business. The students have learned about qualities that are important to entrepreneurs, how to design a business plan based on available resources, and how profit and loss can be impacted by a number of factors.

We wrapped up our study of the 5 geographical regions of the US (yesterday). We worked through the NE and the SE together, and then broke into 3 groups to study the Mid-west, Southwest, and the West. Students researched together using our text and then presented to the other two groups. Now we dive into studying our home state of ND!

Pulled out the selfie stick to show off the books we're reading for Page Turners! As each student finishes they are working on creating a Word Cloud to share about one or more of their characters. Excited to see them all next Thursday!!!

Last, but not least, this week (before I got sick), we started Math Workshop. I have never seen such excitement for math. Students work in 4 teams and rotate through 4 math activities each day: Mrs. Clarey (their daily lesson), At Your Seat (an assignment), Technology (using the iPads or the Smartboard to work on a variety of skills), and Hands-on (math games). They love math workshop because they get more opportunities to be involved and play math games everyday (research supports academic games for both engagement and skill mastery), I love math workshop because all students are engaged the entire hour, downtime is minimized, all activities target the learning goal or standard we are focusing on (or "beefing up" weaker math areas), and I can tailor my instruction to the 5 or 6 students seated at the table with me. You'll have to pull up this picture and ask you kiddo which team they are on and how their rotation flows. :)

Page Turners - FAQ

Friday marks our very first Page Turners meeting, and I am beyond excited to finally officially launch this activity!!! The theme of this year has been "new:" new reading, new spelling, new math, now entering the new portion of our writing...and top top it all off I've added new seating and new iPads. Yikes! No wonder I feel like the year is flying!!! Even though we are launching Page Turners much later than originally planned due to all the "new," the students and I are SOOOO excited for our first meeting on Friday. To make sure that YOU aren't feeling like this is all totally new, here is some background on why I created Page Turners, what it is, and how you can be part of it at home. This will be lengthy, so watch the headings and skim through to find the information that YOU need.

Repost from last fall:

Photo credit: Hope King of Elementary Shenanigans 

Reading. One of my favorite topics!!! Why? Reading is the single greatest determining factor in your child's success in school...and in life. Reading is what opens doors to new opportunities, allows us to communicate, escape into another "world," and learn about the world around us. Reading is used in EVERY subject in school as well as in almost every activity in life (try driving around or eating at a restaurant without reading anything). I promise you that this year I will do everything in my power to support your child in not only learning reading strategies, but also to help them LOVE reading. 

So, what are my beliefs about reading?

• To get kids to love reading, you need to let them pick what they read!!!
• Kids need to build reading habits:
• Know how to find books and how/where to find ideas for picking books
• Choose books that are a good fits, both for interest and readability
• Build stamina for reading
• Read THROUGH the books we pick
• Repeat this process over and over in order to build qualities of being a reader that will last beyond 4th grade
• Reading needs to be modeled and supported at school and at home
• Reading needs to be enjoyable, without strings attached. No logging minutes or petty projects. (Do you know any adults who keep track of the number of minutes they read for pleasure?)

What is Page Turners?

Page Turners is the name of the reading club I've created for my students. Read this post to learn about my experiences and the professional reading I completed during the development of this group. (The link in the previous sentence will take you to a professional development blog I write for teachers called "The Contemporary Classroom," where I have explained my "WHY" for creating Page Turners for other teachers.) In a nutshell, I want students to love reading, read widely, read often, and talk about their reading regularly with their classmates and families. Page Turners is all about encouraging students to simply LOVE reading.

What reading requirements are there for students?  

Over the course of the year, each student is expected to read a minimum of 40 books 20 books (adjusted due to late start, although several students will hit the original goal easily), log the books they've read by genre, and be prepared to discuss their reading during Page Turners meetings. Students are expected to choose "good fit" books that fall within the genre requirements (i.e.: two realistic fiction books, one mystery, one historical fiction, two informational, etc.).

How are students held accountable for their reading?

Each student has their own Page Turners handbook, which they use all year long to record titles of the books they've read, keep track of books they want to read, and generate a list of absolute favorites to recommend to friends. Each time students complete another book, they log its title on their "Required Reads" page under the appropriate genre. In addition, students will share about their reading during meetings and complete occasional book share activities, such as a character sketch, an Animoto video, reading graffiti, or signposts they found in the book. Any of these activities would be presentented immediately following the preceding Page Turners Meeting so that students have ample time to begin and complete their reading prior to working on their project. Some projects, like creating a video using Animoto, would be given dedicated class time.

What are Page Turners meetings?

Each month we hold a Page Turners Club meeting, usually on a Friday afternoon. This time is spent reading, talking about reading, and enjoying activities and snacks. Each meeting has a pre-selected genre or theme to focus our reading in days before and our discussion during. I open these meetings up to parents, our librarian, the principal, our guidance counselor, other specialists, etc who would like to support student discussion groups.

We begin our meetings by constructing reading forts (an idea I nabbed from a colleague), settling in, and spending some quality extended time reading. Depending on how much time our schedule allows that day, we have read anywhere between 30-60 minutes.

Next, we quickly deconstruct our forts and regroup our classroom before gathering on the rug for a Book Share. Each month we have a guest reader who shares a favorite book. Last year our principal has read Dr. Seuss's The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, a grandmother shared a picture book from her home country of Ireland about how Santa Clause carries on in Irish culture, and one of my classroom moms read from the first chapter of Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers. 

After discussing this book students break into groups of 3-4 to discuss the books they've chosen and read. Each month I have posted discussion questions that students can use to guide their conversations. Here is a picture of a few of last year's charts...

At this point in our meeting I quickly reassign my volunteers to either man the refreshment table (treats provided by yours truly or one of the volunteers), assist with our craft / project, or engage with students as they assemble with various board games. This time has been a fabulous way to build relationships and classroom community, especially for those students who may not spend a lot of time playing games at home with their family, need to work on not being a sore loser or cocky winner, or practice initiating conversation with those they may not otherwise.

Embarking on this journey last year with my class was unbelievably rewarding as I watched their love of reading grow, eavesdropped on conversations between students as they raved about one of their books, and witnessed the astounding growth they achieved as readers in fluency, higher-level comprehension, and vocabulary development. Not a day went by without someone relating something from a book they'd read to a lesson we were work through. I am so excited to kick off this year's Page Turners meetings!!!

Getting your child to LOVE reading!

Photo credit: Hope King of Elementary Shenanigans 

Reading. One of my favorite topics!!! Why? Reading is the single greatest determining factor in your child's success in school...and in life. Reading is what opens doors to new opportunities, allows us to communicate, escape into another "world," and learn about the world around us. Reading is used in EVERY subject in school as well as in almost every activity in life (try driving around or eating at a restaurant without reading anything). I promise you that this year I will do everything in my power to support your child in not only learning reading strategies, but also to help them LOVE reading. 

So, what are my beliefs about reading?

• To get kids to love reading, you need to let them pick what they read!!!
• Kids need to build reading habits:
• Know how to find books and how/where to find ideas for picking books
• Choose books that are a good fits, both for interest and readability
• Build stamina for reading
• Read THROUGH the books we pick
• Repeat this process over and over in order to build qualities of being a reader that will last beyond 4th grade
• Reading needs to be modeled and supported at school and at home
• Reading needs to be enjoyable, without strings attached. No logging minutes or petty projects. (Do you know any adults who keep track of the number of minutes they read for pleasure?)

What I expect:

• This year I'm challenging my students to read 40 books. Why 40? Because I want them to build reading habits, read often, and read widely...I want them to catch the reading bug!!!
• I will encourage students to read a variety of genres (I have "challenge lines" on the Genre Graph in their Page Turners book). Why? Let me explain using one of my favorite foods. I love  pizza and could totally eat it all the time. Pizza, however, is not great as an exclusive meal choice. It needs to be supplemented with fruit, veggies, milk...you get the idea. As readers we do naturally gravitate to our favorites, but we still need to be able to read for other purposes. When my son was little it was my job to introduce new, unfamiliar foods, and now as a teacher it's my job to introduce new kinds of reading material. 
• Students need to be able to talk about what they are reading. Once we have built our reading stamina and reading habits we will begin writing about our reading in our Page Turners notebooks and discussing together at Book Club Meetings. These were the highlight of our year last year!!! 

Below is a picture of two anchor charts that we're currently using and referring to often as we build stamina for reading and our ability to stay tuned in to what we're reading.

Spring Picture Things

Mr. History came for a visit last week and drew us this! While he drew he explained about Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, how Lewis and Clark and their team (pictured here) traveled and explored the area, and what happened to each of of these individuals. Did you know one of the men accidentally shot Meriweather Lewis in a very "uncomfortable" place? You'll have to ask your kiddo where that was... :)

On Friday we said goodbye to Miss Yaniero, our practicum student from NDSU. She will make a great teacher in a few years, and we will miss her!!!

You may remember that last fall and right after Christmas we had conversations surrounding our classroom "CARES" rules (how we take care of ourselves, each other, and our learning). After winter break the students worked in groups to brainstorm words for each letter to complete the thinking stem "We expect students in our class to be_____" They came up with GREAT, powerful words, and they have lived up to these expectations for sure!!!

The picture below is of one of the windows at the back of our classroom. We've covered it with a giant grid and are recording the titles of all the books we've read (on our own) this year. Apparently I should have made the boxes smaller to fit more boxes, because we have less than 20 boxes open and have more than a month left of school. Whoops! I am ASTOUNDED by the amount of reading these guys have done this year...amazing!!!

Project Central!

Project #1!

We have finished our study of the five regions of the USA, and...let me tell you...these kids are expects on both the regions as well as identify elements of economy, geography, government, history, and people. They can discuss not only features of our entire country, but explain what makes a region a region. Woohoo!!! Learning goals accomplished!!!

Our final project with this unit will be to choose either a region or topic (i.e.: economy) and write an essay explaining our learning.


Yesterday we each chose our topic and started recording key information and notes on notecards. This morning we worked through the process of reading each of our notes, sorting them into groups of information with a common topic or theme, giving each a category or title, and then arranging topics and subsequent details into one long row to create the structure for our writing. Tomorrow's task will be to begin building our essays using our knowledge of well-structured paragraphs, transitions, etc.

Here we are...working away!!!

Project #2!

Here is an example of how to set up our content for the filmstrip project. The graphic organizer shows one way to explain and sequence key events from the book Because of Winn-Dixie. Under the categories of Beginning, Middle,  and End I summarized the purpose or the main idea of each of these three "sections" of the book, and under these described three main details or events that supported this. You can see in the second sheet peeking out to the left of this is the beginning of my sketches of the filmstrip I would create to accompany the information I chose for my graphic organizer. Tomorrow I will begin distributing the actual film to those students who have completed these steps. 

Steps that you can support:

1. Finish reading the book (if your kiddo hasn't)
2. Analyze the book to determine roles of characters, significant events, theme or overarching issue...
3. Choosing the right type of graphic organizer to help organize information from your book and focus on either a key character, the full storyline, or a significant event or turning point
4. Plan what your filmstrip will look like and what you will want to say to accompany the slides as it's presented

We'll begin presenting these next Friday! Can't wait!!!!!!!

Page Turners Project, March 20

For our Page Turners project this month we are going old school!!! I have a roll of film that I purchased way back in college (I won't say what year that was), and when the librarian at my first school discarded this ancient projector I nabbed it right up. How many of you remember watching filmstrips in elementary school growing up? Bring back a few memories??? :)

Book choice = a good quality chapter book (already selected or read since our last meeting)

Project = create a filmstrip to show in-depth understanding of your story's plot line, main character, or a significant scene / chapter

In class we had a long discussion about how to choose the best option for the book you're reading. For example, Because of Winn-Dixie centered around the character of Opal and how alone she felt due to a recent move, spending years with just her father, feeling abandoned by and missing her mom, and how gaining a dog leads her to create meaningful relationships with people in her new community and opens the door to a more honest relationship with her father. For this book we agreed we should focus on character development...struggles the character faced, events and challenges that affected them, and their personal growth and change throughout the story. Were we to use Inkheart (our current read aloud), focusing on a single character would never work. For this book we agreed immediately that we would need to focus on choosing key / significant events to show the plot line and the development of the story. A third and final option would be to focus on just a single, highly important chapter. Several students are reading LONG, intense books that match best with showing plot vs characters, but do to their length and complexity would be a monstrous undertaking. In these cases, students can choose just one event or chapter that holds significance to the story. It might be a chapter that shows a turning point in the story, a chapter that explains a character's struggle or problem, or the event that they felt was most important. For students choosing the chapter option, their filmstrip should probably begin with a slide or two to introduce their character and give enough background on the problem or storyline that the chapter makes sense to the rest of us. 

The picture below has 3 photos showing graphic organizers that the students will choose from today to help them choose and plan their presentation. The top left picture shows copies of blank filmstrip so that they can preplan their film (so we know how much length each student will need). Students will need to use fine point Sharpies (or another permanent marker) to create their film. I do have a small bin that they can use, but if you have fine point Sharpies at home that your kiddos could bring as we work on creating these that would be great!!! (no need to go purchase, despite what they might try to convince you of) :) 

We will present these next Friday, March 20th!

Page Turners #2

Another successful Page Turners meeting! Thank you so much to the moms and grandma that joined us today to make this time possible!!! Once again we began our time with reading forts, and then moved into our first book share by Mrs. Hill. She shared a book titled Santa Comes to North Dakota, which had many familiar places mentioned and absolutely beautiful pictures.

Next on the agenda...book discussion groups! Thank you to Mrs. Puhl, Mrs. Killilea, Mrs. Sokolofsky, Mrs. VanLith, and Mrs. Sieber for facilitating our groups! Having the opportunity to share and reflect on our reading is definitely a learning experience, and the students so appreciate being able to do this in small groups with a book that they've chosen to read.

Finally, refreshments (thanks to Mrs. Sokolofsky and Mrs. Killilea), board games, and a pom-pom bookmark project. If you would like to make more bookmarks, here is the tutorial... http://www.designmom.com/2012/10/the-perfect-gift-yarn-ball-bookmark/

Next Book Letter due the second week of January. Don't forget to record the books you finish in your handbook!!!

Next book assignment: TWO books of choice by our January meeting! (note: books longer than 245 pages count as 2)

Page Turners Club

Our first meeting was a smashing success!!!

First item on the agenda...build forts and read...

Next, enjoy a very dramatic reading of The Grinch by our own Mr. Carlson...

Then, discussion groups with our wonderful volunteers (thank you to Mrs. Syvertson, Mrs. Sieber, Mrs. Deutsch, Mrs. Killilea, Mrs. Light, and Mr. Carlson)... 

Finally, cookies and cocoa (thanks to Mrs. Hill), a bookmark project, and board games!

Since I was facilitating the bookmark project I completely forgot to take pictures. We made covered buttons with ribbon tails (one to mark our place and one to anchor the bookmark inside our books). The students LOVED them! Many asked where they could get supplies to make more covered buttons for bookmarks and other projects. I've picked up kits at either Modern Textiles or JoAnn Fabrics. If you haven't made them before, I'd recommend going to Modern Textiles (on 7th St just south of Main Ave). The ladies who run the shop are amazing and love to help with instructions, inspiration, or any questions you may have! (Yep, they are my favorite place in Fargo...and I hear a few of my students have been in there too!)

We are SO pumped for our next meeting! Students will be choosing a mystery to read next. If they haven't finished up their historical fiction book, they (of course) should finish that first so that it can be recorded on their list in our Page Turners Handbook. The next meeting will be on Tuesday, December 23rd!

Page Turners Club meeting dates

There was quite a bit of squealing in our room today when I opened our box of Page Turners Handbooks (myself included)! Everyone is SOOOOOOO excited to read and have our meetings!!! Our weekend "homework" is to start collecting titles that we want to read on the "To Read" pages. For those of you who are interested in facilitating a discussion group and helping with refreshments / projects during meetings, the list of dates follows in this email. You can sign up for all, a few, or one. I will take the first 6 responders for each date. During meetings you will sit with a small group of students and facilitate discussion on the books they've been reading. Depending on what refreshment and craft has been chosen, I may also have you assist with those after our discussion as well. 

Here are our dates!

December 5 (afternoon)

December 23 (morning)

January 23 (afternoon)

February 24 (afternoon)

March 20 (afternoon)

April 24 (afternoon)

May 22 (afternoon) 

Please let me know ASAP if you would like to sign up!