Phillips is a Core Knowledge school, so in fourth grade, we always spend time learning about the American Revolution. For the past two years we completed a webquest, researching and writing about the causes of the revolution and the impact it had on families. This year we took a whole new approach. I always integrate fiction and non-fiction reading into our learning, and we write about the things we learn. We still enjoyed reading great books, and we wrote lots of our own books.

My lesson plans were based on this book, American Revolution, Hands On History, by Michael Gravois. I’ve actually had a copy of this book for several years, but this is the first time I’ve really looked it over. I found it listed on Amazon.com, but I’m afraid that it may not be available on Scholastic anymore, so snap up a copy if you are interested.  Here is the link.

Our first activity was to create a Domino Time Line.  This a timeline for events leading up to and causing the American Revolution.  Students kept this at their desks, and as we learned about each event, we wrote it under a domino.  For this activity students had a copy of the page with the dominoes and a piece of cardstock.  Students designed their own path and glued the edge of the domino to the path.  Next year I will give more guidance about this, because some of our dominoes crashed into each other.

As we studied the revolution, we learned new vocabulary.  I loved this idea for a vocabulary bulletin board/display.  Since I am limited on bulletin board space, I just hung bulletin board paper on my whiteboard.  As I introduced new words I added soldiers to the battle field.  In addition to learning new words.  It was easy for the kids to see the disadvantage that the British, with their bright red coats, had in their approach to battle.

Some of our introductory activities were completed together, like the French and Indian War lock book.  Most of the time, students read about an event using pages from the student book of The American Revolution, edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. or using internet resources.  So we still maintained many of the aspects of a webquest.  You can see our resources on our Explore Earth Wiki.

As students completed each activity, they filed their finished page or small book into a hanging file with their name on it, with the plan that we would put together a book when the pages were finished.  I also helped them keep track of the assignments by posting the assignments on a piece of construction paper.

 We finished by creating Circle Books of four important events from the war.  These included Washington Crossing the Delaware, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Winter at Valley Forge, and the Battle of Yorktown.  Before writing, we organized our information with word webs.

This hands on approach was much more engaging than just taking notes or completing worksheets, and I was very impressed with the outcome.

I plan to include mini-books and foldables  into our upcoming unit on Medieval Europe.

All but a few students completed all the work.  We all learned a lot, myself included, and we were proud of our work.  And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it.

In our classroom, we do a lot of partner and group work.  Sometimes it can be tricky matching kids that will work well together.  There are times that I let kids choose their own partners, but we often end up with more play than work that way.  I have a name box that I often use for these situations.  Sometimes I randomly group students by drawing their names, but that can waste time.

I like the idea of a partner wheel.  I set this one up so I could pair stronger readers with those who need a little more support.  We all have those students who are better off not working together, so just put their names on the same wheel, and they will not ever be partners, no matter how many times you turn and use the wheel.  I saw this idea on Pinterest.  The original blog by Karen Moler has templates to easily make your own partner wheels.  They didn’t work for me, because I have 28 students so I needed to put 14 names on each wheel. I had a little trouble getting the wheel divided up evenly, so if you can use the templates that will be a real time saver. You can find her blog post here.

There are lots of ways to organize students for group and partner work, including using craft sticks and other tools. You can read about some other ideas here.  What secrets do you have for grouping students in your classroom?

I have not been doing very well keeping up this blog this year.  My last post was on October 25th.  That’s because we have been so busy.  We have already completed our first Core Knowledge Unit about mountains, and we are now learning about the American Revolution.  I started writing this post about our Mountain Trek webquest on October 29th, and I’m just now getting back to it.

Our classroom may be located in the midwest, but we’ve been traveling the world virtually to learn about the world’s mountain systems.  Our Mountain Trek WebQuest is always a good way to start the school year and introduce my fourth graders to reading and writing about non-fiction.  This is part of Core Knowledge World Geography, and it also ties into our science Earth Materials unit. It’s a great way to review map skills as well.

This is the third year that I’ve done this webquest, and this year I made a few changes.  Instead of Quest Garden, where the webquest was previously hosted, I moved it to a wiki.  You can see it at www.mountain-trek.wikispaces.com.  I updated and added additional resources.

The kids love doing the research and visiting websites to learn about mountains, but I have not been satisfied with the quality of the writing.  In the past I have had them put their own Field Guide together with plain paper and a construction paper cover.  This year I decided they needed more guidance.  I realized I was making a mistake in assuming they could read non-fiction material, synthesize the information, and write in their own words.  I knew that with more guidance on my part, they could do this.  I created more of a framework for them to use with guiding questions on each page.  I tried to set it up as a word document, but I ended up doing some cut and paste to satisfy my perfectionist tendencies.

Mountain Trek Field Guide

I also did more modeling to demonstrate how to read and than select important details to support a main idea.  We created word webs for each part of the project.

The result was the best writing I have seen in the three years I have done this project.  I learned an important lesson about not withdrawing support prematurely.  The children were able to be successful independently only after they had sufficient practice and experience in report writing.

My class just started using a website for math practice called Ten Marks.  You can find it at http://tenmarks.com.  It was mentioned by several people in the 4thchat on Twitter last Monday.  I had looked at this website before, but I hadn’t really moved past the home page.  That was a mistake, because this website has a lot to offer.

First of all, it is free to teachers.  It was easy to set up my entire class, and you can easily tailor assignments to meet the needs of students.   It’s a great way for my students to get additional practice, and it is aligned with state core standards. It has curriculum for grades 2 through 8, and algebra and geometry. You can meet the specific needs of students by including skills from other grade levels.

One of the things I like about it is that each question contains hints for students to use, as well as videos that give instruction.  So even though students are working independently, they have many tools at their finger tips.

Each student has their own ID and password, so they can continue to work on exercises from home.  There is also potential to include parent e-mail addresses and include them in messages to students about assignments.

As students progress through the problems, they can have immediate feedback by clicking on the solution.  When they end their session, they are notified immediately about their progress.

Management and assessment is made easy for the teacher because the website includes in depth graphs and charts that enable you to see how many exercises each student attempted and answered successfully.

It’s hard to believe that it’s already the middle of October.  We had parent/teacher conferences this week.  The fall party is coming up in two weeks, and before you know it, we will be into the holiday season.  Our classroom has been a busy place. In fact I’ve been so busy, that this blog has been sadly neglected.

We have been spending way more time than I would like doing testing.  This year students are taking pretests and post tests for each unit in both math and reading.  The reading tests are being taken on-line.  That has been time consuming, first, to learn how to do it, then to help each student put in their unique code, and to share iPads with other classrooms so that we all have access to the necessary technology.   The positive side to these tests is that students immediately see their results, but I do worry that students will hurry through them.  I also wonder if reading comprehension is different when reading on-line as opposed to on paper.

It’s been slow going, but we still have managed to get started with our Kidblogs.  Before we put anything on line, however, we wrote paper blogs.  We learned about blogging and how blogs work.   Students wrote their first blog post on paper.  They glued their post to a poster and decorated it to make it look like a blog.  Then we hung them around the room. On top of the bulletin boards, on the white board, taped to bookshelves. To learn how to make comments, we saw a video created by Mrs. Yollis and her students in California.  Here is a link to Mrs. Yollis’s blog.
Armed with pencils and sticky notes we all moved around the room reading each other’s blogs and writing comments on the sticky notes.  We stuck the sticky notes to the blogs.  Some people tried to sneak back to their own blogs to read the comments, but they had to wait until the end.  When we were finished, everyone got their own blogs back and got to read the comments that had been left for them.

This was the first time I tried the paper blog idea, but I will definitely do it again.  The original idea comes from middle school teacher, Karen McMillan.  You can read about it on her blog, Notes from McTeach.

In an earlier post I wrote about Organizing My Classroom Library.  It  is working great!  I’m really impressed with the job my class librarians are doing in selecting new books for the class to choose from.  At the suggestion of Tracy Mercier, I adopted shopping days, and that has solved the problem of people who browse for books all the time, but never read.  On top of those advantages, I really love the way it looks.  It’s easier for students to put books away and much less cluttered.

Monday begins our 8th week of the school year, and we will be taking a writing assessment this week.  What’s going on in your classroom?  Is testing as big a part of your school day as it is ours?

Have you checked out Pinterest?  It’s another social networking site, but with a twist.  You really don’t interact with other people as much as you do with their ideas and interests.  Pinterest works like a virtual bulletin board.  You create boards about things you are interested in, and when you find websites, blogs, ideas or photos that you like, you pin them to your boards.

Like other social networks you follow other people, but in this case you follow their boards.  In other words you see the things they have pinned to their boards.  If you like it, you can repin to one of your boards.  I have boards titled Ideas for School, Food Ideas, Owls, Math, Dogs, Craft Ideas, and photography, to name a few.  If you are a visual person, you will love it!

Pinterest is a gold mine for teachers.  During the month or so I have been on Pinterest, I have gotten some great ideas for things to try in my classroom.  I have also been introduced to some fantastic blogs.  It has also made me more creative, as I work to put my own spin on things.

We’ve only been in school a week and a half, but here are some of the new things I tried, because of ideas I first saw on Pinterest.

Class Name Puzzle

The original idea for this puzzle poster came from a blog from Germany.  While I had a year of German back in college, it wasn’t enough to enable me to read the blog post. I managed to read the picture well enough to come up with this “getting to know you” activity for our first day of school.  It was a perfect fit for our “Capturing Kids Hearts” plans to engage and get to know students better.

It was a great illustration of the fact that everyone in our class is unique, but without everyone, our class would be incomplete.

I used a large piece of manila oak-tag, which I divided into 30 pieces (29 kids plus me).  I have student desks grouped, so to make it easier to reassemble the puzzle, I cut the puzzle into five sections with 6 puzzle pieces per section.  I traced the section on my dark blue mounting board.  I had the kids cut out their individual puzzle pieces.  I didn’t realize until I was ready to hand the sections out that I needed to mark the top of each piece, so students would draw and decorate their name upright and on the correct side.  When it was time to put the puzzle together, we called one group at a time to come up to fit their pieces.  It worked amazingly well.

Top Ten Posters

This was another great way to get to know students.  I saw a poster similar to this in the Really Good Stuff catalog.  Later I saw those posters pinned on Pinterest.  I decided to design my own.  I got out my scrapbooking “how to” books, to help me with the lettering.  I drew the poster free hand, then took it to a local copy place to have 11 x 17 copies of the poster made.

I tied the project into our Writer’s Workshop and grammar lessons.  It was a good way to review sentence structure and talk about writing complex sentences using vivid language.  I modeled the writing process, and designed my own poster, demonstrating how to add designs that added meaning to the poster.  If I hadn’t taken time to do that, I don’t think I would be getting the quality work that I’m seeing.

Each child is presenting their poster to the class a’ la David Letterman.  We’re having a lot of fun, I’m learning a lot about the kids, and it will make a nice display for the hall.

Good Bye Poem

I was looking for something to use as my Launch at the end of the day, (more Capturing Kids Hearts stuff.)  I saw a handwritten copy of this poem on Pinterest.  Later I saw where someone had created a poster with different colors and fonts for each line.  At first I just printed that one, but it did not have all the lines that I wanted to include.  That’s what gave me the idea to recreate it myself using Printshop Deluxe.  I found all the graphics in the Printshop library.

After printing off a small copy of the poster, I scanned it and made it into a jpeg, which I uploaded to Walgreens.  I was able to have the poster made for about $11.  I am very pleased with the results, and the kids and I are having a great time learning the lines to this poem.

Where are you finding inspiration as you begin your new school year?  What new things are you trying this year?

This is the beginning of my 25th year in the classroom.  During that time I have been responsible for setting up a classroom for eight different groups of first graders, one group of second graders, a group of third graders, and now my fifteenth group of fourth graders.  In that time I have learned a few tricks and shortcuts that have made this job easier.

When you teach elementary school, you write your students’ names dozens of times.  Student names are needed on desk tags, locker tags, nametags for students to wear the first few days of school, names on notebooks, names for folders.  This job is made easier for me by using the software program, Printshop Deluxe by Broderbund.

Once I get my class list, I use the software to create an address list with the kids names.  This list is important because I will insert student names in many of the projects I create.  Because I have used this for at least fifteen years, I save my templates from year to year.

I use various size labels to put names on notebooks and folders.  My really favorite trick, however, is to use the label templates but print on cardstock to make desk name tags, names and labels for my classroom jobs chart, the Daily 5 chart, and attendance charts.  I also make my locker tags this way.

You can use the Printshop Software to create posters. I use it to create signs for the classroom, vocabulary cards for the pocket charts, labels for my library and work tubs.  I use the postcard setting to make Homework passes, and other rewards.  I also create my back to school cards using the greeting card part of the software.  This year I used my rubber stamps for the graphics, but the text and the speed bubbles were created with Printshop.

If you enjoy desktop publishing, you’ll enjoy this.  I’m very visual, and I like the fancy fonts, photos and graphics that I can easily add to our classroom.  You can even upload your own photos.

Sometimes I use labels for story starters, or other information that I want to include in student planners or writer’s notebooks.  I usually only do this at the beginning of the year, because using labels can get expensive.

I have a very basic product, but you can get as fancy as you want.  There are many other brands out there as well.  I create my nametags and signs at home, and when I go to school I can quickly put them where they belong in the room. I do it at home, because I don’t have access to a color printer at school.  So it involves a small investment for ink, cardstock, and labels, but it’s well worth it to me.

Printshop Deluxe for school, is like duct tape and bungy cords for around the house.  I don’t know what I’d do without them.

What are some of your tricks of the trade that make beginning a new school year easier?  I am anxious to learn about them.

One of my projects for this summer was to sort and reorganize my classroom library.  After 24 years, I have accumulated a lot of books, in fact there are almost too many choices.  For several years my books have been sorted according to genre.  They were displayed in baskets, and labeled with the genre.  We talked a lot about book genres, but kids had a lot of trouble getting books back in the appropriate place.  Many didn’t even make an effort.  In other words, our classroom library was pretty much a mess.

Displaying books in tubs and baskets takes up a lot of space, so two years ago I decided to store about a third of my collection and rotate the books, so different books would be displayed throughout the year.  This did not work very well.  I had three large tubs of books that never even saw the light of day last year.

This year I am putting all the books on shelves, installing curtains on the book cases, and displaying tubs of books on top to choose from.  Instead of sorting by genre, I have divided books into fiction or non-fiction.  Hopefully this will help people get books back where they belong.  I also made myself weed out some of the old books.  In fact I threw out a whole trash can full of books that I know were at least 20 years old.  I have a really hard time doing that, and I know that I need to weed out more yet.   Here are the books after they have been organized on the shelves.

My plan is to have our class librarians, which is one of my classroom jobs, select new books to be displayed every two weeks.

I hadn’t done any sewing in a very long time, but I broke out the sewing machine last week.  I just made a simple curtain panel and installed them with tension curtain rods.  It was pretty easy.  Here is our library with the curtains installed.

Books that I check out from the school library or the Area Education Association library will be displayed at the front of the room in this teal  blue book shelf.  I usually do this for special units of study and our Core Knowledge topics.  I have a box of books ordered for our study of mountains and our science unit on rocks and mineral.  I also have an additional bookshelf for reference books.

With these changes, I hope that I can provide lots of choices to suit the tastes of all my readers.  I hope I can also cut down on some of the nonproductive  ”browsing” that some students do.  The library is sometimes a meeting place, but not much reading goes on.  And of course, I’m hoping to keep things better organized.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

How do you organize your classroom library?  If this doesn’t work, I’ll be looking for new ideas.

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So give it a try.  Get on Twitter and  meet other educators from around the world.  You will be amazed by the possibilities.

This summer I’ve been reading the book, Focus:  Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, by Mike Schmoker.  It was given to each of the teachers on our staff by our principal for summer reading.  Schmoker advocates Simplicity, Clarity and Priority.  By this he means we need to simplify our curriculum by cutting the number of standards down, selecting only the most important, and then teaching them thoroughly, using recognized good consistent teaching.  In his words, our focus should be:

“What We Teach: A decent, coherent curriculum with topics and standards collectively selected by a team of teachers from the school or district that is actually taught.

How We teach:  Ordinary, structurally sound lessons that employ the same basic formula that educators have known for decades, but few implement consistently.

Authentic Literacy:  Literacy or authentic literacy simply means purposeful and usually argumentative reading writing and talking.”

Mike Schmoker has published four books, including his best selling book, Results:  The Key to Continuous School Improvement and Results Now:  How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvements in Teaching and Learning.  He is a public speaker and he has been a school administrator and English teacher.

In reading this book I first had to get past my anger which was generated by the usual inflammatory rhetoric about education reform.  This included comments like

“Despite the central importance of reading and writing to general learning and college preparation, students rarely engage in authentic reading and writing activities, even in language arts.”

And

“Teachers routinely call on students who raise their hands throughout the course of most lessons (vivid confirmation that teachers aren’t clear on the most critical elements of a good lesson).”

Schmoker also complains that teachers spend too much time sitting.

I don’t know whose classroom he has visited, but he definitely has never been in mine, or in any other classroom in my building.  My kids are reading and writing all the time, and while I sometimes call on those who have their hands up, I make it a point to include everyone in our class discussions.

If I had just picked up this book on my own, I might have abandoned it because of those issues, but since it was a “gift” I continued reading.

While there are things I disagree with in this book, it has really confirmed a feeling I have had for a while now.  I had a really terrific group of kids last year, but because of my attempts to comply with district directives, I felt like I did a really lousy job of teaching reading.  As directed by the “Non-negotiables”  I taught each and every one of the little HM readers.  I continued to teach with chapter books as well, but because of the time devoted to the readers, our literature group reading and discussion was disjointed and frustrating.

Schmoker began winning me over when he began quoting E. D. Hirsch.  I teach in a Core Knowledge School, which is based on Hirsch’s beliefs that the ability to argue, evaluate, and reason are

“attained by studying a rich curriculum in math, literature, science, history, geography, music and art and learning higher-level skills in context . . . there is a scientific consensus that academic skill is highly dependent on specific relevant knowledge.”

E. D. Hirsch is the author of Cultural Literacy.  He believes we need a common base of knowledge as a culture and that in order to be critical thinkers, we have to have strong content knowledge.  We can’t understand much less evaluate ideas in the news, in a magazine, or in a textbook, if they contain too much unfamiliar information.

This strong basis of knowledge levels the playing field for all students.  This is something that I have witnessed for myself.  I have students blossom when they get to study important subjects like Medieval History and the American Revolution.  I have seen those who typically struggle in reading and writing enthusiastically sharing their learning through research projects and other forms of writing and discussion.  They know this is important grown-up stuff, and they are interested and excited to learn about these subjects.

According to Schmoker, students need to be reading in depth articles, and responding to them in writing.  He feels that standards need to be simplified so that only the most important are taught, but in depth.  He states, also that the most important factor is how teachers teach.  He embraces an explicit instruction model (a la Madeline Hunter) where the essential parts of a good lesson are a clearly stated objective, the teacher models and demonstrates the skills, followed by guided practice and frequent checks for understanding, and then independent practice.

He also advocates teaching primarily in a whole group situation.  I have some reservations here.  Having lived through the Whole Language period, I am a firm believer in differentiation.  It is in small group situations that I really have an opportunity to understand the root of a student’s misunderstandings, and that small group is also a safe place for students to accept additional help.  Schmoker says teachers can determine this by moving around the room and checking on students, but I can do this better in a more intimate grouping sitting with just a few students.

Schmoker feels that all of this intensive reading, arguing and writing is easily transferable to any age group.  I’m not as sure of that, but I do believe there are parts that can be beneficial for younger children, and definitely for upper elementary students.  He seems a little hung up on having students writing lengthy pieces.  Over time, I want them to include more thought and detail, but that needs to be a gradual transition.

Schmoker is not enthusiastic about technology in the classroom.   I will agree that indiscriminate use of technology wastes valuable academic time, but I have seen tremendous growth in reading and especially writing skills when children are allowed to utilize technology.  Students who have been reluctant writers are eager to write a blog post or post their writing as part of an on-line poster on Glogster.   The criteria is being sure that the technology supports and contributes to achieving your academic goals.

There are some things that I will take away from this book.  I like the idea of spending time reading good articles about social studies and science, and then having students process, discuss and argue the important points of what they have read.  I do agree with Schmoker that students have to be taught how to read closely, and how to annotate, and take notes.  Connecting to current events, history, and science makes everything we do so much more meaningful.

In reading, I am going back to what I used to do, which is read a lot of really great books, and then teach required objectives and skills using these books that are interesting and fun to read.  We’ll hit the HM readers, but for a very short time each week.

Over the years, I have written many study guides for the 4th grade books we read.  I have been thinking about ways to share those questions and activities with others.  At first I was going to start a second blog that would be devoted to this. Instead I revamped my old blog, Prospecting for Treasure.   Each time we do a book, and a good book is definitely a treasure, I will share our activities there.  That will include a summary and questions for deeper discussion, including any writing or journaling prompts I come up with.  So think of that blog as Day At the Reading Table to compliment this blog, Day In the Classroom.

It will be interested to see how my colleagues respond to this book, and whether they interpret Schmoker’s philosophies in the same way that I have.  I am looking forward to our  book discussion.