Venn Diagrams with a Dog's Day & A Cat's Day

These books are my FAVORITE for compare/contrast and point of view!'

One one side of the book the pet tells their side of the story, and in the other the human tells their side. The students are always shocked when I flip the book over and the story is different. This week, second graders worked as partners to Venn the two stories.

A Carousel of Social Media

My 6th graders are wrapping up a unit on Internet Safety. Our final lesson was about social media, and the best way to show what we know is through a carousel activity. Each table is assigned one topic to write about in a specific marker color. They talk and write for about 1-2 minutes and then will move to the next table/topic. They will read what has been written and add to it with their specific color until they have had a chance to talk about each topic. At the end, the original group will read their sheet and give a one sentence summary of their idea. The social media topics were: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Email. Having conversations about these tools is helpful in knowing who is using what!

Project READ- Jane Yolen's Dinosaurs

I LOVE Jane Yolen's Dinosaur books, so I used them as my theme for this month's Project READ! We made dinosaurs out of watercolored plates, colored dinosaur pictures, and played a game where we rolled a dice and added clothespins to a dinosaur's back. Then our treat was a dinosaur egg hunt with eggs filled with plastic dinosaurs, candy eggs, and goldfish crackers!

It's That Time Again... Book Fair!!

We are halfway through a busy week of Parent Lunch Week and Book Fair! Since we have no school on Friday, our days have been even busier. Students are also loving their free books from PTO. Thank you!!

Busy week of Ivan!

This week has been very busy with The One and Only Ivan as our One Book, One School project. Students have been LOVING this book and really empathizing and making connections. We had guest readers from our District Office, School Board, and community come to read to grade levels on Wednesday.

In addition, each of my classes has been doing an Ivan based project. 6th graders have been creating QR codes to link to Ivan websites using qrstuff.com, 5th graders came up with activity/game ideas for our school dance, 4th graders did mini-research "wonder" questions about animals, 3rd graders did a bookmark creation contest, 2nd did abcya storymaker jungle stories, 1st did tagxedos about the book, and K turned a letter "G" into a gorilla. We had a lot of fun this week! Next week is our grade 1/2 musical that is jungle themed and our all-school art show in a jungle theme too. Hope you can join us Thursday, February 25th 5-6:30 art show and 7pm performance!!

Organization Trial #99812

If you know me, you know I love to organize! The problem is, I have yet to find a GOOD way to organize 501 library cards. I used to have these small white bins that I put at tables with the cards for that day in there. Problems: I have to put them out and away each day, AND when kids return them on the wrong day, I can't find them because I store them in coupon organizers by day.

So, then I got these new pocket charts from my Scholastic points. They are magnetic (barely; had to reinforce with magnet clips) and I labeled each with teacher code and class number for students in grades 3-6 to take out and return as they check out. Problem: kids STILL don't return them and they don't look pretty. I did buy command hooks so maybe I will put them in a less obvious place.

Next problem.. crayons. My students do a lot of projects and responses that involve crayons or markers. So I have ziplock containers of them that I take out and collect. This is seeming to be a lot, I find crayons on the floor, etc. So I bought these new bins from amazon for crayons, pencils, and K-2 library cards. (I still pass out and collect these!)

So why not just throw in the towel and create a barcode binder? Because I want the students in grades 3-6 to be able to self check out. It really frees me up to help kids find books and shows them a sense of responsibility. Does anyone have any organizational tips they can share?!

Super 3 Project for 1st Grade

Our first graders are working on a Super 3 (Plan, Do, Review) project related to polar bears. We thought about what we already knew about them, read a non-fiction book together, wrote 2-3 facts we learned, then the next week read another book and added at least one new fact and a picture. This week, we read The Best Nest (image from bn.com) as an example of how you can always add to something to make it even better, and filled out our self-reflection rubric. Many really were able to reflect and choose something they could do better next time.