Fab Vocab!

When you read aloud to your class, you come across lots of great vocabulary words, right?  There is so much rich conversation around these words that happens when we are having story discussions, but what happens to those amazing new words after that?  If you don't keep using them, they just flutter away when the book ends.
Now, don't get me wrong.  I don't expect my firsties to remember and use tons of new story vocabulary, especially if there isn't anything to "stick" it to our classroom lives (for example, some of the farm vocabulary in Charlotte's Web, which I adore, and read every year).  But there are lots of colorful, descriptive words that we come across in books that the kids could be using in everyday life if we scaffold it.
How do I do that in my classroom?  I keep a stack of index cards and a Sharpie nearby when I am reading and when I come to a word that I think is fascinating (oh I definitely play up cool new words), I'll say something like, "Wow, that's a great/smart/interesting new word! (Or "whoa, that sounds like a high school word!" - They think that is the super coolest  thing ever)  How can I remember that word?"  I'll scratch my chin and look around and then amazingly find just what I needed to jot that word down!  So I'll write it down and say it a few times (of course, the kids get into it too, they like to say fancy new words).  And then I'll look all confused again and say, "Wait, what did that mean?"  And since we discussed it in story context, they are more than happy to remind me.  So smart, those firsties.  So smart.  
Then I wonder aloud how I can remember what it means.  Sometimes a problem solver will suggest to draw a picture.  If they don't, I'll suggest it after they've given me some ideas. Now, all of this takes a very brief amount of time, and I don't want to stop and draw right now and totally lose the mojo of the story.  So I'll ask if anyone can do me the huge favor of reminding us all what that word means.  I am never short on volunteers for that job.  I'll pick someone, they take the card to their table and illustrate while we continue reading.  They keep listening too, and often I'll find my illustrators stopping to look up at the story, staying connected.
When the illustration is done, they bring it back to me (usually I am still reading) and I just quietly reach out my hand to take it.  I'll lay the card down until after the story and then show it to the class.  I do ask the illustrator to put his/her name on the back.  Then I add it to the "FAB VOCAB" section on our word wall.  These are not like our sight words on the word wall - I do not expect them to be spelled correctly, etc., should the kids use them in their writing.  And the great thing is that they do!  Once a fab vocab word goes up, I'll use it if I can when I am teaching or talking and the kids follow my lead.  It's pretty awesome at the end of the year to have a nice collection of great vocab words and kids who actually use them in everyday language!  (Many of my kids speak English very well but are bilingual, often speaking Chinese or several Indian dialects at home, and they still get to know lots of great new words!)

Of course, I don't do this with every new word in every book we read*.  Lots of times the kids will ask to put new words on the Fab Vocab board and I'll say "Not right now", mainly because it would take way too much time to do that with every new word in every book I read.  We save it mainly for our chapter books and I do refer to it during writing lessons on word choice, but it is always there.  At the end of the year, I just pull them down and send them home with the illustrators.
*I also don't have a plan at all... like... ever... for what words will go up here.  It happens completely in the moment when we read new and interesting words in context, so every year the Fab Vocab board is totally different!
How do you help your kids to hang on to some of the new and rich language in the stories that you read together?

July Currently

Hey guys!  I know, it's been a while... We finished school at the end of June and I needed a little bit of a break from all things schooly!  This year was great in some ways and very challenging in others so I do welcome the drop in intensity that comes with summer!  Today I am linking up with Farley at Oh Boy Fourth Grade for a July "Currently"!

The end of school was crazy busy and then my kids were in school a week longer so I was able to go in to some of their events, which was so much FUN!  We live in an area with lots of parents who stay at home, so I know it can be hard for my girls sometimes that mom and dad can't come in for all of their events.  But they are so sweet and understanding, and we get to as much as we can.  I use pretty much all of my personal days for their school events.  This year, that included an awesome Philly Zoo field trip for my own first grader and the Locks of Love event at her school where she proudly donated her long hair to help make wigs for children who have illnesses that result in hair loss.

 So proud of my little cutie!  

Now we are juggling children's theater camp in the morning for my little one and in the afternoon for my middle schooler.  Mom's taxi is racking up trips but I really don't mind... it's nice to have to go outside a few times a day, even in this 95 degree heat!  (My classroom was like the arctic this year, so having to go out into the sun is a welcome change.  Fortunately, my blower did get fixed at the end of the year!).

Once I had a little breather, I was able to work on some TpT projects that I wanted to get done - updating my fall and winter writing paper packs, adding summer, and bundling all 4:

 

 Then I created a set of calendar cards and monthly headers for a friend who is doing a full year maternity leave in first grade this coming year (her first full year, congrats Erika!) and wants a Polar Pals polar bear theme:

Then, because I was thinking about the beginning of the year and what might make life in September the teeniest bit easier for myself and other teachers, I made this Grandparents Day freebie pack:

Click to download FREE!  Enjoy!

I hope you are all enjoying the summer!  Looks like the storms are headed our way so we'll see whether our upcoming fun events will work out (Trenton Thunder baseball game with fireworks, friend's party, family pool day!)!  Fingers crossed but I'm not so sure lol...  Happy early 4th!

16 more days...

This time of year is always bittersweet.  We have 16 school days left with the kiddos, and though that equates to about three more weeks, we are definitely in the final push.  I have only one DRA left to do, my DSAs (word study assessments) are done, the kids have completed their self portraits and letters to their second grade teachers... all that stuff that goes along to their second grade teacher. Of course, we are still working... we just planted seeds, are deep into close reading, are writing memoirs, and are learning addition and subtraction strategies to take us into more difficult skills.  (You know how it is... if we don't do meaningful work right up until the end, the natives will go wild!  Lol). I am starting to feel sentimental about my kids moving on, even though this has been one of my more challenging classes.  I found this great project on Pinterest that I just finished and framed to send home to parents:

I wish you could see my kids' faces, they are just precious.  My two little future CIA Agents (they actually said "Good guy spy for the president"... but I couldn't fit that on the chalkboard) are just peeking over the chalkboard, all secretive.  So cute.  It was not my original idea... it came from Pinterest, where it links back to this blog post on We Are Teachers: 

You just take pictures and then plug them into one of the (free) pre-made collages on PicMonkey.  I tried my version in black and white, but I liked it better in color with the polka dot background (which I added later in Power Point).  Then I went to the Dollar Store and bought cutie patootie color frames (pink, green, and blue) for them.  I am going to tie them up with a ribbon and add a poem to thank the parents for their help and getting to spend my days with their little loves.

One more little way I am going to make the end of the year special is by changing my SMARTboard attendance to a graduation theme once June rolls around.  I just posted these.  Happy end of the year!

SMARTboard attendance - Graduation Theme

I made this one for my class, The Wise Owls, but anyone can grab it on TpT!

SMARTboard Attendance - Graduation Owl Theme

Happy summer to those of you who are already out and... 16 more days!!! :)

Hoppy Spring!

Did you have to make up any days during spring break because of all the snow this winter?  This past week was our spring break and we had to go in on Thursday only.  I know, it seems crazy to go in for one day in the middle of a week off, but it was on our calendar from the beginning as an Emergency Day, so we knew it was a possibility.  We've done it before, I'm not complaining, no big deal.  And I actually had 17 of my 21 kids, so I'm guessing some parents out there were probably glad school was open! :)  
The only real problem with coming in for one day in the middle of the break is that that day is like an island in the Sea of Days Before and Days After.  It's very hard to do good academic work that flows from what we did in class a week ago or what we will do when we go back on Monday, so most of us did a mix of academic stand-alone activities and fun spring or Easter things.   One thing we really enjoyed was reading The Easter Egg by one of our favorite author/illustrators, Jan Brett.

It's an adorable story that reminds me of Arthur Writes a Story, with its message of finding your own way to do something great.  After reading, we did some of the great activities in this free TpT pack by Smiles from Second Grade, including story mapping, summarizing, and designing our own Easter eggs.

And some writing from my Spring Writing Paper pack:

And boy was it refreshing to take the time to do crafts... something I know most of us feel like we can't justify anymore on normal school days even though in our hearts we feel like it's right for our kiddos to cut and color and glue. :(  It was a great way to make this oddball day into something special!

So I walked into my classroom Thursday morning and said to myself, "Hmm.  What can we make with stuff I already have here?"  And.... voila!

Easter bunnies!  So.  Easy.  And cute!  I used lightweight tagboard and cut the egg shapes.  (The kids could certainly do it themselves with tracers or directions, but it was faster for me to cut them - I did it freehand, 5 at a time).  Then I drew the bunny head shape, hands, and feet onto one piece of white paper and photocopied it onto lightweight white tagboard (one page per student).  I wish I had it here for you to download, but I left it at school - Anyway, it's super easy to draw them. :)
In the morning, I put out cotton balls on each table along with 6 colors of tempera paint (like I said, I used what I already had... I took out any colors that looked springy!).  I modeled for the kids how to blot the cotton ball into the paint and then use it to decorate their eggs.  I kept a paper plate on each table for used cotton balls.

I showed the kids that they could blot in stripes or randomly but they came up with some pretty good ideas.  They loved getting creative!

Tempera paint dries relatively quickly.  We put them in the hallway to dry.  Later in the day, I had the kids cut out the heads/hands/feet.  They decorated the bunny heads however they wanted with crayons and Twistables (like colored pencils).  We glued hands and feet with glue sticks and heads (since they were a little heavier) with white glue in glue bottles.

Hehe... you can see one of my little friends at the bottom added a hat... because we watched Here Comes Peter Cottontail and he had a hat in the video. :)  I love they they came out so springy and each one has its own personality!  Happy Easter!

SMARTboard Attendance Fun!

One of my favorite things to create is SMARTboard attendance files.  The kids love them because they get to move something around the SMARTboard with their names on it. SMARTboard attendance is great at the beginning of the year if your kids (like mine) have never used a SMARTboard before.  Because they have to do attendance every morning, it gives them a daily interaction with the SMARTboard.  They learn that it's ok to press kind of hard (some kiddies have such a light touch in the beginning) and they figure out how to manipulate items on the board.  I recently updated the very first one I ever made to match my own owly classroom, and I still love it.  Click on the picture to check it out in my TpT store:

Once I got the hang of making SMARTboard attendance files, they became one of my favorite things to make.  I made some to match my colleagues' classrooms:

And then some that are seasonal or holiday themed:

And some just for fun!

Here is my latest one.  I just made it last night after a very trying week, and it cheered me right up!  I plan to use this one ONLY on student birthdays to make the day extra special.  Of course, it will have to wait until next year since so many birthdays have already gone by now that it's March... but I have it ready to go and it's already one of my favorites! 

Which one do you like best?  What things do you love to create? :)

Taking Care of Their Hearts (AKA Mid-Year Social Skills)

Hey, friends. I was all set to do a completely different blog post today, one about the math work we are doing right now, including a freebie and announcing the upcoming TpT sale.  And I'll get to that post soon, but today, something else, something arguably more important, has stopped me in my tracks.
The tagline of my blog and TpT store is "Taking care of little minds and hearts".  Yes, the academics are important. But equally important is the fact that my babies are six and seven, and sometimes being six and seven is hard. And being adults long past six or seven, sometimes we have to consciously remind ourselves of this.
Today we were waiting for buses and there were only a few kids left in my classroom, happily chatting and playing Silent Owl (silent ball with a stuffed owl). I was walking around the classroom, changing the date and class schedule on the whiteboard to get ready for tomorrow, and tidying up around the room.  And there on the floor near our coat closet, I found this:

Cute, huh?  I'm not sure exactly what is going on in this picture, maybe a birthday party with a balloon and cake?  At a swimming pool?  Outside in the sun?  Regardless, it's cute.  Smiling people, clearly a picture about something that made the child artist happy. And then I turned it over to look for a name.  And I saw this:

I literally felt my heart sink.  The rest of the kids were called to their buses and the room was empty and I was standing there holding a picture that someone felt the need to write that on.  I have no idea whose it is. The spelling doesn't give it away because I have a very high class this year and many of them would have no trouble writing this well.
So now I am trying to decide what to do.  My class this year has needed a lot of work on social skills, taking turns, working together, thinking of others.  If you remember, in one of my recent posts, some of them truly thought that doing their homework was considered an act of kindness.  The thing is, not one of them is a mean kid.  Sometimes you have really difficult and negative kids or kids who have poor attitudes or are mean to others.  My kids are not like that.  Each one of them is truly very sweet, but I have a lot of kids who struggle with impulse control and think of themselves before others.  Some of this is just the egocentricity of their age, and some of it I think it just the mix of personalities and the fact that a group of my boys are neighbors and it's a lot of togetherness. They are all really neat kids, some just happen to need more work on social skills.  And so tomorrow, we will take the time to address this in an impromptu class meeting.  I don't even plan to show them the picture, just bring it up as a hypothetical and act out some solutions.  We do this pretty regularly, and I have seen some improvements.
Which brings me to some of the other things that have helped my class to take care of each others' hearts this and every year:
1. The Social Skills Picture Book:

I. Love. This. Book.  Yes, it is technically a book for students with autism.  But it's also just a book that clearly names and defines basic social skills.  I was introduced to it by a longtime first grade teacher who used it in her class for years, and I have used it with my class every September for the past few years.  It's not a book you read to the kids.  But it introduces some basic social skills that are important to every class, such as taking turns when talking, how to listen, "don't be a space invader" (personal space), etc.  It gives very clear names to these behaviors and includes realistic pictures of the behaviors.  I usually introduce one social skill during most morning meetings and act out examples as well as nonexamples. (The kids find nonexamples hilarious, but they are actually a comfortable way to show kids - "Hey!  You know how you've been shoving to get in line first?  Not cool. Try this instead.")  Plus it gives our class common language for expectations and redirection.
2. Monthly class meetings:
We start each month with a class meeting.  We begin by sitting in a circle and doing affirmations.  I start by turning my body to the student to my left and I say, "Good afternoon, Milo.  I like you because when things are hard, you keep trying." Then Milo says thank you and tells me why he likes me.  Then he turns to the person on the other side of him and starts a new affirmation.  We go the whole way around the circle.  It actually only takes a few minutes because my students know they have to listen to other people's affirmations and give them respectful quiet while they are talking (this is your basic Responsive Classroom stuff).  Affirmations have to be about "inside" things, not about what they are wearing, or how fun their birthday party was.

The next thing we do at class meetings is a shared writing chart of four Gator Greats for the month that just passed (our school mascot is a Gator) and then three Gator Goals for the new month. The kids are the ones who come up with things they feel proud about (greats) and the things they know we need to work on (goals).  Sometimes they are academic (we had just started How-to writing, so they thought a good goal would be to learn all about it and get good at it!), and sometimes they are behavioral (clearly, lol).  But they are always student-generated, which I think makes them feel more genuine to the kids and makes them more committed to working on them.  We post these in the room until the next month's class meeting.
3. Class Dojo

We started using Class Dojo in January and it is AMAZING.  It's a classroom management tool that allows you to give or remove points for specific behaviors.  The picture above is of a demo class, not my real class, because I didn't want to publicize how many points my kids really have.  It is free and SUPER EASY.  You just sign up at their website, plug in your kids' names (I just use first names), and it gives each student a silly monster avatar. I keep it up on the SMARTboard for parts of the day, and you can also download the app for your phone or iPad so you can take it with you and your kids have the same behavior expectations everywhere you go (even just walking down the hall!).
You can use the pre-made positive and negative behaviors, or you can make your own to use.  Here are mine.  Positive:

.. and Negative:

It keeps a running total, and the kids can visually see what they are gaining and losing points for.  It has really helped my kids to self-monitor their behavior, which has majorly turned some behaviors around. Also, if you are interested, you can give the parents codes to log in and they can see their kids' points (and only theirs) at any time, including what the behaviors were that they gained or lost for. This can be great at report card and conference time - behaviors are all recorded without me keeping notes and parents can't say they didn't know. This has been a HUGE help to me this year, and I find myself redirecting kids much less since they know that their own choices matter.  When kids earn 10 points, I let them pick a prize from the prize bin (you could also use simple prizes like iPad time) .  At the end of the day, you can see a whole class pie chart like this: This has really made my class want to work together to get that 100% positive, where nothing else worked quite so well to bring them together.  We had our first 100% on the hundredth day, which we HAD to celebrate with a pajama day later that week. 4. Reading and Writing Buddies who take care of each others' hearts. I include this in my partner work minilessons.  When we learn how to be good reading buddies, we learn that our buddies will make mistakes.  We don't laugh, we don't make fun, we don't jump in and solve words for them.  We act like coaches and talk to your buddy's heart.  (Your soccer coach wouldn't run out and score the goal for you, he'd remind you to use your strategies).  Same thing with writing buddies - we do need to tell each other when things need to be fixed.  But we do it with both your buddy's work and heart in mind.  We chart examples of how to tell your buddy to make revisions ("I think you need a period here" instead of "You forgot a period!").  We practice.  And practice.  And practice.  
I really do think that with first graders, and many kids, they don't mean to do things that hurt others, they are just so darn impulsive.  So I try hard to keep things positive while giving my kids the skills to solve problems verbally with each other and an open enough classroom that we can talk about problems we are having and solve them together.  My kids know that it is a big deal to me when they are Problem Solvers.  A big part of this is having the tools to fix hurting hearts because little hearts get hurt easily.  I constantly use language about the heart.  I tell the kids they make my heart smile or make my heart shine.  I tell them how important it is to take care of each others' hearts. And we'll talk about that tomorrow and how we can save someone's heart who is scared to show a beautiful picture because someone might make fun of it.