Monday Made It - Freebie and Giveaway

Normally I get quite bored and restless in the summer, but starting a blog and learning about Bloglovin, Linking, etc., has certainly kept me busy.  This is my 3rd link, and 1st with Tara's weekly Monday Made It.

 

 

First of all, let me explain that my husband is the cook (more like chef) in our house.  He enjoys cooking (not me) and "gets it"!  I need a recipe, and even then, it doesn't usually taste good.  My kids even groan when they see me cooking.  But I'm off in the summer, so I sometimes make more attempts.  This past week I made a pork tenderloin medallion dish, salmon and yellow fin tuna, and homemade pizzas.  All were good.  I totally did not intend to make the pizzas, but my husband got called back into work, and I had no choice.  We have a great little Breville pizza maker that was a gift last year, and I highly recommend it for anyone who has tried and tried to make pizza at home without much success.  Also, the trick is in making your own dough (which he already had made before getting called into work, otherwise I would have just ordered out!).  So I rolled the dough, added the toppings, and successfully put in and took out of the pizza maker.  Three pizzas, all good, and one was even round.  That's something my husband never even does.  So here's a pic of our pizza oven, and of my round pizza.  Looks a little burned in the pic, but it wasn't!

 

 

I'm really excited about how my next project turned out.  On my "to-do" list was creating a genre display for my class.  I just couldn't figure out what it should look like.  So I'm very grateful that my colleague came up with the great idea of a bookshelf.  It was a lot of fun to make, and I've added it to both my TpT store and Teacher's Notebook stores.  It is a FREEBIE in both stores, hope you find it useful.

FREE item on my TpT and Teacher's Notebook Store.

 

My last item to share is a Giveaway I created in my Teacher's Notebook store.  I just opened this store, and already seem to be doing much better than my TpT store, which surprises me.  Anyways, I think they are more creative in product/store promotion, and I'm having fun learning.  So yesterday I added a Giveaway.  It is my task card bundle, 8 sets designed specifically for 4th grade.  I'm giving away 3 of these, and it ends Friday.  I thought I'd try adding a bonus.  If I can get 20 followers by Friday, I'll make one of my better selling products free for the weekend.  I was shocked that I went from 2 followers to 11 in less than 24 hours!  Here is the link if you want to enter the giveaway.

My first Giveaway on Teacher's Notebook

 Lastly, I'm afraid I might be a "no reply blogger"!  I've followed the steps on several sites, and my settings all seem to be okay, but a friend was unable to reply in an email.  Also, I've been commenting on several blogs on Bloglovin, but I don't seem to have links to my blog/email in my comments like others do.  Any advice here would be helpful.

Five for Friday 7-11

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching Five for Friday.

Here are some events from my past week:

Even though the 4th of July was last Friday, we had our big celebration at my dad's lake on Saturday.  Day with family and fireworks are great, but the highlight was running with my two children in the annual Posey Lake race.  This year the proceeds went to juvenile diabetes, which was nice since I had a boy in my class last year with JD.

My brother has been in town all week.  He is 18 years younger than me, and only 10 years older than my daughter.  So he enjoys playing with the my kids (like in the pool pic below), but we also enjoy having great discussions over a beer or two together.  He heads back to Colorado today, and will start his final year at CU Denver!

 

 

My school "To Do" list is getting smaller!!  Although, I keep adding to it. 

 

 

One of the items from my list that I finished this week was the presentation and activity I made to do the Collaborative Conversation mini-lesson from the Smart Start portion of our new series by McGraw Hill Wonders.  It has a "Teamwork" theme, includes speaking and listening goals (with hangable posters), and an activity for students to practice with 8 teamwork quotes.  Very happy with how it turned out.

My product on TpT and Teacher's Notebook

 

My blog is new, I guess it's still really just a diary at this point, since I only have one follower, and I'm pretty sure she is only following me because I followed her.  Anyways, even if my blog never takes off, I've enjoyed the learning process.  This week I've learned how to "link-up".  This is my second link, and I have to admit, I'm was amazed at how simple it was!

Back to School Goals

UPDATE:  Wouldn't you know, I first added my link to the wrong section...  So if anyone is looking at this from the link-up of last year's goal reflections, here's a quick recap:  Last year was a new grade (newish, I had taught 4th grade many years before - but pre CCSS).  I planned out the whole year, revised, revised, revised, and revised.  Happy overall, but totally looking forward to year two in 4th grade for 2014-15.  What's new this year is new reading series.  My blog is mainly dedicated to implementing this series.  So if you use McGraw Hill Wonders, please follow me, and join in my conversations!

Well, here goes my first attempt to link to another blog.  I've just started blogging, and found bloglovin.  I'm amazed at how blogging has changed from when I first learned about it many years ago.  So many great blogs out there, yet weeding through to find the great ones is a daunting task.

So I'm linking up with I {Heart} Recess to do one of my favorite things...setting goals.

 

More about my goals:

Personal: I tend to be an all-or-nothing person.  Two years ago I ran my first 5k, within a year I ran a full marathon.  Then I pretty much stopped running.  I need to find a way to moderately incorporate exercise into my life and keep it that way.

Organization: I also tend to get so excited about what's next, that I hate to do tasks associated with events that already happened, such as filing.

Planning: Writing has always been my Achille's Heal.  Maybe better planning will excite me and the students.

Professional:  Last year, and this coming year, I have the inclusion classroom.  That means 2 out of the 3 ELA classes I teach, I will have the inclusion teacher in my room.  I need to find a way to make having 2 teachers most effective for the students.

Students:  I just said good-bye to students I had for 2 years.  I knew them very well.  Being a part of a team of 3 means that I will spend only 70 minutes a day with most of the students on my team.  I need to find a way to get to know them during this small window, and make them feel important and loved.

Motto:  Speaks for itself.

Teaching Teamwork & the Routine for Collaborative Conversations

My product on TpT and Teacher's Notebook

I feel like a broken record!  Again, this project was created to help guide the Smart Start lesson of Collaborative Conversations.  I love collaboration, and almost always have my students' desks in groups for that reason.  Although I have always had a discussion about collaboration, cooperation, and communication, I was glad to finally make an "official" presentation to teach this.

After going through what teamwork is, and why it's important, I made slides that have listening goals and speaking goals.  Like my other projects, I intend to hang these in my room for reference.  I used CCSS for Speaking and Listening, and the wording in the two Smart Start lesson plans help me to write goals that I felt were appropriate and understandable.

Then, time to put those skills to the test!  I love quotes, and so I found some great quotes about teamwork.  My task is to have students discuss these in their groups, and then choose one to share with the class, and their reason for sharing.  I'm planning to do some observation during this, and take notes of things I see during their conversations (good and bad) to discuss with the class at the end.

Introducing Writing Traits

Just like my Close Reading project, I created a presentation and posters for writing traits for the same reason.  Much of the Smart Start mini-lessons say, "tell students that...." or "explain to students that..."  Personally, I need visuals, and I think that most 4th grade students are more visual learners too.  Presentations give students that second avenue for accessing information, plus they help guide my instruction.  This presentation is meant to give students an overview to the 6 writing traits, the writing process, and how writing will be integrated into their learning this year.

I started with a slide asking students, "What makes a good writer?"  I plan to give them time to talk with their group, and then we will discuss as a class.  Hopefully, most of their ideas will fit into the later slides.  I decided to generate a list of adjectives for writers: interesting, engaging, knowledgeable, descriptive, flowing, genuine, and sophisticated.  Then each of these adjectives are used for the different traits. 

I plan to hang each of the trait posters in my room for reference throughout the year.  It was easy then to print all six in mini-size for students to glue into the front of their writing spirals.  I also made matching sticker labels to be printed onto 2" x 4" Avery labels for the front of their spirals.  I love the graphics I used for this that I purchased a while ago from Scrappin' Doodles TpT store.  I love her stuff!

Teaching All Reading and Language Standards by Unit 4

There's a lot in this post, so before you read, please know that all of these materials are free, and available in my TpT store, and my new store in Teacher's Notebook.  I spent a lot of time on them, so I hope others find them useful.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, after charting out the assessed standards on both the weekly assessments and selection tests, only 7 of the 19 RL and RI standards are assessed through their questions.  That's not my evaluation of their questions, but their own labeling.  Likewise, they only assess on the L4 and L5 standards.  And I'm still not sure why they keep throwing in some 3rd grade standards on these assessments???

So, as I've done before, I will again be writing my own questions to go with the weekly stories.  But first I needed to layout a plan for coverage.  I started by looking at which standards they clearly aligned with each unit, and then took the remaining standards, and added them where they best fit.  When Kelley and I met last week, we put the finishing touches on this, and also did this with the language standards.


The idea of covering all of these in the first 4 units is because of testing:(  With the Smart Start, and the natural slow start anyways at the beginning of the year, I don't expect to get much farther than Unit 1 before the end of the first quarter.  The second quarter is always chopped up with conferences, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.  So I also would like to spread out Unit 2.  Since this unit has the Poetry, Drama, Prose standard, there are a lot of fun activities that could be done instead of a story on the shorter weeks.  Unit 3 will likely start after Christmas (technically still our 2nd quarter for a couple of weeks) and then Unit 4 should go uninterrupted (if we don't have a winter like last year) and finish before the end of the 3rd quarter.  Then, it's a great time to review all standards with the remaining stories in Units 5 and 6, and prepare the students for State testing.  This year begins our switch to PARCC.

Additional materials I've created to align to this plan are student assessment pages, Unit cover pages with more detailed standard language, pages to keep track of resources, and student "I Can" posters to hang.

The student assessment page is similar to the format I used last year to help keep track of data for our standards-based grade card.  Only last year was one page with ALL reading and language standards.  It was too much, and I needed new ones every quarter.  This is the front (there is a back) and it is one page for each students for the entire year.  This way I can chart student progress on one sheet.  Each unit has the standards assessed that unit in the top, white portion, and the already taught standards in the smaller gray, bottom portion.  This is just a place to track issues when a student misses a question on a reviewed standard.  It certainly is more work to keep grades this way, but it is nice when you need to discuss student progress in a meeting, or just for yourself, all in one place!

The pages above are for my personal use.  I intend to put the left page in the front see-through pocket of my binder for reference, and the other page inside.  There's nothing worse than finishing a lesson, and then remembering that great resource you have that would have been perfect!  This will hopefully help remind me of those resources before I teach the lesson.  Below are the posters.  Last year we created very nice "I Can" posters for each unit, and hung them as we went.  Obviously we needed to redo this, but it's okay because the second time is always better.  This time, we will have a poster that has the standards that we will assess on ALL units, one for each Unit, and then we made a 6th poster for language.  The language doesn't have all standards, but those they should be thinking about in their daily writing.  These can be hung in the small 8.5 x 11 version, but I'd like to find another great deal on Vistaprint to order these as large posters like our last ones.

Teaching Students about Close Reading

Even though I've been tempted to work on other projects, I started this a little while ago and am determined to stick with started projects until they are finished.

The Smart Start has two lessons on Close Reading.  ACT (Accessing Complex Text) is something that McGraw Hill Wonders uses for mini-lessons on Close Reading throughout the series.  Even though most of the information on this seems to be for the teachers, I felt that it is important to also explain these ideas to students, and then give them reference materials to use throughout the year.  A while ago when TpT was having a site-wide sale, I purchased several cute clip art sets from Scrappin' Doodles, including these detective monsters.  Since I paid for this clip art, I did set a price for this item that I added to my store, but my next Wonders project will be a freebie.

Teaching students about Close Reading of complex text.