Monday Made-It!

For the first time all summer, I finally felt like thinking about school a little more today and created something for the Monday Made-It linky party over at 4th Grade Frolics.

I created a file folder game for my students to practice sorting foods by which part of a plant they are from.  Each spring we do a unit on plants and introduce the idea that different foods come from different parts of the plant by reading Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens.  It's a super cute trickster tale about a bear and a hare.  The hare tries to trick the bear and plants different plants so that he can harvest the part that has the food from each kind.  In the end, bear learns an important lesson. Check it out by clicking on the picture below

Anyways, after reading the story, they need more practice thinking about which part of the plant certain foods are from.  Enter the file folder game.  There are 6 wheelbarrows each with a plant part.  Students put each food into the correct wheelbarrow and then fill out a recording sheet.  To get this from my Teacher's Notebook store, click on the link or click on the first picture below.

                                                

Finally, for home, I made a canvas quote that says, "And they lived happily ever after."  My second anniversary is coming up in early August, and I am still working on getting more wedding pictures framed. Shhh.... So, this week I made a cute canvas to display with our anniversary date frame and a couple of wedding pics.

I bought a canvas at Michaels on sale, some wooden letters, and a bottle of Martha Stewart's glossy white paint.  I also used Tacky glue and matte white acrylic paint that I already had on hand.

Here is the inspiration that I pinned on Pinterest.

The $333.58 inspiration!

And, here is my $6 DIY :).  

The pictures don't do it justice.  Sorry about the poor quality.  The letters have a shimmer to them because I used the matte white to paint the whole canvas and the letters after I glued them on (2 coats each).  But, then I added a couple of coats of the shimmery white paint to just the front of the letters to make them stand out.  You could do this with any quote and any color.  You would just need a matte and glossy version of the same or very similar colors and paint the front of your letters with the glossy paint to make them pop!

Happy Monday!  

My Little Synthesizers!

Of the six main reading comprehension strategies....

• making connections
• inferring
• asking questions
• determining importance- non-fiction
• visualizing
• synthesizing...

I usually save synthesizing for last because it seems to be the most difficult for primary kids to grasp.  This spring, I tried something new to introduce each new strategy.  The book Comprehension Connections  explains how to use a concrete object to introduce each new strategy in order to give kids a context for understanding the strategy before trying to apply it to reading.  It's a great book, especially if you use a reader's workshop or Daily 5 format to teach reading.  Tanny McGregor gives tons of practical examples and ideas that you can try right away.  Click on the picture below to check it out.

So, for synthesizing, she suggests using nesting dolls (matryoshka dolls) to introduce synthesizing.  I put the nesting dolls on a table, gave them a quick background on the cultural aspect of nesting dolls, and asked them how the dolls reminded them of thinking.  There responses were impressive.  My second graders said things like,

• "It's like thinking because you know more the bigger you get."  
• "The dolls are like thinking because you're thinking gets bigger as you learn more."
• "In first grade, you know more than you did in kindergarten.  And, in second grade, you know more than you did in kindergarten and first grade."
• "The dolls are like thinking because they get bigger and as you learn more, your thinking gets bigger."

After a brief discussion, I took the set of nesting dolls and put them together starting with the smallest so that the kids could see how the smallest one fits inside the next one and so on.  Then, I asked them, "How did that remind you of thinking?"  Again, their responses were right on.  

• "It's like schema.  You have a file in your brain for different things.  When you learn something new, your schema file gets bigger just like the little dolls fit inside the bigger ones."
• "Your old schema goes together with your new schema."

Wow!  So, after a few more days of mini-lessons on synthesizing with music (I know an old lady....) and practicing with a wordless book, I felt like my second graders were ready to write their own definition of synthesizing.  They wrote a definition of synthesizing in their own words and decorated a set of nesting dolls since that was our concrete model of the strategy.  They did a wonderful job explaining synthesizing.  We also studied a few different sets of different nesting dolls and looked for common characteristics that we could include in our own (bright colors, flowers, dots/circles, etc.).

Here are a few examples:

Synthesizing means your thinking grows and changes throughout the book.
Like nesting dolls.

Synthesizing is you know a little about it and then you know some more and then you know a lot.

Synthesizing is when your thinking gets small then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger!
 Like nesting dolls!

Synthesizing is where your thinking is small.  Then it grows a little.  Then it grows more and more.
Then it's done growing.

Synthesize means my thinking grows as I get older.
Synthesize means you put all of your thinking in one file.

To get a copy of this activity sheet, visit my Teacher's Notebook store by clicking on the picture below.

Please let me know what you think.  How do you teach synthesizing to your primary students?

One Lovely Blog Award

I was so excited last week when I opened my email and saw a message from Miss H over at Little Miss Hood's Adventures in Kindergarten.  She gave me the One Lovely Blog Award.  Thank you so much!!

I am so excited to be able to pass this award on to 15 more bloggers.  Spending hours blog hopping is usually not a problem for me, so I enjoyed finding these 15 blogs to share with you and to give the award.  Please check them out.  I have gotten some wonderful ideas from each of them.

1.  Jessica at Welcome to Room 36!  - a kindergarten blog
2.  Lesson Plan SOS Teachers at Lesson Plan SOS
3.  Amy Lemons at Step into 2nd Grade with Mrs. Lemons
4.  Hope King at Shenanigans in Second
5.  Jamie at 2nd Grade Stuff
6.  Brooke Perry at Primary Perspective
7.  Jess at Rambling about Reading
8.  Jaime at What's the Buzz in First
9.  Kerri and Lindsay at Teacher Bits and Bobs
10.  Melissa at Joyful Learning in Kindergarten
11.  Gladys at Teaching in High Heels
12. Teri at A Cupcake for the Teacher
13.  Mrs. T at 3AM Teacher
14.  Kris at Teaching with Love
15.  Nancy at First Grade Wow

Here are the rules for receiving this award: 

1) Follow the person who gave you the award
 2) Link back to the person who gave you the award

3) Pass the award on to 15 new bloggers

Edible Earth Model and Interactive Writing

      As part of our Earth, Sun, and Moon unit, we created an edible Earth model after learning about the different layers of the Earth.  This could also be a really fun Earth Day activity.  Before we made the edible model, we studied non-fiction conventions and learned about being readers of non-fiction text.  Here are a few anchor charts we made.  The second picture is of a chart still in progress...I actually make a copy of the page from the book I use to model whichever convention I am teaching about for the day and glue it to the chart to help kids remember our learning together.

After we learned about diagrams and labels, together we labeled the diagram I created of the Layers of the Earth.

Then, we did some interactive writing and filled in missing information, sight words, and chunks while reviewing what we had learned about each of the layers.  Whenever possible, I really try to integrate science and social studies content into literacy.  So, we did this during our word work time.

Finally, we got to make our edible Earth model. I got the idea for the inner and outer core from a Pinterest picture of bite-size caramel apples with pretzel sticks in them.  

Edible Earth

For the four layers, we used:

         1.  inner core- apple (I used a fruit scoop.  It took about 3 apples for my class of 25 students).

               -The inner core is solid metal.  The apple was a good model of how the inner core is solid,         

         2.  outer core- caramel dip 

                -The outer core is made of molten rock, so the caramel has a similar consistency.

         3.  mantle- crushed graham crackers

                -The mantle is made of rock.

         4.  crust- crushed chocolate graham crackers

                -The crust is the outer covering of Earth, made of land and water.  

So, we used the chocolate graham crackers to look like land (soil).

The kids loved it and learned the layers of Earth.   Please let me know what you think and how it goes when you try it with your class!  

Donor's Choose for My Classroom Library

Hey everyone!  I'm sure many of you know about donorschoose.org.  If not, it's a website for teachers where you can go and create projects for materials you need in your classroom.  Anyone can donate and when it's fully funded, the items are shipped right to your school.

So, it is almost the end of match week.  Through tomorrow 3/19 at midnight, Donors Choose will match any credit card donation.  That means whatever someone donates toward a project is doubled.  If you're interested in checking it out and seeing an example of a project or even donating :), here's a link to my current project.

                                    Mrs. Kerola's Donors Choose Project
    I currently have a project for new non-fiction books and a new bookshelf.  As you can see in the picture below, my shelf space is limited and the small shelf isn't very stable.  And, looking ahead to implementing the Common Core standards, non-fiction is a much bigger focus than it has been in the past.

Our Class Library- This is from the beginning of the year.
We are out of shelf space and have no room for our new books.

So, if you are in need of some new materials for your class, check out donors choose.org.  

More to come later on organizing my classroom library.

Morning Meeting and the Moon!

I love morning meeting!  It is such a calm, focused way to start our day and build community in our classroom.  Beginning on the very first day of school, we meet in a circle on the meeting area carpet to begin our day.  At first, I lead the morning meeting but gradually release that responsibility until the kids are totally in charge!

The morning meeting is part of The Responsive Classroom philosophy of how to build a positive classroom culture.  A morning meeting usually has four parts, ending with the morning message:
                                                   
                                             1. Greeting
                                             2. News/sharing
                                             3. Activity
                                             4. Morning Message

There is a morning meeting book that is a great resource that I've used a lot when planning my morning meetings.  Click on the picture of the book below to check it out.

Ok, so I just wanted to get that plug in for morning meeting.  I will post more about it later with examples of greetings and activities I use.  But, I also just wanted to quickly share an example of how I try to integrate whatever content we are learning into our morning message each day.  We are in the middle of a unit on the Earth, Moon, and Sun (more to come on that unit).  Here is one of my morning messages from last week:

OOPS! I just noticed that this pic has the wrong date in the message.  One of my students noticed right away (of course :) and I fixed it but had already taken this picture before school.

We are learning about contractions right now so I put a line under "it is" and "we will" for the kids to fill in the contractions made from those words.  Also, I usually try to incorporate whatever chunks/word patterns we are learning about.  That day I wanted to review what we learned about how the moon isn't really changing shape but just looks like it so I asked a question that could start a quick review discussion. I make the morning message interactive so that it can serve as a quick review.

Oh, and I also try to change the greeting of the message each day to match something we are working on and help my kids see themselves in many ways.  That day they were strong readers.  Some other common greetings I use are:
                                        Dear authors,
                                        Dear mathematicians,
                                        Dear second graders,
                                        Dear boys and girls,
                                        Dear kind kids,
                                        Dear curious kids,
                                                 (when we are working on questioning)
                                        Dear teachers,
                                                 (when we are working on how-to writing)

During our current unit, I have also addressed them like this:
                                         Dear astronauts,
                                         Dear space explorers,
                                         Dear researchers,

Much more to come on morning meeting!  I would love to hear how you write morning messages or different greetings you use!

Martin Luther King Jr...better late than never!

So, I know that I am almost a month late on this post but I wanted to share a couple of quick and easy ways to teach about Martin Luther King Jr. through literacy.  If nothing else, you can pin it :) and save the ideas for next year.

In my second grade class, we started out by building our background knowledge about MLK Jr.'s life through some read alouds.  Here are a few that I used/would recommend:

During the read alouds, we payed attention to when we learned something new about him and recorded on our graphic organizer.

Finally, we made text-to-self connections and thought about how the stories we read about Dr. MLK Jr. reminded us of our own lives.  We turned those connections into a class book.

Here's the cover of our book.

To get this freebie for your own class, click here.

Here are a few of the pages from our book:

"I am like Martin Luther King Jr. because he likes

to the right thing.  And, I agree with his dream!"

"I am like Martin Luther King Jr. because I care about all
the people in the world and I want freedom!"

"I am like Martin Luther King Jr. because I like love.
I love black people and white people."

"I'm like Martin Luther King Jr. because I love everyone
no matter who they are! Even when they disappoint me.
No matter what!"

Please leave a comment and let me know if you try one of these ideas...or share what you do to teach MLK Jr. through literacy!