First Days of School

I seriously love my job!! Especially since my week is already over! ;) I got to meet some of the sweetest kiddos this week and we had a lot of fun getting to know each other!

Here are a couple of things that we started on this week...

Making Books

Definitely my favorite way to start writing. A blank stapled book.  I had books sitting at their seats when they came in and told them to write about something they did this summer. I learned lots about them as writers. The different responses to the task is always precious and the look in their eyes as their ideas start forming is WONDERFUL! I can't wait to jump into our writer's workshop next week. 

Who Am I as a Reader/Writer

I made these sheets specifically for the first days of school. It was a helpful way to get to the kiddos--their interests in reading, what they like to write, what kind of read alouds will hold their attention the best, what genres they know.

I had several of the following response...

It makes perfect sense! :)

Marshmallow Challenge

I wasn't sure if I wanted to do this, but was so glad I decided too! Any opportunity to see kids have to collaborate and work together is great! I did this last year, but waited until we had been in school a week or two. We had the best discussion afterwards about teamwork and I loved watching how hard the kids worked and that they persevered through the task!

They all agreed that the task was difficult, especially because they didn't always get to use their idea, they had to think about other people's ideas too. If you want more info about the marshmallow challenge go {here}.

iBooks

We call our interactive notebooks iBooks here. I told the kids they were getting iBooks and they got all excited...and then I told them to pull out the black notebook in their backpacks... ;) We got started on our Literature iBook as we started talking about characters. 

I really do like using them to help us keep up with our notes and learning! Tuesday we read a couple chapters of Because of Winn Dixie and then talked about the characters while we worked on the pages. On Wednesday we continued to talk about characters in our different read alouds and it was good to keep the connection going! I'm still in the process of finishing the first unit, but once it is done I will be adding it to my TPT store! :)

Read Alouds

Here's a peek at the read alouds we used this week to celebrate being Back and School and to brainstorm before writing our Essential Agreements. 

Always a fun one!

Just because they need to get to know my favorite author! ;)

I haven't used this book before, but it is a Beautiful story and the kids really thought through how we should treat others.

It's not back to school time unless we read this one! :)

Of course, back to school days would not be complete unless I find out what the kids want to learn about this year! :) It's a great way to get them used to my quick check/exit slip system too! :)

There's a snapshot of our back to school fun! Next week we dive deeper into characters and setting and we will get started with Writer's Workshop!

Hope your back to school was fabulous too!

Teamwork Time #3: Collaborating Across the Grade Levels!

After the beginning of the year, I can get so focused on academics that some other areas suffer, but as I have been reflecting I realized that we needed to start building in teamwork time again. It's that time of year when behavior issues can start flaring up and often it comes back to the fact that kids don't always know how to appropriately play and interact with each other. Here are a couple of things we have been up to recently!

Inquiry Buddies

One thing I have been able to start back up this year after a year or two break was book buddies with an older class. Except the other teacher and I decided our kids would be inquiry buddies because we wanted to engage in a variety of activities this year!

We have done book buddies twice and another time played games. Have you watched kids play games these days? It is interesting... taking turns in a circle, playing by the rules, problem solving, I have realized do not come naturally. So we had 4th and 1st graders spread out all over the room playing sorry, trouble, memory, jenga, headbandz, etc. For the most part they played the games well and it was good for the first graders to learn from the 4th graders.

Last week, we did our first inquiry project together! After watching the Landfill Harmonic we got to work using some trash to create treasures!

I've done a similar project before but I noticed that my kids had some ideas, but they were able to get a lot more elaborate with the help of the 4th graders! 

The 4th graders were so sweet to work with my kiddos too and help build off of their ideas! 

We had a great time collaborating and I am already thinking of some ways that we can work together when we start our next unit!

Problem Solving Words

I think this comes from the The First Six Weeks of School (Strategies for Teachers)

or The Morning Meeting Book and I have used it for several years, but this year I have really pushed it and I hear the kids using it all the time! So often we tell kids to problem solve, but do not give them the words to do it. A couple weeks into the school year we will talk about our problem solving words and then we talk about scenarios and kids practice the language. Once they have the language to problem solve they can take ownership of their solutions. Besides, no teacher has time to problem solve every "he stole my pencil" situation! ;) We talk about how these can be used for happy feelings too and try to use it in both situations. We also discussed different feeling words because I have noticed that can be lacking in their vocabulary as well.

This year I have a Peace Keeper, for super tricky situations, but they haven't really had to do their job at all. I saw another teacher tell two kids that we end our problems with a hug, hand shake, or high five to show we are friends again, so I have encouraged my kids to do that too. And really, by the time the boys complete their little secret hand shake, it seems like they have pretty much forgotten what the problem was in the first place!

Our next focus for building collaboration/teamwork are some of those social skills that are keeping us from moving forward in building that deeper trust and collaboration. One of our school's amazing teachers has provided us with some social skills lessons that we are going to work through over the next several weeks. I'm excited to use them and hope that it will start to bring about some of the change I need to see in a couple of those kids that are struggling! It may mean losing some minutes for a workshop station, but when it comes down to it, I think keeping a focus all through out the year on building those collaboration skills will be more beneficial to their academic careers!

You can see my other teamwork time posts here and here.

Five For Friday: Goodbye October!

Not only were we celebrating red ribbon week, but Halloween too! Craziness!! But we survived and had a great week!


1. We are finishing up our unit on Sharing the Planet. The kids decided we needed to try composting so we spent a morning researching and finding out information about it, and then today we put it together! Read here for more details. I'm really curious to find out if it will turn out!

2. We also collaborated with a fourth grade class to reuse our trash by turning it into something useful! The kids had so much fun working together. We watched the Landfill harmonic first. I need to watch the whole documentary sometime. It is so amazing!

3. Our district is smart and made today a half day for professional development! The kids could not get over the fact that we weren't going to spend the whole day talking about halloween anyways, so it works out well! ;) Anyways, this is the second year that our school has done a cancer awareness walk. We walk around the school. It is such an awesome thing to see all the pink and kids come together at the end and meet in front of the school. Last year it really brought us together as a school community after a lot of change. This year it was just as wonderful!

4. Call me a nerd, but good collaboration in planning makes me so HAPPY! We are working on our new planner and it makes me so excited to teach it! We still have to finish the planning, but I think it is just what our kids need. It's that time of the year when they can get comfortable with school and the procedures, but thinking about greatness can encourage them to keep striving for more! I'm SO excited!!

5. Happy Halloween! We had fun trick or treating tonight!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching's five for friday!

Teamwork Time #2 and a Freebie!!

Life is BUSY!! But here are some of the team building activities we have done the last two weeks!

Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig

Have you read this book yet?? It was such a sweet story about a boy who feels invisible and the new kid that helps others to include the boy! We were learning our class discussion rules and this book led to a great class discussion about how we treat other people. We did have to clear up some misconceptions about whether he was really invisible and if he actually wanted to be! ;)

Self Control Bubbles

I saw this on Pinterest and knew it would be a great activity for my kids! I first blew some bubbles and the kids of course started popping them right away. Then we talked about what self control meant and I told the kids that they could not pop the bubbles. It was humorous to watch a couple scoot as close as they could to the bubbles, then they started blowing the bubbles back up because at least they weren't popping them (their words, not mine!)! Then we took a couple of turns popping and not popping bubbles and thinking about self control!

Cup Stacking

This was our big team building activity last week! I split the kids up in two groups and they tried to build the biggest tower with cups!

It was fun to watch the kids work together and use self control (to not knock down the tower). I also switched up the groups and timed them one time. It was interesting to see the different groups cooperate and how they worked to get the job done!

When I feel... I can... chart

In order for kids to work together well, they need to understand how to deal with their feelings. After reading When Sophie Gets Angry, Really, Really Angry we talked about appropriate ways to deal with our feelings. Spur of the moment I realized that this would be a great anchor chart, so over the next several days we added to it! After seeing some common elements come up, we talked about where we wanted our quiet spot to be in our classroom.

We are Awesome

Alex is really into the Lego Movie so after watching it a million times one weekend, it turned into a little mini lesson! We started off listening to Kid President's Pep Talk and then we talked about how we are awesome. Then we danced to Everything is Awesome on Go Noodle and talked about how we are the most awesome when we work together as a team! The kids colored a picture of their awesome selves and wrote about some things that made them awesome. You can download the freebie here!

Teamwork and community building is all about helping the kids understand themselves, so they can better relate to others! I feel like for every team building activity we do, we also need to take time to reflect about ourselves. It has been really neat to see the kids come together and interact!

The next couple of weeks, my focus will really be on our Learner Profile and Attitudes. We have touched on a lot of them as we have talked about teamwork, but I want to make sure that they really understand what the terminology means and how it should impact their lives at home and school!

Teamwork Time!

In order for our kids to have authentic learning experiences, they need to be able to collaborate with each other. Its not always in our nature to want to work with other people, so before we can have our kids collaborate on group projects or activities they need to LEARN how to do that! This week we did a couple of teamwork activities in class. Throughout September I am going to try some other ones, or even repeat some and see how our problem solving abilities have changed as we have been a class for a longer period of time. Here are the ones we tried this week:

Two on a Crayon:

What do you do: Two students have to hold one crayon, at the same time, and draw a picture. The catch? NO talking! 

Purpose: we can't always have our own way! Sometimes there has to be some give and take! 

Class Discussion: Who was the leader? Were you able to take turns? This year, as with the other years I have done this, my kids can quickly point out who were the leaders, and even admit if they kind of took over the picture!

One Piece at a Time:

What do you do: Pass out a floor size puzzle pieces to each student. Some kids will get two and you will have to remind everyone that it is okay if not everyone has two! :) As a class look at the picture and decide where to start. If kids have pieces that they think go in that area they can go in the middle of the rug to put them together. 

Purpose: The point is we really can't argue or tell other people what to do, but we can each contribute as pieces of our class puzzle! :)

The Marshmallow Challenge:

What do you do: During some training this summer we watched the TED talk about the Marshmallow Challenge, and then proceeded to do the challenge. Check out the talk and instructions. Then proceed to spend 20 minutes watching your kids get to work. BEST 20 minutes EVER!!
Purpose: Well, besides trying to build the tallest tower, its really about working together. And none of my groups actually made a tower that stood, but I learned so much about my kiddos watching them work. When we talked afterwards about how it went, I shared with them the Learner Profiles and Attitudes I noticed. I picked one for each group.

Table 1: Creativity. Oh. My. Word. The two boys at that table got to work. One of them is one of my wigglers, but this activity was right up his ally! If one idea didn't work, they tried a new one...and they were some pretty creative ones!

Table 2: Communicator: This group was great a communicating with each other... both positive and negative thoughts! Most of their communication had to do with wanting the other person to share or follow their idea! :)

Table 3: Independence: I guess even in teamwork we have our independent thinkers! :) This group didn't work together too much until the very end, they barely even talked, but they did work well by themselves!

Table 4: Enthusiasm: This precious group LOVED the learning process. The joy and laughter they shared while they worked was contagious! These kids worked, laughed, and then worked some more! Their tower almost stood up, and they didn't once argue the whole time! :) 

I learned a lot about my kiddos just from these 3 activities! I can't wait to do some more activities in the next couple of weeks! Check back for more updates!