Student Moving Away {FREEBIE Memory Book}

When I taught at my old school, it was common for students to move mid-year. Military parents would receive orders mid-year, and off the kids would go! This also meant I had an new students arriving mid-year at times.

But at my current mid-west, middle-of-nowhere school, it's very uncommon for students to move away. It's very rare for them to leave mid-year. So when a parent contacted me a little while ago to let me know that her daughter's last day would be November 15, I knew I had to do something special to send her off.

As I thought through the things we could do for her, I decided upon a memory book. I gave a page to each of her former teachers in the school, the principal, and all of her classmates. Once the pages are returned to me, I'll bind it and have it ready to present to her on Tuesday.

That left me with the question: Where could I find a memory book that would work for this purpose? I searched and searched. I found a few things, but none quite suited to my needs. So, I created one, and I'm giving it away to you for FREE, just in case you have a similar need. You can grab the freebie here, or you can click on the image below.

Looking back, I wish I would have done this for every student moving out of my classroom, even when it was common! It's easy, cheap, and means a lot to the person receiving it.

Because it's uncommon in my school, our class has also collected some new school supplies to give to the girl who is leaving. We figured that if you have to start a new school in the middle of the year it would at least be nice to have some fresh new supplies!

We've also decided that her desk will stay "Abby's desk" all year long, even though she won't be here with us. We'll sure miss her!

Spider Craft Tutorial

So for Spider Day each year, I make these fun creatures with my students. 

For each spider, you'll need the following: 

1 pipe cleaner for the body

12 beads for the body

4 pipe cleaners for the legs (I found animal print pipe cleaners one year at Meijer, and I've never turned back! The kids love them, and they make really cool spiders!)

Take the pipe cleaner for the body, and string 6 beads onto it.

Fold it in half. 

Take the two ends of the pipe cleaner, and holding them together, string a bead onto both of them together.

Then, pull the two sides apart and string two beads onto each side.

Finally, take the last bead and put both ends through in opposite directions.

Pull to tighten it, and then take the two ends, twist them a couple of times, and cut off the excess.

You've now made the body of the spider.

Next, grab two of the pipe cleaners you're using for legs.

Place them under the spider's middle section. Grab the pipe cleaners, twist them together once, and lay the legs out to the side.

Next, turn the spider back over so that the top is facing you. 

Take the remaining 2 pipe cleaners and feed them through the holes in the spider's body from the top, down. 

Then, flip the spider back over on its back. Pull the pipe cleaners all the way through, and twist them a time or two.

Then, just arrange the legs so there are four on each side.

All that's left is to bend the legs....

...and trim the excess length.

Viola!

Happy spider making!

Spider Day!

It was spider day in 4C today! Since our school doesn't celebrate or embrace Halloween, I choose to take the opportunity to have a "Spider Day" instead. And since tomorrow is Reformation Day (a big deal at the private school where I teach), I elected to have Spider Day today. 

We started our day reading this book:

It's a fantastic cautionary tale written by Mary Howitt in 1829. The kids love it because the pictures in this book are phenomenal, and because it doesn't have a happy ending. The spider eats the fly. It allows for some amazing discussion about the types of friends we choose and how sometimes flattery is sincere, and sometimes it's not. Not everyone who speaks sweetly offers sweets. 

Then, we spent some time in small group reading. We read a few books about spiders. 

We watched a spider video. I have a subscription to Discovery Education's United Streaming, and we watched the video called The Incredible World of Spiders by Discovery Education. In case you care to look it up, you can check it out HERE.

We did a spider craft. 

You can find my tutorial on how to make these little arachnids HERE. The kids really enjoy them, and they're anatomically accurate enough to go along with learning the parts of a spider. :)

We still had time to get in our math test, some handwriting, and other essentials as the quarter gets ready to come to a close. It's always fun to do something a little different for a day. I really enjoy watching the students' excitement as we learned about arachnids. 

Conferences are coming! {Student Self-Evaluations}

And it's just about that time of year again.... you know what time of year I mean! ......

Dum, dum, dum...

PARENT TEACHER CONFERENCES!

I always feel like I'm unprepared for parent teacher conferences, particularly at my current school. The way that our school operates, I have very little interaction with most parents prior to our conferences in November. Also, my school doesn't allow student-led conferences (bummer!). So, I needed a way to have students lead the conferences without actually having them sit at the table with us.

This year I vowed that I would be more prepared than I was last year. And, by George, I think I am! Thanks to having a student teacher since school began, I found that records day didn't need to be spent frantically grading and entering grades, so I took Friday morning and developed a student self-evaluation tool to use with my students.

Download from my TPT Store

If you'd like to use it, hop on over to my TPT store. I made it for my classroom, but it's just a perk if you can use it in yours and save a little time. It's in Word Document form, and fully editable. Enjoy! 

There's a SPOT for you!

I hereby promise to attempt to keep a blog. For reals! I have been terrible about keeping up this blog. Best intentions, but then reality set in. As I was teaching my students this morning about how blogs are a type of text, I showed them my blog... and realized just how long it's really been since I posted! Yikes!

This is my second year at my current school, and it's amazing how different the second year can be. This is my third school, and it never ceases to amaze me how much better the second year is. I'm finally settled in an enjoying my class.

It's a bit late for this, but I still thought I'd highlight a few of the changes I've made to my classroom this year. I've perused a gazillion blogs around the cyber world and made a decision to embrace a classroom theme. I chose polka dots!

For today, I thought I'd show you our hallway bulletin board and locker decorations that go along with our polka dot theme!

My student teacher got construction paper and began to cut lots and lots and lots of circles. She cut some slightly smaller than the others and layered two colors to make more interesting spots.

This picture isn't the best, but you'll get the idea. I printed the class names onto mailing labels in a fun font. I made several sheets of their names so I could label everything---books, bags, folders, name tags, files, etc. I don't know why it's never occurred to me to do this before! It saved loads of time! 

This was our hallway bulletin board. I don't love the brown on brown, but I wasn't thinking it through when I pulled everything together, so it just happened that way and I was too lazy to cut out new letters. :) It was still readable, and I got a lot of compliments on it.

We made the word SPOT 3-D by hot gluing pieces of drinking straws to the back and then hot gluing sticky tabs to those to hang them on the board. I love the little POP of those letters.  

We also made coordinating "spots" for the locker labels. We're fortunate enough to have these lockers right outside our classroom for each student.  

Have I mentioned what a mammoth bulletin board this hallway board is? I can't even get a very good picture of the whole thing. This is my best attempt. 

Happy teaching, everyone. See you SOON, I promise. :) 

Inference, Silent reading, and Reader's Notebooks

Today was a "revamping" day in my class's reading world. This week we're talking ALL ABOUT INFERENCE. 

One of my FAVORITE, FAVORITE, FAVORITE books for teaching reading strategies is the book Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor. You cannot go wrong. So practical. So concrete. 

Well, one of the strategies for teaching about inference is to use a bag of garbage and make inferences about the people who live in the house. I like that idea. But then I saw the blog post over at The Inspired Apple where instead of a bag of garbage, the teacher uses her own bag! So smart!

This is what I did today. I wish I would have snapped a picture, but I forgot. The kids were cracking me up with their inferences. They did a very good job. For example, they opened my wallet, saw my Macy's and Kohl's credit cards and said, "You must like to shop." They grabbed my library card and noted:

"You must like to read." 

"You've been to a library before."

"You like to spend time in quiet places."

Then one of them grabbed my phone. Keep in mind, THIS is my phone:

Yes, I do still live in the dark ages. 

And one of them said, "I infer that you wish you had an iPhone."

Oh, kid. How your inference is spot-on! One day....

But I digress.... So we finished up our mini-lesson on inference, and I sent them hither and yon to practice making inferences in their books. Meanwhile, I was going to make my rounds and continue to assess their Guided Reading (I'll post my forms soon). But, as I got ready to walk around and listen to them read, there was such chaos that I found myself staring at the class and thinking, "This is NOT working." This thought was immediately followed by gathering my kids together and declaring that ZYLAR (zip your lips and read) time was over (groaning...which is amazing, since very little reading was happening).

And so I began to revamp. We discussed some of our problems during independent reading. The kids know. They were able to point them out. Yes, one problem was that fourteen kids are looking for books... and it's the same offenders each day. Lots of talking, not much reading. 

So I raffled off my 11 book boxes, and bribed the other kids to bring cereal boxes to make some. I need to make a book "shopping" schedule so that kids are only at the class library once a week. (I've seriously never had this problem before with my kids, but now I do, so I have to change my system.) 

And then I grabbed the stack of composition notebooks that I stole from the resource room at our school. I gave each kid one and had them write their name on it. Then they turned to the first page and recorded their independent reading level for the quarter. In other words, they wrote the levels of books they're looking for to be independent reading books. Then I had them number the page to 3. 

See...This class is terrible about picking out a book and committing to it. I mean awful. They stare at the books, grab one, read four pages, and then quit. So I grabbed a bunch from the shelves today and started talking about each one... told them what the reading level was, and read the back of the book. I had them listen for at least three that interested them enough to want to read it. It's crazy to me. These are the same books that have been staring them in the face for a month, but only after I presented them did pencils start furiously scribbling the titles of these books. Nuts, I tell you. But, whatever. If it gets them reading, so be it. 

So, whew. That was our day in reading today. From now on the kids will have at least three books in their book box that they intend to read. Tomorrow we'll work on finding a reading spot and staying there. I've seen several independent reading self-assessments, and I think we'll use one of those.

I've always always always wanted to start reader's notebooks with my kids. I've just always been intimidated that I'd do it wrong. But you know what? I'm risking it. I'm jumping in. I had to rethink our reading today, and, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I'll post more pictures and things in days to come as I steal more ideas from fabulous teachers and revamp my own system to get it to work. We'll get there! 

overwhelmed.

I'm there. Overwhelmed. I wasn't there yesterday. I wasn't there this morning. I just arrived in the land of the overwhelmed this afternoon. Suddenly I looked around my classroom and saw the chaos. The ungraded papers, the science materials stacked on the back counter, the unfed crayfish next to the sink (I have since fed them, so don't worry :), the desks all askew (I moved them into rows, but I hate that at the end of every day the desks are a mess!), and my desk PILED with stuff. Just piled.

And, it's the end of the month. You know what that means. Bulletin boards need to be changed, the calendar needs to be changed, and since it's the end of the week, the newsletter needs to be created and emailed out, too. Sigh. I raced around the room for about forty minutes after my kids left today, but it's still chaotic.

Don't get me wrong.... it's a good chaos. We had a really good week of learning. Thinking back to some of the conversations I heard my "friends" having this week, here's some of what I overheard:

"This is grammar? I love grammar!"
"What do crayfish eat? Do they poop? Can they live outside of water? When will we get to learn about the crayfish??"
"Can we work on our skits in our groups now?"
"Aw, man! I got chloroplast on my pants at recess!" (Learning about plants is paying off! Yay for the smarter vocabulary!)
"Do we have to stop reading now?  Can we have ten more minutes?"
"I can't choose from my writing prompts. Can I write both of them if I have time?"

Yes, it's been a VERY good learning week. And, in preparation of another such week, I'll be going into school tomorrow for awhile. We have a waffle breakfast fund-raiser anyhow, so I'll just stay and work on some things for a bit and be ready for another week of learning. And you know what? I don't love the chaos, or leaving my room in shambles in the evening, but if the chaos is a side-effect of my kids' learning, then so be it! Bring on the chaos!

What a way to start a year! [Leaving sub plans and more!]

Well, friends.... I really do have some great intentions to get on this blog someday soon and begin to show you some of the AMAZING things I've been learning from my 4th grade friends. They really are incredible!

This year just hasn't started as planned! I've had my kids for all of nine school days...  (which is crazy when I think of all we have accomplished in JUST nine days!). I really have been meaning to blog, but starting at a new school, in a new grade, with new curriculum... it's all I can do some days to keep my head above water!

Then, this weekend my grandfather passed away, which sent me into a tizzy to get sub plans ready. I am usually pretty good at getting sub plans ready. However, I have never had to leave four consecutive days of sub plans during which time I couldn't come back to the classroom to grab papers to grade, check on things, etc.

I began my hunt on pinterest and elsewhere to find some help!

I started with THIS cute Sub Tub Label from TPT. It's free and adorable. (I love free and adorable).
I applied it to my version of a Sub Tub, and viola!

Done {enough}: Classroom Tour

Well, folks, it's done. Enough. For this year.

I'm never *quite* satisfied with my classroom, but I think it'll get there. Part of it is because I'm at a new school this year. I'm in a new classroom. I haven't had 20 kids in there yet to figure out how the flow will go and what areas need to be accessible... you get the idea. But, it's done enough for the start of school this year. It's functional. And I think it's pretty enough and homey enough for Open House on Monday night.

Okay, okay...enough talk... pictures. I was going to put some in the post, but then I realized I had 42. Um...yeah. I really only took pictures for a couple of minutes, but I guess I take them fast. Soo.... I made a slideshow for your enjoyment! :) Let me know what you think!


I'm linking up here and here with other amazing teachers who are ready to reveal their rooms, too!