Second Chance Sale

I was so excited when TpT announced this week's boost sale because there was so much that I forgot to purchase during the back-to-school sale! Hopefully I won't miss anything this time. I'm linking up with some amazing bloggers to get some great ideas for those MUST HAVES!

First up, something I did purchase in the sale...Little Red's Genre Posters. These are freaking adorable and fit perfectly along my reading wall. I even made small grayscale copies for my kids to paste in their Read and Respond notebooks.

This is something I have been wanting for awhile. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan or anything, but I just get a huge kick out of these Marzano scale posters! They catch my attention and I know they'll catch the kiddos attention to!

I'm not very good at tooting my own horn, but I really liked using this Poet BINGO set with my 5th graders last year and plan on using it again this year. Hopefully I'll get to do it in April when it is actually poetry month! The students get to choose a variety of poems to read and complete some in depth activities with the poems they choose.

This second chance sale is this Wednesday, August 20. My entire store is discounted, 20% off. Get the extra 10% off with promo code "BOOST" at checkout. 

What did you buy in the last sale? What is in your cart for this one?

Monday Made It - Independent Reading Notebooks

I'm asking forgiveness in advance for two things. 1. I know most of my posts lately have been Monday Made Its. What can I say? I love this link up! 2. Please ignore any errors or nonsensical bits of this post. We had to take one of the rats to the emergency vet last night. Got to bed at 1 am, then up a few hours later, so I'm a bit beat.

Ok, so I am really excited to share this made-it because it was a long time coming. Last year was my first foray into Reading Workshop. Although I didn't really have any other upper grade teachers on campus to go to for help, I did enjoy it, and I am trying it again this year with some tweaks and adjustments. I have to give a big shout out to my friend Dana at Learning Required who helped me along the way and was always there to answer my questions.

So, last year my students had reading binders. I bought each student a black binder for about a buck and had them all prepared with dividers and a pencil bag. These were solely used for reading time. Man those binders were cheap! By the end of the year they all had one place to go...the trash. Besides the fact that they didn't last long, they were a pain to maintain. I would ask students to put handouts in, and half of them wouldn't make it. We'd have to take a special day just to organize the binders. Did I mention the word pain?

Yeah, so this year I decided to use the amazing binding machine to make my own Independent Reading Notebooks. These took me weeks, literally, to prepare. But once they were done it was so satisfying. And so far, the kiddos are taking great care of them and using them just as I taught them.

Let me give you a tour of some of the pages.

Our district has really emphasized Marzano's Learning Goals and Scales over the past few years. Each of the notebooks has several of these tracking forms for students to write the learning goals and indicate where they are at the beginning, middle, and end of each concept. Although I have the scale posted on both sides of my room, they have right there in the notebook too. And speaking of Marzano's scales, have you seen these adorable Star Wars ones from Daisy's Bookbag? Too stinking cute! I think I need them!

Back to the tour...

 Each student has a genre tracking form, as well as page describing the common genres (not pictured). The pages following this are their reading log where they track what they read each day (not pictured).

Students periodically write me a letter about their reading, how it is going, what is going well, and what they are struggling with. I've included some useful letter writing pages, as well as lined paper right in the notebook. No need for loose paper running away, I'll just collect the notebooks when I need to check their letters and write back to them.

I'm really big on students using sticky notes to "show" their thinking as they read. To hold them accountable they keep all their sticky notes in their notebook. I also have something else I'm working on to help keep them focused with their sticky note writing.

There you have it! My awesome Independent Reading Notebooks. If you are a Reading Workshop teacher I'm sure you've recognized that I've recycled a lot from Fountas and Pinnell as well as the amazing Beth Newingham. I love that teachers share their knowledge so that we can help all students be super readers!

And, as always, thanks to the lovely Tara of Fourth Grade Frolics for hosting my favorite link-up!

I hope my post was acceptable...time to crawl into bed about three hours earlier than normal!

BB Part 9 - Poet BINGO

Despite the fact that I have to go back to work next week, I'm getting pretty excited about finishing up my Blog Backlog series, and of course, for VEGAS!

I always tend to be a bit behind on some of those timely activities. Although I really wanted to spend April buried in poetry, we were caught up in other activities, so poetry got pushed into May. A colleague had a pretty neat activity for poetry in which students were to look for poems from different poets, but unfortunately it was a bit ancient and many of the poets were difficult to locate. So, I revised, updated, and added activities for Poet BINGO. 

Students were all give a bingo sheet with 24 different poets on it, some were classical poets, and some were modern. The middle space was a "free choice" space. Depending on time and what you would like to accomplish students can get one bingo, multiple, or blackout (great for differentiation). We checked out pretty much every poetry book from the library and I placed a stack at each table for students to peruse. 

The students kept track of the poems they chose, gave them a star rating, and wrote a comment about it to remember it. Then they used some of the poems to complete the analyze, synthesize, visualize, and compare/contrast. 

If you'd like a copy of Poet BINGO, you can find it here in my store. 

BB Part 5 - Donors Choose + Sticky Notes = Nonfiction Readers

I hope everyone is having a relaxing and fun summer. Mine is already half over, the first three weeks flew by, and I'm hoping the next three weeks are nice and slow. It's time for part 5 of my 10 part series, Blog Backlog: Playing Catch Up. Today's post is about my Donor's Choose project and a really great resource I purchased from TpT. 

We all know that with Common Core a greater emphasis is placed on reading nonfiction, which, if your school is like mine, lacks in the nonfiction department. Actually, even before CC I had realized the need for more nonfiction, especially as literature sets. When I taught sixth grade I used Donors Choose to get a set of books on Ancient Egypt, which I donated to our library when I moved to fifth. So, this year I decided we needed a class set of books on the Revolutionary War. Last year during our study of the war I had some students in my class "rooting" for the Americans and booing the British. I wanted them to understand that there were always two (or more) sides to a war, and always different perspectives. So, I read them George vs. George by Rosalyn Schanzer, and that helped. This book is at a great reading level for 5th graders, and they loved the graphic novel-like illustrations. I decided this would make a great book to use as a lit study, and so I set up a project through Donors Choose.

I am so grateful to all the donors that made it possible for us to get a class set of the books, they were a hit!

To make our study even more meaningful I purchased this amazing resource from Head Over Heels for Teaching: Reading Nonfiction with Post-its.

I picked out many of the pages from her resource that would coincide with the sections of George vs. George and made them all into a booklet. We glued on a copy of the front cover of GvG to make it official (sorry, forgot to take photos!). The students already had the 3"x 3" sticky notes that they use during Reading Workshop, but they needed the smaller ones for many of the activities. I found four packs of brightly colored ones at Dollar Tree and there were just enough in a stack for each student. 

Thanks Head Over Heels for Teaching for creating this super resource! I know I'll be using it even more this coming school year! And thank you Donors Choose for helping teachers get great resources and projects for our kiddos!

If you're making mistakes...

I saw this great poster on Pinterest and it actually came from ModCloth. I just HAD to have it because not only is the quote perfect, but it is from Neil Gaiman who I adore (and we will be studying next month). ModCloth wasn't offering a print, so I made my own to hang up. I'd really love to buy a high quality print if they ever make it available.  

We only have 3 more days of school before we are on our two week fall break! Of course I'm excited, but mostly because I am in need of some good R&R. I'm also excited because that means November is right around the corner, and November means NaNoWriMo! Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? It's only the coolest thing going on in November. 

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month and participants are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. They also have a Young Writer's Program and two years ago my class and I embarked on this journey. I wrote a 50,000+ word novel and they wrote novels aiming for their own word-count goals. My class and I did it again last year. I can't imagine not doing NaNoWriMo in the classroom. It's full of amazing benefits for the kids. They become more confident and writers. They learn to make achievable goals and write steps to get there. They become more detailed writers. They learn to be persistent. They become more fluent writers. And I could go on and on! Interested? Head over to the Young Writer's Program site. You can order your free classroom kit now!

Before we start NaNoWriMo we spend two weeks preparing. I use the YWP workbooks which are amazing, and free, resources. And here is where the amazing Mr. Neil Gaiman comes in (sidenote: I adore his wife too, and had the pleasure of attending her concert last weekend). If you are unfamiliar with this fabulous writer I suggest you check him out. He writes for adults, young adults, and children. His most well-known books for the upper grades are Coraline (which was made into a movie) and The Graveyard Book which won the Newberry Medal in 2009. When we review plot I read Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls. It is a lovely, but slightly disturbing, picture book that is just right for the upper grades. It holds their attention and each element of plot is crafted perfectly. The day before we start NaNoWriMo I show the kids the episode of PBS's Arthur that features Neil (called "Falafelosophy") and it's all about becoming a writer. How fitting for the program! 

I'll start blogging more about NaNoWriMo in the coming weeks.  I'd love to hear from other teachers that use NaNoWriMo in their classrooms and from those that may be trying it out this year! 

Read and Respond

I have been using Read and Respond with my students since I started teaching 8 years ago and have tweaked it every year. Every educator knows how vital it is for students to be reading daily. Daily reading boosts fluency, builds vocabulary, and increases comprehension. Good readers think about what they read and the Read and Respond Daily Journal allows students to quickly and thoughtfully respond to what they are reading. Students use thought-provoking prompts to help them analyze what they read for deeper understanding. Read and Respond goes beyond traditional summarizing, although summarization is embedded into the response.

I use Read and Respond in my classroom as an on-going daily homework assignment. I expect my students to read everyday for 20 minutes or more, and I require them to respond to their reading in their Read and Respond notebook four times a week. I like to keep the response simple because I'd rather them spend more time on reading, and I feeling that a meaningful response can be kept to around five sentences. I provide prompts for students (for both fiction and non-fiction books) that they can respond to, or they can write their own response. I ask that my students not give a summary. Usually by 5th/6th grade students are able to easily summarize what they have read. It is much more meaningful for students to actually respond to what they read by thinking about it in different ways. Typically a summary will embed itself in the response. All the students need to do is write the title of the book they are reading, the genre, the date, a five sentence response, and a parent/guardian signature. 


The Read and Respond is checked off daily and I periodically collect students' notebooks and read some of their entries. I ask that students only put one response per page so that I may write a note to them about their response on the rest of the page. Sometimes I will collect everyone's notebook at the same time, or I have also collected them on a rotational basis (this helps me not to be overwhelmed). Usually the first few weeks students are still stuck on summarizing, but once I provide some feedback in their notebooks then I start to see the really meaningful responses emerge. 


In this booklet you will get . . . 
* Teacher directions and suggestions for use
* Student directions for students to paste in their journal 
* Student rubric for students to paste in their journal
* Student worksheet (to be used instead of a composition notebook)
* Read and Respond Passes (for use as incentive/prize in your classroom)