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My first week of school was simply amazing. I am really hoping that this was not just a Honeymoon week, and that this is how my year will be all year long. In honor of such a successful first week, I thought that I would share my top five moments with you. 

One. Whole Brain Teaching is amazing! I was so hesitant about using this technique at first, but I am in love with it. My kids kept telling how much they loved it too. In my opinion it seemed that my students were much more engaged than when using traditional teaching techniques. I cannot wait to see how WBT progresses as the year does. 

Two. Interactive Student Notebooks are still the best invention ever! I do not know what I did last year during the fall semester before I implemented them! My kids seem to really be enjoying them too and I heard several times that they didn't mind taking notes/working/learning this way. That sure made my teacher heart happy. 

Three. My room has been a huge hit. You can find the photos I posted here. I have gotten so many compliments about the decor. Since I have implemented WBT this year, one of the rewards they can earn with their scoreboard is to work with the lights off and we turn the lanterns on. I had no idea how excited 6th graders would be about that!

Four. I was dreading using CSOPE for my curriculum this year, but it too has been wonderful! I had heard many negative things about it, but I was excited to just have a scope and sequence for the year. I am happy to say that I am actually loving CSCOPE. My fellow Texans, if you are in a district that uses it, do you have to use the ELA one?

Five. I got out of AM Bus Circle Duty already. You have to love school holidays! 

I will be back soon with some answers to some of the questions that you all have asked. If you have one for me, just visit here!

Reading and Writing Notebook Update

One of the best things that I did in my classroom was start using a Reading and Writing Notebook. Each of my students has a composition book that they use for this. In the fall we used just a regular spiral notebook that I got for each student, but I asked them to bring a new composition book for the spring semester. 

After all of my students brought one to class, we finally got them all put together. I actually changed them up quite a bit from last semester. I gave all of my students a label to put on their cover, but forgot to get a picture of it. It is real simple and nothing special.

The first thing that is in our notebooks is a Table of Contents. To be honest, we did a crummy job of keeping ours updated in the fall, but I am glad to say that we have done 100x better with it this semester. We are now up to page 20 on it as of today, and know we will have to add another page on top sooner rather than later. We use both the front and back of pages in the notebook too. 

Behind our table of contents you will find our "Word Collector". This idea comes from The Daily 5 and the The CAFE Book. When my students find an interesting word that they may not know, they add it to their list and can figure out what it means when they are at their Work on Words or Work on Writing station at a later time. 

Even though I teach 6th grade, I still feel that it is so important for my students to track their reading. I do not require them to read for a set amount of time each evening or anything, but they do have 15 minutes here, or 5 minutes there to read in class. When we start stations next week, they will also be required to go to the read to self station every day.

In the fall we took some very detailed notes on genres, so I decided to type it up for my friends. Boy were they glad I did that for them!

Each week my students are responsible for writing a Reading Response letter to me about the book that they are reading. This is a list of some ideas that they could write about in their notebook.

My district has spent a lot of money on Shelter Instruction training. We have to do things such as write content and language objectives each day, encourage students to speak in complete sentences, have word walls, etc. I personally do not mind it, but maybe that is because I am a new teacher. I almost always give my students (especially in my Inclusion and Regular class) a sentence stem to help them put their thinking into a complete sentence. This is a list of stems that they could use to help them write their reading response letters. 

This is something new that I started for the 2nd semester. We are doing DLR (Daily Language Review). Each day for their warm up, my 6th graders have 2 sentences to correct and a few questions about some skills we have learned. It has been the perfect way to get them focused first thing, and we are also able to review the skills that we have already learned. 

I knew my post could not be complete without a foldable in it. We use them all of the time in our notebooks. It really is such a great way to chunk the information together for my students. This is one that we did on Persuasive Techniques that we will be using throughout the 6 weeks while we are doing our persuasive unit.

Being that we are beginning Daily 5 stations in class on Monday, we have taken notes for each station this past week. This is what our notes page looked like for the Read to Self station. 

That is just a preview of what is in our notebooks so far this semester. I am hoping to do a weekly post on what we did in them that week. If you have any questions about them, please leave a question in the comments and I promise to answer them!

I have a dream and Humor

That my students would magically listen to me 100% of the time. I guess I can dream it at least because it is never going to happen! 

We did talk about Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream today though in class. It was actually an impromptu lesson that turned out better than I even expected. I have a huge collection of picture books and I knew that I had several on MLK. This morning when I got to school, I picked one out. I ended up choosing March On!

His sister actually wrote this book and it captivated my kids! I was shocked at how closely they were paying attention. 

After we read the book, we then filled out a 3-2-1 foldable. 

Underneath the flaps, they wrote 3 things they learned from reading the book, 2 things that shocked or surprised them, and 1 question that they still had. Tomorrow we are going to share the questions that they still have and see if we can find answers for some of them using our available resources. The bottom part of the page where it says, "I have a dream just like MLK Jr.!", that was the freebie that A Teacher's Treasure shared today with us. This is my lame example, I wish I had taken some pictures of the kids' writing because it was so good.

I had one of those, "You know you teach middle school when" moments today in my 7th period class.I had some students draw the picture below on my board during the last few minutes of advisory. 

I walk in after the tardy bell rang for 7th period and one of my boys is raising his hand. I call on him, and he shares with me, "Miss Klohn, that picture on the board looks like an atomic fart!" I was not too sure what to say to that, and then he continued to explain why to me. That is when the class erupted in laughter. It took a good 10 minutes before we were able to even do anything productive after that little comment. Got to love being a middle school teacher though! 

I am still working on going through all of the links and am hoping to finish that up tomorrow. I also am going to be sharing some more about our reading and writing notebooks tomorrow, so stay tuned!

It is going to be a great week!

Well, that is what I am hoping for! 

Today we had inservice and the kiddos had a holiday. I would have loved to have the whole day to plan, but we had to do some housekeeping in the morning together as a campus. We did not meet AYP last year, so we have all sorts of peeps in our pockets as my wonderful principal likes to refer to them as. We got two new ones today. I think we are up to 4 that will now be coming on a regular basis. Hopefully we will meet AYP and we can get rid of them all. :)

In the afternoon, I was able to get quite a bit planned with one of my teammates. We are beginning to use C-SCOPE even though we are not required to yet because we do not have a real scope and sequence to follow. I know, it is crazy and I am still trying to wrap my mind around it. I think a big reason for this is because the Reading and Writing scores on the state test have never been the problem for my district. One year it is math, the next science, and then social studies. We know that we are going to be using C-SCOPE in the next three years so my thinking is that we might as well get used to it. I personally do not think the LA portion of it is that bad, but maybe it is just me. 

I am so excited by the response that I have had with my linky party. 

I am still in the process of reading all of your posts. If I haven't made it to your blog yet, it will happen I promise. 

I am planning on sharing some new things that we have been doing in our Reading and Writing notebooks lately with you all tomorrow with pictures!

Reading and Wriitng Notebook FAQ

I just started reading The Cafe Book yesterday by The Sisters and I am already so excited to make some changes in my classroom because of it. You can bet that I will be doing some serious posting about it during the next month as I begin to launch it in my classroom.

I got a really great email from Lindsay today and thought I would answer her questions on the blog about my reading and writing notebooks. I thought that some of you might have the same questions yourself.

The first question she asked was, "Do your kids have both reading and writing notebooks?"

The notebook that I use in my classroom is a combined reading and writing notebook. That is why I tend to call them their interactive notebook. I have thought about using 2 separate ones, but in my opinion it makes sense to have it all together. They might be learning a reading strategy, but I also want them to think about them while they are writing since others will be reading their writing. In my class, students also still have a regular binder where we store some papers as well. 

The second question was, "Are they responsible for bringing the notebooks to class each day or do you house them in your room? If they are responsible for that, what happens if they forget or lose their notebooks?

I am lucky enough to have the capabilities to store the notebooks in my classroom. (I will take a picture of where I store them when I go up to school later this week.) Since I teach middle school, I only have 3 classes because 6th grade Language Arts classes are double blocked. Each of my classes has a crate that is labeled with their class periods on it, and that is where they pick their notebook up from and place it in each day. Generally, the notebooks do not leave my classroom, but it does happen. My students are responsible for completing a reading response letter each week, and sometimes they do not finish it in class so they must finish it for homework. Luckily, I have only had one lost and it was within the last 3 weeks of the semester. This student just began to do her things on notebook paper and then storing them in her regular binder for the class. When we redo them when they students get back from the break in their new composition notebooks, I am also planning on making some extras along the way for those who lose them or new students that I get. I also do a weekly notebook check to make sure that they are completing the activities and such. If their notebook is not in the crate they receive a 0 for it. I do drop their 2 lowest daily grades though for the 6 weeks, so it allows them to have an oops in there.

The third question was, "When you do the activities that are on your blog in the notebooks such as your author's purpose notes and flat vs. round characters, are the kids copying down whatever you do on the board/document camera, or are they self generating the notes?"

I do a mixture of both. Sometime it is necessary for them to just copy down what I need them to copy. A good example of this would be our Genre Notes that we took at the beginning of the school year. This was information that I just needed them to have right then before we could do some things with it. When we did the flat vs. round characters notes, I gave students the information for underneath the round and flat character flaps. They then had to use that information to help them identify what type of character we had in the picture book that we read to practice the concept. I almost always also have a sentence stem that students must complete on their note page for the day because I feel that is a great way to check for mastery. For example, with Author's Purpose I used the following stem: Knowing the author's purpose for a text is important because... I then give them the opportunity to answer this first and I walk around during this time. After a few minutes and I know that everyone has something written, I ask if anyone would like to share their sentence. 

As we rebuild our notebooks, I am planning on sharing more details about them with you all. I am planning on doing another Q&A post about them too in the next month, so ask away if you have any questions. :)

I'm lovin' it!

As they say in the McDonald's commercials, I'm lovin' it! That is also what my 6th graders say when I am trying to get their attention. I start by saying, "Ba da ba ba ba" and they respond with, "I'm lovin' it!" It works great and the kids enjoy saying it. 

I have absolutely loved how our reader's notebooks are working for us in my classroom. We have been doing some things with The Polar Express in them the past few days. I was hoping my 6th graders would love using foldables in class, and I am so glad they do. Sometimes I do not even think they realize how much they are actually learning when we use them. Here are a few things we have done in them the past few days. 

Sorry about the shadows. 

Tonight I also ventured off to a Scholastic Warehouse sale that was in San Antonio which about an hour from me. That might have been a mistake because I spent way too much money, but I got so much stuff! Pretty much everything was half off. I am planning on taking a picture of it all tomorrow sometime to show you all. If there is ever one around you I highly suggest that you go! 

I also finally got a kidney table for my classroom today. I have had a round table, but the kids like to sit at it and I was really wanting something to meet with small groups at. I am also getting rid of my desk to make room for it. Hopefully this will all happen sometime this week. :)

I am also loving that I have been playing Christmas in my classroom these past few days. I am so grateful to work in a district where that is not an issue. I actually just downloaded the new Biebs Christmas CD. My kids better be excited about it!!!

Don't forget to enter my giveaway here!