Book Clubs...They're a Hit!

Today was our first official day of book clubs, and I was so pleased with how they went. We had spent the past few school days setting expectations and discussing procedures for the book clubs. The hardest part for me was actually assigning the books. We laid out all of the choices last week and the students then listed their top five choices on their choice sheet. I was pretty pleased because I only had to place a few students in a group that did not contain a book they selected. 

The highlight though was definitely getting out the iPads for my students to use while they read their book club books. They were so excited! I ordered some Belkin Rock Stars from Amazon so I can plug up to 5 headphones into the iPad. They worked great! Here is a picture of one of my groups that is reading Trouble Maker by Andrew Clements. They made my day when they were listening and all of a sudden I hear a chuckle out of them! 

As I am looking on iTunes for more audio books, I am discovering that some of the titles are not there. Where do you find audio books for your classroom? I am open to using other resources. 

I promise to keep blogging about our classroom journey with book clubs! 

Literacy Centers for Bigger Kids and Bud!

I am so excited because I am pretty sure that I just finished my new favorite product! 

It is a total of six Literacy Stations for the 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade classroom that can be used during the month of December. Head to my store to check out the description and to also download the preview that shows you exactly what is included. I promise you will not be disappointed!

We also have a new friend in my classroom, Bud. I noticed him while I was doing some planning today. 

My kids are at the age where some still do the Santa thing and others do not, so I knew I had to do mine a little differently. I know my kids will not be sure about it at first, but I am excited for it. Hopefully their behavior will improve...especially my 7th period class.

What We've Been Up To in Room 117

It is so hard to believe that yesterday started the beginning of the 3rd 6 weeks. Where has this year gone? I managed to somehow get everything graded and my grades posted before I had to be emailed by our Registrar. That is always a good feeling! :)

This week we started our new CSCOPE unit which is focusing on Expository Text. This is something I have never really taught a whole unit on, but I am loving it so far and so are my 6th graders. We started the unit by creating an anchor chart together that helped us understand just exactly what an expository text is and we also reviewed text features. 

This is something that we will be reviewing throughout the unit. I also plan on making some more with students to demonstrate the different organizational patterns of expository text. 

In my Pre AP class, we also started reading The Wednesday Wars on Monday and my kids are already loving it! When I read it this summer, I knew I had to read it with some of my classes. What are some of your favorite novels to read in your classroom? 

I have also had a huge response about the Anchor Chart Linky Party. Be on the lookout for it to debut on December 1st!

Anchors Away!

Some people might think I am crazy, but I just love anchor charts. I think it is the elementary teacher trapped in me. It is rare that we do not make at least three of them during the course of a week in my classroom. My goal is to start sharing my anchor charts with you all on a weekly basis, but we will see how that goes. 

Last week we were focusing on plot elements and we were using a story mountain to help us. I created this chart with them that we have since put up in our classroom as a reference for us to use throughout the year. 

I just love hearing my students talk about the different elements in a story now that they understand what they all are. 

Yesterday we started to talk about theme. My student had no idea what the word theme meant, but they quickly realized that all it really is is the message or lesson that the author is trying to teach us in a story. As soon as they realized that, we quickly became theme pros. :)

If I turned this into a weekly, or biweekly, linky party, is that something that you would be interested in participating in?

What We've Been Up To

I know...I am the world's worst blogger.

School has just been absolutely crazy! I am sure most of you can relate. The adjustment from having 60 kids to 105 has been insane, and the amount of grading is crazy. This year might make me move grade levels, well at least the thought of maybe only having 40 kids sounds appealing right now. 

Anyways, I just wanted to share a few of the things that we have been up to lately in room 117. During the first 6 weeks of school we covered Poetry and Non-Fiction. One of the things that we did was write some personal narratives. I had no idea how difficult this was going to be. My students either forgot how to write over the summer, or they have never really learned. It was pretty much like pulling teeth just to get them to write one page single spaced. By one page all I mean is the front!!! We did take some pretty cool notes in our Interactive Notebooks though. I made them on a large post it note to display in the room, and the kids copied them into their notebooks. I got a lot of my inspiration from some of the wonderful work of Jennifer Runde!

The leads anchor chart turned out to a huge help because so many of my friends were stumped on how to start their personal narrative. I can only hope that our next writing assignment will be a little easier for us to complete. 

I also wanted to share my new motto with you all. I don't remember where I originally found this, but it hits home with me. I have really been struggling with collaborative planning with my other 6th grade teacher, and this just reminded me why we are doing it. 

Interactive Student Notebook...finally!

I finally managed to remember to snap some photos of my Interactive Students Notebook (ISN) today while I was up at school making copies and getting ready for the week. Several of you have asked questions about how I use them in my classroom, so hopefully this will answer most of them. :)

I first decided to implement Interactive Notebooks in the middle of the fall semester during my first year of teaching. I knew what I was doing was not working and I was not loving the binder that was requested on the school supply list. During one of my Saturday grad school classes last fall, we were lucky enough to have a presentation from one of the ladies that worked at the Dinah Zike Academy. (If you didn't already know, Dinah is pretty much the queen of foldables!) I know this was exactly what my 6th graders needed, so I went with it an ran. Last fall it was a big learning process, but I felt great about how my notebooks went in the spring. Now I think I finally have the hang of it and love how the ISN is evolving in my classroom. 

This school year we completely did away with a binder in 6th grade and most of our learning is placed into our ISN that lives in the classroom. The only time my students are allowed to take the ISN home is when they need to study notes or activities out of it that we are going to be tested on. I just know that if I allowed my students to keep their notebooks in their backpacks or lockers, they would not make it to class every day.

So now what you have been waiting for, pictures and details about the ISN and how it works in my classroom.

 The first thing that you will find when you open up an ISN from room 117 is the Table of Contents. It is hard to believe, but we are already on page 2 for the year. The first page is glued all the way down to the notebook page, but then each one after that is only glued down where it says Table of Contents which allows us the ability to look underneath it in the future to see what all we have done.

 Next is an individual word wall. Sorry that it is sideways. There is a box for each letter, A-Z, and this is a place in the ISN where students can write words that they misspell when we are writing.
I think it is so important for students to have a place to keep up with things like this.

The next few pages are composed of some essentials that live in our ISN all year long. These are things like a reading log, reading interest survey, a book waiting list, genre overview, writing survey, and a reading response letter format.In my classroom starting the 2nd 6 weeks, students will be expected to write a reading response letter each Friday based on their independent reading book. This is one of my favorite things that we do in our notebook because I love seeing how my students connect with their books.

 Since we do not keep a binder, we take all of our notes inside of our ISN. Here is an example of one of the first things that we did this school year. We were learning about different word parts such as root, base word, prefix, suffix, and affix. I really liked how this particular note taking strategy worked out, and we will be doing them in a table form like this many more times this school year.

These notes booklets are something new that I am trying this year and so far so great! It does not take much for notes to get boring so I have started to create my notes in the form of books that we can put together and then glue into our notebooks. I have already made some more for our plot notes as well as notes that we will be taking on questioning. I am hoping that these will be something that I can share in my TpT shop.

I am a huge fan of teaching roots, prefixes, and suffixes to my 6th graders. One way that I have been doing this is by using Teach Root Words All Year Long from Fancy Free in Fourth Grade. I have loved it and so have my kiddos. Most of the time we will use this as a warm-up, but I love placing them in our ISN so we can reference them throughout the year.

We also use lots of foldables in our notebooks. This one came from the fabulous Dinah Zike and one of her many books that she has published.

I absolutely love chunking the content for my students through the use of foldables. I have been amazed at the results I have gotten from using these.

I am hoping to start doing a weekly post that shares with you all what we did in our notebooks that week or at least blogging about that once a month. Hopefully that answered some of the questions that you all had, but if you still have one, be sure and ask it!

New Year Resolutions and Novel Studies

One of my favorite things about teaching Language Arts is all of the novels that we get to read in my classroom. I really didn't do a great job of this during my first year because the choices I had to choose from were not the best. One of the things that I really worked on this past year was finding quality novels to read with my students as well as growing my collection of novel sets of 6 for book clubs. Right now I am planning on reading The Wednesday Wars and The Giver with my Pre-AP class. I just finished TWW and loved, loved, loved it! I think my kids, especially, the boys will enjoy it too! As for my regular classes I am not quite sure what I want to read with them yet. Even though it is a little easy, I think I am going to start the school year by reading The Best School Year Ever because my kids really liked that a lot last year. I think it is the perfect book to get their feet with and it gives them a positive experience with their first novel as a middle schooler. If you teach middle school, or upper elementary, what are your favorite novels to read as a whole class? What are some novels that you have used for lit circles or book clubs? 

I am also linking up with Amanda Madden for her Back to School Resolutions linky party. Make sure you go and link up over at her blog if you choose to participate. 

One. I need to manage my time after school better. Sometimes last year I would be up there until 6 or 7p.m. This school year my goal is to be gone no later than 5:15p.m. each day. I also really want to limit the amount of work that I take home with me to complete if I can. I think part of the problem is that I am a single 20 something and do not have a family or husband at home so it makes it easy to take things home with me.

Two.Stay organized. Last year I was very organized when the school year began, but it never lasted. I had to do some serious reorganizing at the semester. I think I will do a better job of it this year because I simply know what to expect. I am hoping that I can do a better job of teaching my students procedures about keeping their things organized too in the room which I think will help me stay organized at the same time.

Three.Stay positive. Last year I think I did a good job of this the first semester, but I let others get to me during the second semester. I need to do my part with this too by bringing a positive attitude to my classroom each day and realizing that every day cannot be perfect.There were some changes made to my team as a whole for this upcoming year and I think that the freshness of some new faces will help with this too.

Four. Share what I am doing in my classroom on a weekly basis on my blog. I love seeing what you all are doing in your classroom, so I want to share more of what I am doing too. I am thinking that each Sunday I am going to reflect on what I did during the previous week and hope to share pictures of that too.

On a side note, my campus found out yesterday that we met AYP!!! I could not be more excited since we had not met it in the previous year. 

Context Clue Detectives

Today we turned into Context Clue Detectives in my classroom. We had done some things with context clues when we were reviewing for the STAAR test, but I wanted to revisit them today. 

I was so excited about the lesson turned out and I think it really clicked all the way with my 6th graders. I took an anchor chart that I pinned on Pinterest and changed it a bit to better fit the needs of my kiddos. 

Source: slide.com via Katie on Pinterest

Unfortunately, I did not think to get a picture of it and I am usually so good about that. After we completed the anchor chart and notes in our ISN (Interactive Student Notebooks) we did a few together before I let them work with a partner. They had fun working with their partners to try and solve the mystery of figuring out what the words meant. Some of my kids were so sweet while they were working with each other. 

I especially loved this last picture. I could not believe that I caught these two boys sitting in the same recliner together. They are always trying to be macho 6th graders, but deep down they are really so sweet! 

I also do not think I mentioned the results of my certification test that I took last Thursday. Well, I am glad to report that I passed. I am officially certified to teach everything PK-8th grade! This is a huge relief because it really makes me marketable when I decide to leave my current campus. 

Only 9.5 more days with my 6th graders!

Three on Thursday

So many random things to share about this evening. 

one. Our Grammar Boot Camp has been going great. I really did not teach as much grammar as I would have liked throughout the year, but we are making up for it now. Last week and this week we have been doing irregular verbs. We took some really great notes in our notebooks from the anchor charts that we made together. I really like how they turned out and we have been using these while we have been working. 

Tomorrow we are going to start working on simple, compound, and complex sentences. Luckily, I know they did compound sentences some in 5th grade, but who knows what they will remember. 

Two. I finally broke down and splurged on a laminator that is all mine! Luckily we can use the one at school without any stipulations, but it will be so nice to have one at home this summer. I had been researching them for a while, but I finally decided on the middle of the road Purple Cow laminator. 

Isn't it just great?!?!?! I also stocked up on laminating pouches, cardstock, and colored ink for my printer because I have all of my purchases from the Teacher Appreciation Sale on TpT. I got some great math things that I cannot wait to use tomorrow. 

Three. Tomorrow our soon to be 6th graders are coming for a campus tour. That means that the end of my first year is so close, but the next school year is also not that far away. I am excited because one of my mentor teachers moved up to 5th grade so I will get to see her tomorrow and several of the kids from the 4th grade class that I student taught in. I am really hoping that I will get to have several of them again next year! 

Hope you have a wonderful last day of the school week tomorrow! If you are in Texas, stay dry!

Assessing, PD, and a Linky

Now that I am integrating CAFE and the Daily 5 in my classroom, I have been searching for a good reading assessment to use with my students. When I was in my undergraduate classes, we took 2 reading courses where we actually worked with a student in an after school program for an entire semester. In this class we used DIBELS to monitor our student's fluency and their growth as they worked with us. I really liked DIBELS because it had a weekly progress monitoring that we were able to give our student. However, this is not geared towards my 6th graders at all. If I remember correctly, it only went up to 3rd grade. 

I have also had previous experience with the DRA while doing observations and subbing at the elementary level. I really like this assessment because it not only has students read aloud, but they also read silently, and there is then comprehension questions that follow as well. I also like that this assessment provides you with a reading level that can be transferred to a grade equivalent. Since we do not use AR at my school, I would at least love to have this ball park number to help with my grouping and instruction that takes place in my classroom. I was looking on the Pearson website, who is the company that publishes the DRA kit, and I was excited to see that they have a 4-8 kit. Have any of you all ever used the 4-8 kit? You can find more out about it here. I am pretty sure that I am going to go ahead and budget for it though. :)

I was also so excited to discover that The Sisters are going to be in San Antonio doing workshops on The Daily 5 and CAFE in April. I already emailed my principal to see if I can go. I would love this opportunity since not many people in my district even know what it is . You can find out all of the places that the Sisters are going in 2012 by clicking here. Have you ever seen them present? I know that it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity and I have a feeling that I would walk away with so much knowledge that will help me to implement both things in my classroom even better. 

I mentioned last week about wanting to do a linky party where we all share what it is like on a daily basis in our own classrooms. I know that I personally love finding out how others spend their time during the day. It might even provide you with a new idea for your own classroom. 

Here is how it will work. On Friday, January  13th, you will get to write a post that it is completely dedicated to telling others what a day is like in your shoes. You can share as much or as little as you would like. I will have the post go live early that morning and all you will have to do is link up. In the mean time, feel free to copy and paste the picture and tell others about the linky party by blogging about it! I hope you are as excited about this as I am!

Our Reader's Notebooks

Today we had a 6th grade Language Arts teacher planning day. I was really excited about it, but I am bummed at the lack of things we actually got planned today altogether. I wish I could have just had a whole day to plan alone because I know I could have at least gotten a 6 weeks taken care of. I was actually excited to dive into the C-SCOPE materials because I have really struggled with not having a real scope and sequence to use this year. Well, I know what I am going to be doing over the Christmas break! 

I know that I have blogged about our reader's notebooks a few other times, but I just love them. I am so glad that I decided to bite the bullet and get lots of spiral notebooks when they were on sale during back to school time. It was such a good investment! The learning that has taken place in our notebooks is just amazing!!! I think I am going to ask my students to all bring a composition book for the spring semester because they just hold up so much better. Here is a picture tour of some of the things we have been doing in our notebooks lately. 

Sorry for the bad quality, they are from the phone. For some reason, I also cannot get the ones to rotate correctly in blogger. :(

Newspapers and Observations

Yesterday, we tool our notes about Author's Purpose and practiced finding the author's purpose using a picture book. Today we once again used a picture book, but we also used newspapers too to help us identify the 4 types of Author's Purposes. I purchased Jen Runde's Author's Purpose unit from her Teachers Pay Teachers store and that is where I have gotten several of my ideas from. It is a great unit! 

I have had newspapers stacking up in my room for several weeks now, and decided that they would be perfect to use for this lesson. What I did was I created 4 big anchor charts for each of the 4 purposes. I then split my students up into groups and gave them a newspaper, scissors, and glue. They had to find articles, advertisements, pictures, etc in their paper that was an example of each author's purpose. The kids loved it because they got to make a big mess that we cleaned up, and I loved it because I could tell that the kids actually got it! I did capture some pictures today of all of the fun, mess, and learning! 

I used the video that I shared earlier this week yesterday in class and we continued with the PIES theme today to help us remember the 4 types of Author's Purpose.

The charts we made in my 1st and 2nd period class. I also went ahead and put them up in the hallway because I was so proud of their work and thought it was such a neat activity.

The charts from 3rd and 4th period.

Some of the ones from 5th and 7th period.

The other 2 from 5th and 7th period.

After we finished, I had my students answer the sentence stem on their post-it note and then stick it to the big chart. I used a different color for each class. 

Did I mention that we made a little bit of a mess with this project? I am pretty sure we took at least 10 bags of trash out today!

Some of my Pre AP kids even decided to pick up a little couponing when we were finished. :)

Today we also had our Sheltered Instruction liaison on campus as well as another lady who is helping us this year since we failed to meet AYP this past school year because of our math scores. They both came in my room together at the same time and ended up staying in there for about 45 minutes. Normally they are in our rooms for maybe 10 minutes tops when they visit. Our AYP friend even came back to my room a 2nd time. I was not really sure if that was a good or bad thing. However, when I was headed out of the 6th grade building to go and check my box during my conference, they were both outside talking to my principal. They stopped me and told me how much they loved being in my room and loved the activity I was doing with my kids today. That made me feel really good and I was pretty excited about it. It put a smile on my face for sure! 

Yeah for it almost being Friday!

Authors Purpose

Have you seen this video?

I am for sure showing this to my kids tomorrow because we are talking about Authors Purpose. We are also going to make a foldable for our notebooks and read a story to identify the purpose the author wrote it.

P.S. If you sign up for a free account with Teacher Tube, you can skip the ads.

December Book Picks

Even though I teach middle school, I still use picture books all of the time. I need to take a picture tomorrow of my picture book to collection to show you all. I use them all the time as mentor texts to teach my 6th graders new skills. We are actually getting ready to use The Polar Express for a big unit.

I thought I would link up with Mrs. Parker to share some of my favorite book picks for the month of December. 

What are your favorite books to teach with in the month of December?

What a week...

This past Friday was by far the worst one I have had since starting the school year. 

On Friday, we had a lady come around our rooms to observe and see how we were doing with implementing our sheltered instruction strategies. Being that I just went to the sheltered instruction training this past September, I was pretty sure she was going to be walking into my room at some point, and I was right about that. However, I did not think that I was going to be the very first room she would go into, but I was. I have been using lots of the strategies that she I already used taught us in my classroom and I had my objectives posted like we are supposed to. She was in my room for about 15 minutes and then she talked to me for a few minutes during the 5 minute break in between 1st and 2nd period. She was quite negative with me and just kept pointing out the things I was not doing instead of at least sharing something positive with me. Let's just say that put me in a pretty crappy mood!

During 3rd period which is my Pre AP class I began to grade spelling tests while they were working on some comprehension questions for The Giver with a partner. Oh my goodness, the grades were horrible! I even had one of my kids in my first class make a 2 on it. Yes, a 2!!! I did not even know that was possible. He missed every single word, but managed to get the bonus right. There will definitely be some retesting and corrections going on with spelling tests from this past week. Hopefully they will do better on it this coming week.

After lunch, I had my Pre AP kiddos again for about an hour. One of the boys came back from lunch and could not follow directions and was driving me crazy. He also happened to be way behind with his work and was distracting the others while they tried to work. I ended up having to send him to the office with a stress pass so I did not blow a gasket. I think it might have been exactly what he needed though because he came back ready to work.

Then it was time for 5th period and this is my smallest class, there are only 16 of them, but 10 of them are boys. These boys also love to talk and argue with each other. They wear me out every single day, and Friday was no different. They would not stop talking for anything on Friday. Luckily, I did manage to make it to 6th period which is my conference.

During conference my plan was to go to the workroom to run my district benchmark bubble sheets through the Eduphoria scanner. I got a little frustrated when the computer program for it kept freezing and then would not take my bubble sheets. I finally gave up and started walking towards the main building to go and check my box. Our principal happens to be in one of the rooms as I am walking by and she calls me. She could tell I was frustrated and upset so we talked for a little while. When she was getting ready to walk out of the room she also told me that the sheltered instruction observer was raving about me and my classroom. The same one who I thought pretty much hated me actually loved me. Why couldn't she have told me something positive instead of making me mad for most of the day?

By this point I was pretty sure that my day could not get any worse, but it did. We took our MS cheerleaders to the HS pep rally on Friday because they were invited. It is always such a neat thing for the girls and it is a fun pep rally too because it was the black light one. We were supposed to be there by 2:45pm so the girls could warm up and everything. We were all there, but our head cheer sponsor did not get there until about 3:05 when the pep rally started at 3:15. This is when I just lost it and cried. Luckily I did feel better after crying.

Did I mention I had some major projects for grad school do this week too?

I can only hope that this week will be better than the last one.

Behind every good teacher, there is an even better bag!

When I came across Abby @ The Inspired Apple's linkup for teacher bags, I knew I had to participate. I would have done it sooner but I kept leaving my camera at school.

 Here she is. It is a Cindy tote which is from thirtyone. I absolutely love thirtyone and their products. They are so great. I of course had to get this bag monogrammed though to make it my own. I treated myself to this when I started student teaching because I knew I would need a good bag that could transport lots.

 This is what was in it today. Way too much!

 I keep my thirtyone wristley in there, my school lanyard with my badge, room key, and locker key, and my jump drive. How did we ever live without those things?

 This is sad but this was all in the zippered pocket. My glasses case, some DQ gift cards, a receipt with an ungodly amount of school supplies on it, a gift certificate to a hamburger place in town, and lyrics to I Want Candy by Aaron Carter so I can re-write them for the next pep rally when I have to give the pep talk.

 A few professional reference books, a book for grad school, The Giver which we are reading in my Pre AP class, and Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pies which is my current read.

 My Giver folder with resources, grade sheets, EZ-Grader, and the student list for reward day tomorrow.

 Grammar and Spelling book Teacher Editions.

 My bag of pens, pencils, and hilighters.

 Erin Condren teacher planner. I love this thing! It was so worth the money!

 It is also where I keep my TEKS so I have them when I am planning and writing my content objectives that we have to post each week.

And a look at a week in the life of a 6th grade teacher. 

I am thinking I might need to upgrade to one of the utility totes to tote it all back and forth. My theory though is with a smaller bag I cannot bring as much home.