Prayers Needed!

We had a tragedy strike our small little community today that directly affected both the middle and high school. We had a house fire last night that took the lives of an 8th grader on my campus, and her 10th grade brother who attended the local high school.

KSAT News Story

Two Fredericksburg teenagers died and their father was seriously burned overnight in a residential fire at 623 Deer View Drive. Perishing in the 4:30 a.m. fire were Brian Cantu, 14, and Justine Cantu, 15. Their father, Armando Cantu, is being treated in Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio for burns he received trying to save his family. Other family members were able to escape without injury or with minor injuries, which were treated at the scene. Funeral arrangements for the two youths are pending at Schaetter’s Funeral Home in Fredericksburg.Cause of the fire is undetermined and remains under investigation.

The whole campus is in shock. Justine, who was the 8th grader, was such a sweet girl and always had a smile on her face. It has really made me realize that I never know when might be the last time I see my students. I have to cherish each and every day with them.

Two teens perish in Fredericksburg fire: kxan.com

Exhausted!

I am beyond exhausted after our first full week back this semester! Maybe it was because I started grad school back up last Saturday, or the fact that we had our parent informational meeting for cheerleading on Wednesday, or the fact that I had 12 of my 54 kids absent yesterday. At least I had a sick day today because I had to get blood drawn, go to the dentist, and get a physical. Having the whole day was nice, but I am dreading going up to school on Sunday to see what my room looks like. 

I am really excited for my grad classes this semester. I am taking 12 hours and most people think I am crazy when I say that, but it is the only way my university offers their grad semesters. It really isn't too bad because we only have to go to the university one Saturday a month, and everything else is online. This semester I am taking PPR, Curriculum and Instruction, my research class, and Advanced Content Reading. The texts for all of my classes are really great and I am actually excited about the research class because we will be doing Action Research. Any good ideas for my research? I am currently torn between doing something with collaboration between teachers or the use of small groups in the middle school classroom. I know that both would be a big help to me. 

I am also hosting an online Stella and Dot party right now that you should go and check out! Click here to shop. All you have to do to order from my party is to make sure that you pick my name at checkout, Katie Klohn. It is through the 3rd of February. 

I also came across a new blogger tonight and you should go and share some love over there. The blog is called Fumbling in Fifth Grade and she is about to take over a 5th grade classroom in February. Her story reminds me a lot of my adventure of finishing my student teaching in 6th grade and then taking over for the rest of the year. I cannot wait to hear how her first day goes this coming week! 

Also get excited because I am going to be posting a giveaway sometime this coming week. I am going to be giving away one of my absolute favorite teaching products! Trust me, you won't want to miss it! 

Here is to a productive weekend for all of us!

Daily 5 Stations

Today was the first day that we did our Daily 5 stations in class and I am so pleased with how it went! I am currently using 5 stations (read to self, read to someone, work on writing, work on words, and meet with the teacher). I will be sharing more about this later this week with you all. 

Sorry about the poor quality of pictures, but you've got to love the iPhone! :)

When students are meeting with me this week, we are doing an activity that goes along with out persuasive unit that we are currently doing. We read a short article together about the driving age and whether teenagers should drive at 16 or 18 years old. While reading, we highlighted and marked on it when we found techniques that the author used to try and persuade us. 

When we finished, this is what our article looked like. 

We did some things on the article like...

Once we finished reading and marking the article, we then worked together to write a persuasive paragraph together using the OREO technique. OREO stands for Opinion, Reason, Explanation, and Opinion. I even had some Oreos that we used for this activity and the students loved eating them! Later this week, students will be responsible for writing their own persuasive paragraphs using the same strategy. The article they will use for that is about bullies. 

My librarian actually gave me this article and it was from an old Scholastic Scope magazine. I am really wanting to budget for it next year. Do you use any of the Scholastic magazines in your classroom? There are 3 of them in my opinion that would be great for my 6th graders. If you don't use Scholastic magazines, but use something else, what is it?

We have also been making lots of anchor charts together in class too. Here are the two that we made last week. 

Hope everyone has a terrific Tuesday!

Yes, I got to meet them!

So glad that I decided to make the hour and a half drive last night to SA to meet up with some other central Texas teacher bloggers! 

I had such a blast with Farley, Reagan, and Kristina (who needs to start a blog pronto!!!). It was so great to just relax, eat some chips and salsa, and talk about our crazy lives as teachers! 

 Farley, I borrowed the picture from you, I hope you do not mind. I don't know why I didn't snap one! :(

I cannot wait until we do it again!

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!