Our latest book of the month: One Tiny Turtle!

Throughout the year, we've had several school-wide Books of the Month. Each month, every teacher receives a copy of the book and uses it to teach reading and writing lessons. This month (April), the Book of the Month is One Tiny Turtle by Nicola Davies. This book is the charming story of a Loggerhead Turtle's life and represents an incredible story of survival and instinct. It's a great book to integrate life science concepts, too.  Whenever we have a new Book of the Month, I create a bulletin board to introduce the book to our teachers and students. This was our bulletin board this month.

To share the story of the turtle's life, I included sea turtle facts all over the board.

I was especially happy with the 3-D elements of the board, including the seaweed and the border. To make the ruffled border, I cut strips of butcher paper. I staple the end down onto the board, made a ruffle and stapled above it. Then I made another and stapled, and so on. It added some wavy-oceany-texture to the board!

Our first grade teachers were responsible for putting together a display to represent their student responses to the book, and they really rose to the occasion. It's a tall order because our display cases are large and take up an entire section of the main hallway - that's a lot of space to fill, but the teachers did an incredible job! Below are some of the adorable products they created with their kids! Each class made a special product to respond to the book!

These turtles feature life cycles on their shells!

Tissue paper turtles must have been so much fun to make!

The spirals include little cards where the students sequenced the events of the story, and below are 3-d dioramas of the sea turtle's nest.

The kids retold the maine events of the story in an accordion fold.

How cute are these 3-D shells? The teacher did a beautiful job of creating a realistic environment!

These turtles are hanging on strips of box tape back-to-back to make them look like they're swimming through the space!

That's a lot of display case!

The teachers did a beautiful job responding to our Book of the Month! Pin It

Biography Study: fun ways to conclude our unit!

I think I have made a groove in my couch with my ample bottom. I've binge-watched Dexter on Netflix (because I'm all caught up on Law and Order SVU). I've consumed cup after cup of delicious coffee, pretending that using Splenda instead of sugar is healthy enough. I pour in the Splenda with my left hand, and with my right, I sqoodge on the whipped cream. Sometimes I carry a few marshmallows with me for good measure, in case the whipped cream melts and there's still more coffee left.
Ooooh! I just had an idea! I can sprinkle cinnamon on the whipped cream! YEAH!
Don't judge me. It's November. 
This November, many of our grade levels worked on teaching literary nonfiction, specifically, biography. We taught the elements of the genre and explored them in a few texts. After creating a matrix, our teachers were ready to wrap up the unit the week before Thanksgiving.
One great way some of our grade levels had students demonstrate their learning was this folded flap book about Snowflake Bentley. I love Snowflake Bentley - he's such a great person to read about and contributed so much to science! This little folded flap book documents his traits, motivations, challenges, and how he overcame his challenges. You can find it in my 41 Character Analysis Tools Pack, new to TPT!

On the outside, we illustrated Snowflake Bentley. On the inside, we wrote the text evidence and the inference we made about him.

The way we wrapped up our unit in the fifth grade was by making connections across the biographies and using them to compare/contrast the people we read about. Check out this post to see the matrix we used to connect across biographies!
Then we used the information in the matrix to make a folded flap book comparing/contrasting two people we read about. You can find this folded flap book in my Nonfiction Pack

Click over to check out the full 41 Character Analysis Tools Pack!

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Stealin' Paint Chips from Wal-Mart - Writing Freebie!

About a month ago, my fourth grade teachers and I went to an Empowering Writers training at our local service center. It was a great training for expository writing, and my teachers walked away with a lot of strategies and tools. One specific tool the trainer shared, which I've seen before on pinterest in various forms, is using paint sample cards to help students expand their color descriptions. Our trainer said we should go to the store, steal a bunch of paint chips, and put them on a ring so students can use them to find specific color words. Rather than saying "red" or "blue," they can say, "pomegranate red," or "cold cobalt". 

So today, after I got out of school, I was feeling charitable. I left early and ran by local Wally World, thinking, "I'm going to take a bunch of paint chips and make the rings for my teachers during my week off!" This was easier said than done. Mostly because I am afraid of getting in trouble  know it's wrong to steal.   Feeling guilty already about my plan to steal samples with no intention to purchase paint, I went to the hardware section and was pleased to see that it was empty. Just like when I need help with something, no associate with an "Ask me, I can help" vest was to be found. I started out with the shades of blue and purple. I grabbed "royal amethyst" and "true turquoise" paint samples in bundles of seven (one for each teacher). My stack began to grow as I added in "pale hyacinth" and "feather teal".  At this point, I realized I had quite a stack, so I stuffed it into my purse. I gazed around nonchalantly, trying to channel "I'm just browsing for the perfect bedroom color," I looked left and right. There was no associate in the vicinity. I did see several shoppers, though, and their classiness (this store is known for its classy clientele) deterred me from theft for a second. By which I mean I knew they knew exactly what I was doing: stealing.

Oh, well. They knew. I knew. We all know.  Grabbing large chunks of yellows: canary cream, dusty daffodil, and honeyed honeysuckle joined the bundle of contraband in my purse.  I began to really feel guilty. I looked around and saw a blue vest in the distance and decided to take a walk around the aisle. Pushing my cart and my purse full of thievery, I took a few steps down the aisle and pretended to think about surge protectors and extension cords. After I made a full circle around the aisle, I again stopped in front of the paint samples and proceeded to gather browns, beiges, and greens. Sea foam and fresh-cut grass were added to my stack, along with bubblegum pink and shades of rose.

And then the phone rang.  It was a sudden ring, from right behind me. The empty booth, designed for an associate who should be giving me the evil eye right now, was still vacant, but the phone was ringing.  It was ringing for me. It was ringing because I was a thief. I shoved all the paint samples in my purse - the stack was about five inches tall by now - and started to turn my cart to leave the section. And then a voice came over the public address system.  "Someone in hardware, please pick up line 2." AAAAAAA! I thought. They're calling someone to the hardware department to tell me to stop stealing their stuff!  I walked quickly, clutching my guilty purse, darting across the store.  "If I can only make it through the checkout before someone tells them I'm coming!" I thought irrationally. I stuffed my scarf into my purse to make sure no paint chips crawled out to declare my guilt.

I found a magical empty checkout lane (I know - an empty lane in Wally World? It had to be a trap) and raced to the counter. I couldn't make eye contact with the cashier, becuase my tell-tale heart was beating from inside my bag.  "Did you find everything you were looking for today?" the cashier asked me. "Yes," I squeaked, barely able to keep myself from blurting out, "I'm sorry! I'll never do it again!"  "Have a good night," she said. I didn't deserve her graciousness. "Thank you," I said, as I dragged my bag o'lies out of the store. I didn't feel completely comfortable until I was sitting in my car with the door closed. I opened up my sack and shuffled through my purloined paint colors. 

The kids will never know what we do for them. I risked my freedom for a stack of colorful cards in colors I will never really use. All of this being said, if you are brave and would like to go steal paint chips from your local one stop money trap, here's a handy dandy printable you can use to make your own Ring O' Color Words!     

Grab your freebie at TPT!

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Literary Nonfiction: what's important in a biography?

Our big focus for reading this year has been to identify the important characteristics of a genre in order to help our students know what to look for in each genre.  Our current unit of study is about Literary Nonfiction. We are teaching most of the unit through biographies and autobiographies, because they meet the criteria of literary nonfiction: text that provides information but uses literary devices, such as descriptive language or a narrative story structure. This can be a difficult concept for readers who are new to this genre! It's a crossover genre, and it contains characteristics of more than one genre we are familiar with.

In the upper grades (2-5), we planned a unit in which the teacher reads several literary nonfiction texts and looks for specific things in each one, and then adds them to a matrix to help students make connections across texts. 

This is the way our matrix looks in third grade:

In case you can't read the questions, they're 

- Who is the subject/main person?

- What are their traits?

- What are their motivations or goals?

- What challenges does he or she face?

- How do they overcome the challenge?

- What lesson can we learn from their life?

We chose to read...

Wilma Unlimited

Harvesting Hope

and Snowflake Bentley - one of my favorites!

It's especially difficult for kids to understand and decide on a lesson, moral, or theme for the text. Our teachers worked on the theme as the learning that the character does or the reader can do as a result of how the problem is solved (or challenge is overcome). 

Question for you: Which biographies do you love to read with kids? Which have the best messages for us to learn?

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Buzzing about Biography & Winter Word Work Freebie!

Oh, biography, why are we studying you right before Christmas when I what I really want to do is spend all day reading Christmas and holiday poems and stories? But alas, we live in the land of NCLB, and if children don't understand biography the difference in point of view compared to an autobiography, we'll all end up dead from zombie attacks, killer robots, or thinking we can control dinosaurs by making them lysine dependent. I'll do what I can, future, to make sure you don't happen like I think you might probably happen anyway.

Anyway, I am SO EXCITED to be teaching biography! I know Snowflake Bentley would have been an awesome awesome choice, but I needed something where everyone had a copy for shared reading. This being said, I also wanted to kill a few birds by reading about someone who had been a "good citizen" and address some of our social studies standards. This is how we ended up learning about Helen Keller (always a shocking read for little people, and for myself, actually. It blows my mind a little) and Harriet Tubman. We practiced reading for information and gathered facts on our graphic organizers.

First, as a class, we read about and recorded facts about Helen Keller:

 Then, we read about Harriet Tubman, recorded facts, and made the graphic organizer into a little foldable.

I don't know why Harriet looks so terrified
yet otherwise emotionless in these pictures. 

Inside of foldable

This week, we'll be reading an autobiography and comparing the points of view between the two.

Also, sometimes this week (probably Friday) we'll be doing this word work! After perusing my free printable from Teachers Pay Teachers and reading about building words from the letters in "Winter Wonderland," I decided that is exactly what we need to do in order to keep children from overdosing on candy in my classroom. So here's what it looks like (the letters can be cut out to manipulate) and you can grab it here.

Happy Teaching! (And Happy Christmas)

You can grab my whole Building Words for all Seasons on TPT!