Author Visit: Donna Munoz: Harley Farley's First Halloween!

One of my fondest memories of my early teaching career is the day I met Rick Riordan. Our school had won the membership contest for International Reading Association, and our prize was a guest author visit. Rick Riordan had already written several novels for adults, and his new book, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, was about to be published!

Now, of course, Percy Jackson is a major series, has been a motion picture, and is loved by middle schoolers, high schoolers, and adults everywhere (or many places, anyway).

I believe in authors sharing their writing process with kids; encouraging them to write and read; discussing the challenges of revision; sharing where inspiration comes from. Because of this, we try to have at least one guest author each year to hopefully inspire our students.

Yesterday, we were absolutely blessed to have a lovely children’s author, Donna Munoz, come and share her writing and her process with our kids! I sat in on the fifth grade presentation and listened to her story about being the first person in her family to attend college, overcoming challenges, and loving her career as a teacher and a writer.

Her book, Harley Farley’s First Halloween, is available on Amazon in paperback and for the kindle. You can grab it here: 

It’s an adorable story about a zombie named Harley Farley who sleeps in a bunk bed in Eddie’s room at the top of the stairs! Eddie finds him one Halloween night and decides to take him trick-or-treating. It was really enlightening for the kids to hear about where the inspiration came from for certain details in the story; why Eddie’s “plan” looks like a football playbook, whose idea it was to include fried chicken in the story, and why the message of acceptance is so important.

Donna wrote the story collaboratively with her three sons around the dinner table!

An important moment (I always enjoy it) was when Donna shared her document of the story with edits. Students are always surprised to see that “real” authors revise. It’s such a valuable lesson to help kids think about their own writing work.

Donna also shared the first page of her upcoming middle school book, A Jar Full of Butterflies, a story about two sisters who have to move from Mexico to Texas and must find themselves here in America. This is a story many of our children know well from personal experience.

She encouraged our kids to find something they care about and work through their challenges. What a great message!

Happy Teaching!

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Five for Friday! Halloween edition

This week was ca-razy. The kids were actually really great, but we had so many things planned that I am dead tired. 

One
Because this was Red Ribbon Week, just getting dressed appropriately in the mornings was a real challenge. This was Give Drugs the Slip, so I pulled out my Clifford slippers and flopped around in them all day.

Two

On Team Up Against Drugs Day, I busted out my favorite team shirt: Go Yanks!

Three

We had an early release day this week. My math/science counterpart had already planned a training on learning targets and he delivered it beautifully. But, of course, we had to pause for some tasty treats courtesy of our principal and office staff.

Four

On Thursday, I made some tasty treats of my own. To thank the teachers and staff who had worked hard to make Family Literacy Night successful, I made them some deeelicious cupcakes. I don't know if you've tried the new Cinnamon Bun frosting, but holy cow. It is amazing.

Five

On Friday, we had a fairy tale ball for the students in K-2. It was SO MUCH FUN. I dressed up as Gretel and we were introduced red carpet-style. We danced the afternoon away and left feeling exhausted and disgusting in our costumes. 

Go check out Doodle Bugs Teaching and see what other great pictures people have shared for this week! Or link up yourself!


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November Math and Literacy Centers and Stations: Fun Turkey Themes!

Are you a planner? Are you completely ready for November? Well, good for you. Go to some other blog where they're already hand-crafting their own Christmas decorations. Because this is not that kind of blog. I'm just cutting out some stuff for November! These are two of my math and literacy stations that are perfect for this time of year!

In this activity, students have to work out the multiplication problems on the pumpkins. They round the answers to the nearest hundred and sort them into products that round to 100, 200, 300, or 400! 

The entire Turkey Time Math Centers set includes the above activity, a multiplication roll and color center, fact family matching activity, word problems, and arrays. Every activity includes an answer sheet and answer key! Grab it at TPT for only $3.00!

This is from my Gobbling Up Words Word Work centers. In this center, kids read the words on the cards and sort them into one, two, or three-syllable words.

The rest of the Gobbling Up Words Word Work Center set includes a fun Old Maid-type game called Old Crow to practice plural nouns, a compound word building activity, and a sight word choose & color center. Everything is in a fun Thanksgiving theme! Recording sheets are included!

You can get this at TPT for only $3.00 too! For just $6.00, all of your math and literacy stations can be taken care of for November! Pin It

Saturday English Camp: Pancakes, Pancakes for second graders!

Last year, we hosted three Saturday English Camps and invited our students who are struggling to make growth in English to attend for free! It's a big challenge for our teachers and students to grow in their English capacity when so many of our kids have little exposure to language at home, come in speaking Spanish only at home or demonstrating a strength in neither English nor Spanish. This is one of the initiatives we've tried to help our kids who are stuck in one level of English acquisition. The main focus of our English camps were listening, speaking, reading, and writing in English. We incorporate fun, hands-on activities, and language acquisition strategies such as chants, songs, poems, GLAD charts, etc.  First, our second graders read Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie DePaola, a wordless picture book classic!

Then they sequenced pictures from the story to retell using sequencing words such as "first," "after that," etc. 

The teachers called them up in groups to watch pancake batter start to bubble and cook on a griddle and the kids described that they saw using specific and scientific language.

Once enough pancakes were made, and students had finished writing about the changes they saw in the batter, moving from a liquid to a fluffy solid and releasing gas, they came back up to the table and explained which toppings they wanted on their pancakes. 

And then they scarfed. So tasty! And so much fun while learning English!

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Sequencing and Summarizing in a Folktale

Gosh, I miss having a class of my own. As a literacy coach, the teachers are my students...and the students are our students, but they're not MY students. I have to share them with their teachers. It's hard, sometimes.... and then sometimes, when I see a teacher filling out an office referral, or submitting grades, or doing anything else I don't like to do, I don't miss it so much. But most of the time, I do.

Anyway, this past week, I've been a modeling fool. My modeling career is really taking off in fourth grade, where I'm modeling reading and writing lessons for a teacher who just had to close her kindergarten section and move to fourth grade three weeks after school started.

Don't ask.

She's been great, and I've been loving modeling in her room! This week, we worked on sequencing and summarizing the plot's events in a folktale. Some folktales are great sources for this kind of plot teaching because there's a clear lesson supported by the problem and the solution. To teach this, we chose The Little Ant, by Joe Hayes. He's kind of a local favorite.

We read The Little Ant to students and gave them little cards with the main events of the story.

 

After the reading, during which students each had a copy, the students used the text evidence to sequence the events in the story. We had them identify the important elements: the main character, her motivation, the problem, solution, outcome, and lesson.

 

After students sequenced the events, we checked them together using the text evidence from the story. 

Then, we gave each pair of students a fiction story map. They decided on the elements and glued them on.

 From there, we gave each team a blank sentence strip and told them the element they were responsible for. Students in the group wrote a sentence describing their element from the story. They created them in complete sentences. We put them together on our five summary elements of fiction pocket chart to create a super summary of the story.

This scaffolding has really supported students in summarizing and thinking about the important elements in most fiction stories. By generalizing the learning, I'm hoping we've helped them make connections to their own reading!


To help kids practice the work we've done during Reader's Workshop to students' independent reading, I created this Fiction Lapbook. It includes folded flap books for students to use when reading their own stories or novels. The skills included are the five fiction summary elements, different types of questions, character analysis, character relationships, cause-effect relationships, and comparing characters! I'm so excited to use it with our kids!

You can get it at TPT!       Pin It

Summarizing in Fiction

Does summarizing make you want to pull your hair out? How many times have you shouted to kids, "JUST THE IMPORTANT PARTS!" while sobbing over a stack of copied 'responses' taken verbatim from the text? 

Well, yeah, summarizing is hard. But if we can give kids tools and a focus, we can help them be far more successful when it comes to fiction summarizing. 

Summarizing requires kids to understand the text structure, determine what's important, and write it in a logical way. Yikes; we're asking a lot from some of our struggling readers. Without the proper scaffolding, they're really going to be playing a guessing game. 

Over the last couple years, I've put together a strategy that has been very supportive of our kids, able and struggling readers alike. This is it:

   

Ok, so maybe it doesn't look like much. But trust me, I no longer tear out my hair for lack of decent summaries! 

It all starts with identifying the important events in the plot. You can read about what we did to scaffold students' understanding of the plot's main events here, in my post about The Sweetest Fig. 

 

From there, we identified these four out of the five elements of the plot:

Main Character

Goal/Motivation

Problem/Conflict

Solution/Resolution

Outcome/Lesson Learned

All of these elements are written on colored index cards on a pocket chart. We consistently use the same colors so students will be able to use this system independently. This chart will stay up for as long as we learn about fiction, in order to help students recall the important elements to summarize.

Each team received one sentence strip to create a complete sentence to represent their assigned element. These are the sentences they came up with to summarize the plot's main events from The Sweetest Fig.

 

 

In case you can't read it, it says, "Mr. Bibot is disrespectful to Marcel the dog. Mr. Bibot wants money. Bibot received special figs, (we verbally added the following) that he wanted to use to be the richest man in the world. But then, Marcel ate the last fig! Marcel's dream came true instead of Bibot's. Lesson Learned: Treat other people the way you want to be treated.

It's far from beautiful, but it includes the important elements, in a logical order! Now it's easy to do some basic revising and include some transition words to write a great summary!

But here's the tricky part. We teach kids to create a summary based on something they've read. This is an essential and invaluable skill. But then, when we test them, we do it differently. They have to find the best summary out of four versions. 

This is very different from what we've asked them to do, and it can be hard for students who are struggling or not as sophisticated in their thinking to make the connection. So this is how I bridge it:

Do you see on the right side of the picture where there are four different paragraphs, all colored up? Those are four different summary versions for The Sweetest Fig. I wrote them myself :) One of them is the BEST, that is, it is the most complete and most accurate, compared to the other summaries - the other three are lacking something, so are NOT the best. 

 

To have students evaluate these summaries, I asked each student in each group to decide which element they were going to hunt for and grab that colored marker. Some had more than one element. They read through the summary as a group and marked their evidence for each element in the summary. If their element was missing from the summary, they made a little note on the bottom of the page. After they marked up each of the four summaries, they decided which was the BEST summary. Students were very successful with this scaffolding!

 

This 5 element strategy lines up very well with the Somebody Wanted But So Then strategy; they both represent similar elements!

Fisher-Reyna on TPT have some handy free tools to help you teach these elements of fiction as well.

And one of the folded flapbooks in my brand-new fiction lapbook is all about the elements of fiction! It's only $2.00 at TPT!

Check them out!

Happy Teaching!

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