On the First Day of Christmas, Ms. B Gave to ME...

On the first day of Christmas, Ms. B gave to me... an embarrassing family story!
It's the Twelve Days of Christmas!
My family absolutely loves Christmas. We have a lot of traditions, and if we were to somehow have to 'do' Christmas without them, I'm not sure if we could deal. This year, I'm starting my own blog tradition. The last twelve days before Christmas, I'm going to share things with you. I will share a story and a thing. 
Today's story is an embarrassing family story. This is easy to do because I have an embarrassing family.
Embarrassing Family Story:
My youngest brother, Matthew, is a nice boy. The story I am about to tell you is not going to make him look like a nice boy. But he mostly is. We all make mistakes when we're hopped up on sugar. When Matthew was little, he was a typical little boy. Except that he loved fudge. Absolutely loved it. He could eat entire trays of it (if he were allowed). And he was pretty much a fan of sugar altogether. 
One special Christmas day, when Matt was four years old, we had a house full of people. There were bowls/plates/trays of sugar in all of its forms: candy, cookies, and other tasty green and red colored items.
Matthew, while we were otherwise engaged, spent the morning going from tray to tray and consuming large quantities of any Christmas-ish items.
So by the time we were ready to open gifts, he was really just a clothes-wearing sugar boy. If you'd licked him, you would probably taste frosting.
Now, this was the extended family Christmas. We had already exchanged family presents, and now we were really only giving gifts to the people we hadn't seen yet. Matthew had one gift to open. A foamy football. He took it and went into his bedroom, we hoped, to nap. Or at least sit and watch cartoons. Or do almost anything other than what he actually did next.
My mother and I were out in the den with the large group of family. Everyone was talking and shouting over each other, until a moment of lull in the conversation. At the same moment the conversation died down, I heard a distant shout, bordering on a scream. My eyes darted across the room and met my mother's, who had clearly heard the same thing. She nodded at me, and I raced down the hallway to my brother's room.
I found Matthew sitting in the middle of his floor, surrounded by little green bite-shaped pieces of foam. I watched in horror as he raised the football to his mouth, took a bite out of it, spit the bite out onto the floor, and shouted, "I WANT PRESENTS!"
What a nice little boy he was.
Needless to say, we cleaned up the football bites, force-fed Matthew some protein in the form of a hot dog or some such nutritious foodsource, and never, ever, ever told my father.
As penance for Matthew's horrific behavior, I am sharing for free, until midnight tonight, my Word Work at Santa's Workshop centers from TPT! Grab it free until tomorrow, at which time it will return to 3.00!
Product for Free for a Limited Time!

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12 Days of Christmas starts tomorrow!

My principal is a sweet and wonderful woman who seems to love celebrations. At our school, each grade level and special team is designated a special day when they are responsible for bringing in something to share with the rest of the school. 
One of the teachers remarked that,  instead of the 12 Days of Christmas, it should be called The 12 Pounds of Christmas. So far, I've had donuts, cakes, bagels, hot chocolate, candy, and several other tasty treats sure to add on the poundage.
One special grade level gave us calendars instead of food. While I very much appreciated the thoughtfulness towards my waistline and closet, I must admit..... I like food.
Don't forget: tomorrow, it begins! That makes today the 12 Days of Buzzing with Ms. B's Christmas Eve! Exciting!

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Expository Text Structures

Our latest plans for nonfiction!
 
In fifth grade, the teachers are introducing expository text structures. The TEKS call for these text structures in fifth grade: cause-effect, compare-contrast, sequence, logical order, and classification theme. The teachers are reading different articles with the kids and searching for the 'signal words' that indicate the relationships between ideas. They'll build this chart as they go! 

At the end, we planned for them to distribute shorts texts to the kids and have them sort them by organizational pattern, and complete the graphic organizer for each one. 

Wish us luck!

To help your kids understand how to analyze text structure, you can check out this Reading Strategy MiniPack on TPT: Analyzing Text Structure! It uses the gradual release model to support kids in understanding how to analyze text structure in expository text. 

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New Unit: Nonfiction Features!

Embarrassing Story:

Today my hunny and I went to Corner Bakery to do a little work on our laptops and enjoy some tasty stuff. I worked away (blogging, creating. You know the business) and he worked as well. He is the photographer for our district, so he was working on editing some pictures of the cute little guys we go to work for every day! At one point, he flipped his laptop around and showed me the most beautiful picture. A little pre-K boy with his tiny little fingers clenched in glee, laughing like he'd never seen anything so funny. I immediately cracked up. This little guy just looked so joyful.

Then I asked, "When did you take this? Why is he laughing so much?" and my hunny said, "It was the first day of pre-K and they were doing Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes during PE as fast as they could."

And this is when I became a smushy puddle of jelly. I started cry! Right there, in the Corner Bakery, I had tears spilling down my face and onto the napkins made of recycled material. Something about the sweetness of a little boy being so excited to do Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes on his first day of school was so moving that I fell apart like a person with a chemical imbalance.

Which I may well be.

Anyway, this is what I intended to blog about: (Don't you love my skill-less transition?)

Actual Blog Content:

One of the more difficult texts for kids to navigate is expository. This is unfortunate, because kids love to read about information and it's such an invaluable skill! I think it's largely due to the lack of experience kids have with informational text. The less exposure they have, the more difficult it is for them to glean information and identify how ideas are related.

My school has begun teaching about expository text this month. For the next several days, I'd like to share with you some of the things that we've planned to do in the expository genre.

To get started, we're helping kids do some basic text navigation by creating this anchor chart. Students often have experience identifying the text features. However, using them is a different story.

Ask a kid, "Where's the caption?" and he can probably point to a caption. Ask the same kid, "How does that help you? Why did the author include it?" and the kid stares blankly. (This is what I call the dead fish look.)

To me, this is a slight flag-raiser. Everything we do is to help our kids understand text and become better readers. If what we're doing doesn't do that... why do it? So to assist in this, we made sure we added a column on our chart entitled "Why was this feature included?"

Once students have learned to identify (and appreciate) the features text has to offer, they need to do these two things with them:

1. Use the features to make good predictions about the text
2. Gather information from the features

To help out with this, I'm sharing a couple of documents that you can use to help kids make and record their predictions and record facts they have learned from features of nonfiction.

Nonfiction Features Scavenger Hunt

Nonfiction Fact Finder 

(I require students to use the nonfiction features to gather information and record them on this organizer.

Nonfiction Prediction Guide with Response Questions

Grab them free at google docs! Pin It

Saturday English Camp: Gingerbread Adventures and GIVEAWAY WINNERS!

Saturday was our last day of English Saturday Camp for our ELL students. They had so much fun. Our fifth graders read Too Many Tamales (love that book) and made ornaments. Our fourth graders read Braids and made bunuelos! And our third graders made adorable gingerbread men from salt dough. I must admit, though. I spent a lot of time with second grade. They made gingerbread men, too. Out of gingerbread. These are just a few pictures of the fun things they did:

They made the gingerbread from a mix and rolled it out.

Then they oh-so-carefully decorated with m&ms.

And then, they baked in toaster ovens!

Tasty. I'd recommend it.

And, what you've all been waiting for... the BIG WINNERS! These winners have each won the corresponding prize from my giveaway! Congratulations and thanks to everyone who entered! a Rafflecopter giveaway Pin It

Thankfully Stuffed

Tomorrow is the first year I'll be hosting Thanksgiving in my our home. My hunny moved in about a month ago and we're having his family over tomorrow (thankfully, just his parents and godfather) for Thanksgiving dinner.
Yelp.
I've helped to make every item on a Thanksgiving table, and made some of them exclusively by myself, but I've never made the whole meal from start to finish. Without supervision from my mother. This will be a challenge. To make things even more exciting, my hunny's parents only speak Spanish. I mean, there's a smattering of English in there, and I've got my high school Spanish, which you can imagine how excellent that it, but suffice it to say our conversations aren't exactly scholarly. They sound like this:
That's nice. You like it? Yes. I like it. It's good. Yeah, I like it, too. I don't like that one. No, I don't like that. Fernie does. Fernie does. Yes. I don't. No.
That conversation could have been about any noun. Cars, cake, sofas, television shows, people, blouses, any noun at all. And that's really all we have to say, despite a lot of things that we think. Today was PIE day. 

We (my mother, sister-in-law, and I) made fourteen pies, fifty-some empanadas, a lemon thing, and

cranberry sauce. Why am I so full? Because I taste-tested every item; some at multiple stages in their development. 
Hmmmm....that apple strudel looks tasty. Taste taste.
Now I'll put it on the apples and mix it up. Num nums.
Now I'll roll a little in a little ball of dough. Mmmm...
Not healthy, I know, but it is what it is. Just being honest. Maybe making some of you feel better. I decided, at the very last minute, to participate in A Year of Many Firsts Stuffed with Thankfulness Linky Party! My thankful things are similar to everyone else's. No one ever says that they're thankful for baking powder or carrots (although those are two extremely useful things. Baking powder for making tasty biscuits and carrots for making...what else? Carrot cake). But it's good to share.

I'm thankful for this guy. He's my hunny. 

Not Martin Luther King. I mean, he's great, and I'm thankful for him, too, but my hunny is the one on the left.

He's on the right in this one. That other guy is Babe Ruth. 

These people make me pretty thankful, too:

My best friend, Rachel. 

My great sister-in-law, Stephanie. Super fun to be around, and she's a teacher, too, so we bore everyone with our teacher talk.

All my bros and my parents. This is John & Stephanie's wedding, about a two years ago. We're lucky that, even though we tease each other mercilessly, (see below) we all actually like each other; something my hunny frequently reminds me of.

The other day, we celebrated my brother Ben's twenty second birthday by playing the game "Partini." This is a dangerous game. For one round, we had to write things about the person who chose the card and the person had to decide which was funniest and which was truest. 

These were some of the statements written about me:

- I am a man who has funky teeth and I'm not as smart as I think. (from John. How sweet.)

- I am down to Earth (opinionated). (from Ben. This was truest.)

- I like tasty things (from Stephanie. This was funniest. Because it was true)

- I am the boss of can I can I have I can do anything I try to do! (this was mom. She struggled a bit.)

- I was such a mean teacher to my students they told me to teach other teachers. (from Matt. Insightful.)

Other highlights: "I'm the smartest one around. When I'm not around family." and "I can't fix anything without breaking it first."

That's pretty much what I'm thankful for. Of course there's a home, job that I love, and my furry friends, but the people are the biggest piece of the pie.
Go link up with A Year of Many Firsts!
And don't forget to check out my One Year Blogiversary Giveaway & Sales! That's how I am showing my thankfulness to you great followers!

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