I honestly don't know what to say, so silence is best anyway.

Join us tomorrow for a day of silence in the blogging community to honor and remember the children, teachers, and families of Sandy Hook.

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On the third day of Christmas, Ms. B gave to me...

On the third day of Christmas, Ms. B gave to me...another embarrassing story! Embarrassing Story
It was my first Christmas in my own house, and I had invited my friends over for a Christmas party! I had bunches of people over - mostly my teacher-friends, and I was excited to have covered my house from top to bottom with garland. We had a nice evening and, upon teacher-request, I made a pot of coffee.   I am a big coffee drinker. I like my coffee a la Marilyn. Blonde and Sweet. But I use sweet'n'low. So to serve such a demanding coffee population, I had gathered up a few options from my mom's house. I had a little baggie of sugar and a little baggie of splenda.   I poured a cup of coffee for me, and one for my friend's husband, Mike and dressed them up with creamer and splenda. As I walked back to the den, Mike said, "Uh, Chrissy. This coffee is...bad." What do you mean? I asked. "It just tastes...bad." I took a sip. Yup. Bad. Very bad. Bad like acrid bitter coffee. It had a flat, yucky flavor.    My brain went nuts. Can coffee go bad? Can splenda go bad? Was it my coffee maker? It was kind of old. What if there was something in the bottom of the mug? What if I poisoned Mike?! I tasted my coffee. Gross. I tasted coffee directly from the pot. Ok. I tasted the creamer. Fine. I tasted the splenda.   Blech!   I turned out, I had made myself three little baggies. One of sugar, one of splenda, and one of kosher salt, and I'd been 'sweetening' everyone's coffee with the latter! Mystery solved. Coffee re-poured. Party ensued.

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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