Souper Bowl

Tomorrow at Donovan the teachers all bring in soup and we have a Souper Bowl party.  Get it a "Souper Bowl" party.  I will not lie...I love this day.  Any excuse to get to sit and eat a bunch of different soups with breads sounds great to me.  Of course on the day we have hot soup served it is going to be the hottest it has been in the last thirty days.  I just finished my chili and it seems like it might be a good batch.

Tonight I have been working on finding a few infographics that we are going to use to look at the real Super Bowl and the separation of powers in our government.  I love looking at infographs.  I just found infographs a few years ago but I love how they show information in a visual way.  Here is an example of an infograph about vinyl records.

Sorry I realize that might now show up perfectly on the blog.  I think these infographs are just another type of text that students have to learn to read.  It also allows us to look at different types of charts and graphs.  I find the information inside of the infographs amazing.  For example one of the infographs that we are going to look at tomorrow claims that enough guacamole is going to be consumed on Sunday to cover a football field at a depth of 11.8 feet.  That is insane, but to be honest I know how much guacamole I will be eating so it might not be that implausible.  

I need to keep it short tonight.  I hope you are all having a great week.

Small Words

We have really started to work on the parts of words.  Each week now we are looking at a suffix or a prefix or a greek or latin root.  I really wanted the students to understand why we are looking at these small parts of the words, so I went searching on youtube and found this great video.

We watched this video in class last week.  I think it really helped the students understand that if they understand the smaller words or parts of a word they will be able to spell and understand bigger words.  

I have been so impressed with the class.  Obviously we have not been able to string together a large group of days.  Even with these constant breaks the class is working so hard.  Today I just started asking some rapid fire questions about the prefixes, suffixes, and greek roots that we had discussed.  It was amazing to see the retention the students were able to show me with their answers.  

Today also allowed us to get into our hero unit.  We started by reading an article about two cross country runners.  As a class we read the article and wrote our thinking all around the text.  The class shared some great thinking and I was really impressed that we also noticed some of the amazing writing from the piece.  

After reading the article we started to make a list of characteristics of a hero.  The class added that a hero is willing to help others and they might be persistent.  We will continue to add to this list of characteristics as we read more.  

Hope you are all having a great week.

State of our Classroom

Perfect night to fill you in on the state of our classroom.  If I had to pick just one word to describe our classroom right now it would be transition.

In social studies we are transitioning from learning about early Ohio history to government.  I love our unit on government.  In fourth grade we study state government.  We will dive into the topics of the different levels of government (federalism), the branches of government, the powers given to state government, voting requirements, the role of citizens, and much more.  One thing that I love about teaching about our government is that we will be reading selections of the U.S. Constitution and the Ohio Constitution.  I know these documents can seem daunting but we look at small sections of the text to determine their meaning.

In writing we are soon going to be transitioning from learning about poetry to looking at text structures that authors use.  I am excited for this unit.  I have never really taught a unit that was centered around text structures.  I think that giving the class the opportunity to look at how authors organize their non-fiction writing will allow them to think about why authors decide to use these different structures.  It will also allow students to understand that there are different options to present the information that they are trying to share.

In reading we are transitioning from learning about how Native Americans talked about the earth and sky to learning about heroes.  Yesterday I talked about how we started having students think about what they thought made a hero a hero.  Now we are going to jump right into the unit learning about heroes from the past and present in literature and real life.

Our last transition is that we just started a new read aloud last week.  The book is a change from the other types of books we have read aloud this year.  In the book Flora and Ulysses Kate DiCamillo and the illustrator K.G. Campbell include comic book pages along with the text.  Comics or graphic novels have become a very popular form of text in the last few years.  As I mentioned yesterday this book just won the Newbery medal award.  I got to tell the class the news of the award yesterday and they were extremely excited.  I have just found a group of interviews with Katie DiCamillo and I cannot wait to share them with the class.

I am so excited to get these transitions underway over the next few weeks.  I hope the students have been able to rest up over these extra few days because we are going to get to work.

Hope that you are having a great week.

Newbery Medal

Today the Newbery Medal was announced and the winning book for this year was Flora and Ulysses.  I am so excited about this announcement.  A few years ago when Mr. Franz became our principal we sat at the Junior High and went around the room and shared some of our goals.  I remember my goal was to read aloud or book talk the Newbery winner to the class before it was announced.

In the past I had book talked and read aloud honor books but never the medal winner.  Last year my luck started to change.  I read the book The One and Only Ivan to my class and then it won the Newbery Medal.

This year the winner is Flora and Ulysses.  

Sorry I could not find a picture that had the medal just yet.  I love that as a class we have found this book before it was announced.  Sure we are not finished with the book, but now as we finish the book we can start to think about why this book was selected over the other amazing titles that the committee considered.  

One of the reasons that I picked to read Flora and Ulysses for our next read aloud is that it fits with the theme of our next topic in reading.  Today during reading we started to discuss our next big idea...heroes.  Over the next several weeks we are going to discuss the idea of a hero.  Today we started by having the class write about what they think makes a hero.

I was so impressed with the writing/thinking around the room.  Two students who shared at the rocking chair shared a common idea.  To paraphrase their thinking, "a hero does not have to wear a costume or have gadgets or superhuman powers, they just have to help and protect others."  I loved this thinking and we just started.  I cannot wait to see where our thinking goes after thinking about this topic a bit more.  

Hope you are all having a great start to your week. 

Picture Walk

Today I had the students do a picture walk.  I found five pictures that went with an article that we were going to read about the Elk River chemical spill.  Here are just a few of the pictures that we used on our picture walk:

During the picture walk the class walked around the room and wrote down their thinking about the pictures.  Some students wrote questions or wondered about what they were seeing or just described the scene.  It was interesting to see the students try and figure out how the pictures fit together.  

After the picture walk we read an article about the chemical spill in the Elk River.  As we read the article the class was trying to figure out the 5 W's in the text.  Tomorrow we are going to have the students finish reading the article and write a news report about what happened in West Virginia.  

We have also started a new read aloud book.  Our new read aloud is Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo.  We actually started to read the book yesterday, but today we really started to get into the book.

I had started to read this book myself right before winter break.  By the time I got to the fourth chapter I had laughed out loud multiple times and knew this was going to be our next read aloud.  I hope you will ask your students about this book.  I know I love it and we are only on chapter four.  

Hope you are all staying warm and having a great week.

Back Again?

Another little mini-break there but I was glad to get back to school today.  The first thing I wanted to do  once we got started this morning was show the class a bit of something I read this week.  Many of you may not know this about me but I am a gigantic Kansas Jayhawk fan.  Both my parents raised me this way so the blame lies solely in their court.  That should explain why I found this little nugget of writing:

Two weeks ago, who could have envisioned this? Two weeks ago, Kansas was 9-4, sliding down the national rankings after a 4-4 stretch in November and December. Two weeks ago, the Jayhawks weren’t finding ways to win. Two weeks ago, Kansas coach Bill Self kept imploring his team to play with more passion.

Now, this.

(I added the picture I could not help it)

This writing came from a piece written by Rustin Dodd of the Kansas City Star on Tuesday.  I love so much about how this article was written.  Mr. Dodd puts so much craft into the article which made it a joy to read (and not just because it was about Kansas blowing out Baylor).

I want our students to work on finding and sharing their favorite writing with me.  I created a little sheet and gave it to the class where they can find and share this writing.  I hope that the students will start hunting for writing that makes them stop and notice all the craft of the author.  

I am hoping that this hunting for great writing will have two effects.  First I want the students to recognize how authors use words and string them together in interesting ways.  Hopefully the students will be able to find writing that is excellent and they will begin to appreciate the beauty of the writing.  Second I want the students to find this type of writing so they can try it in their own writing.  Authors learn from other authors.  I have been reading and watching lots of interviews with authors and the one thing that I hear repeated over and over is that good writers read.  When you read, you can expose the tricks that authors use to make their writing better.

In fact earlier this year we had seen this same trick that Mr. Dodd used by Cynthia Rylant.  In her book Scarecrow Rylant wrote:

So he doesn’t mind that there is always a smile on his face or that his eyes are always open. He doesn’t mind being up high. He doesn’t mind staying there

Rylant repeats the line, "he doesn't mind" just like Dodd repeats the line, "two weeks ago."  Our writers can take this technique to make their writing better.  If you would like, ask our students to share this "Great Writing" sheet with you.  You could also find some writing that you love and share it with our students.  If you find something amazing, send me a link or let me know in the comment section.  I would love to keep sharing amazing writing with our authors.

I hope you are all having a great week.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/01/20/4765060/halftime-report-kansas-37-baylor.html#storylink=cpy

Polar Bears

Today we read an article about polar bears.  Before we read the article, I showed the class the title of the article, "It's Even Too Cold For Polar Bears."  What a great title!  As we looked at the title I asked the class to think of questions that they thought they would be able to read while reading the text.

I stole this idea from a professional development day we had earlier this year.  I love the wording of that question.  It forces the students to come up with their own questions but it also forces some limitations on those questions.  The class came up with a great list of questions:

• Where did this happen?
• How cold was it?
• Did any polar bears die?
• Hom many polar bears was it too cold for?
• How did polar bears get too cold?

It was that last question that I wanted to know the answer to as well.  I mean they are polar bears.  After making the list, I passed out the article and the class read the text.  As they read the text they would put an "A" above the spot where they found their answer.  Here is the text of the article if you want to read and find the answers.

It's too cold for Chicago's resident polar bear.

The city's Lincoln Park Zoo says its polar bear, Anana, was kept inside Monday because of the record-low temperatures.

Zoo spokeswoman Sharon Dewar says that the below-zero weather might be comparable to what polar bears experience in the wild. But Anana doesn't have a thick layer of fat that bears typically get from eating things such as seals and whale carcasses.

That extra insulation would make it uncomfortable to live in Chicago during the rest of the year. So Anana gets a different diet.

While she stayed inside, Anana lounged in her comparatively balmy indoor climate that's kept at 40 to 50 degrees.

Anana usually has access to both an indoor and outdoor area. She'll be allowed to venture outside Tuesday.

I thought that was an amazing article. I think the class was pretty interested to learn about how polar bears are different in the zoo than in their habitat. What I love about the exercise is that students are creating their own questions as they read. They also are realizing that the answer to their questions can be found in text.

Hope you are all having a great week.

Crafting our Poems

The chapter we are reading now in Poetry Matters is about having students craft their poems, and it starts with this quote--

"The world is full of poets with languid wrenches who don’t bother to take the last six turns on their bolts."  —X.J. Kennedy

I am a writer who struggles with these last six turns.  I write a first draft and always think that I am done.  That is why this chapter is brilliant.  It really gives some simple strategies to help our students work on making their poems even better after the first drafts.  

The first piece of advice that Ralph Fletcher gave in the chapter was to try using fragments.  After we read this section of the book I shared the poem Subways are People by Lee Bennett Hopkins.  

Subways are people-

People standing

People sitting

People swaying to and fro

Some in suits

Some in tatters

People I will never know.

Subways are people-

Some with glasses

Some without

Boy with smile

Girl with Frown

People dashing

Steel flashing

Up and down and round the town.

Subways are people-

People old

People new

People always on the go

Racing, running, rushing people

People I will never know. 

Then the class had some free writing time to try and use fragments in their poems. I thought the class did an amazing job of creating poems using fragments. Here are just some of the amazing examples:

Buses--

Kids yelling
Kids screaming

Kids out
Kids in

Kids bouncing
Kids jumping

Kids going here 

and going there

This was just a little of the poem.  I love how this student captured the energy (that is a nice word) of the bus.  

New York

Dark night

light buildings

cars driving, drifting on 

the go

different colors

even some I do not know

Tall buildings

small houses

twisty turn roads

horns honking

people yelling

Cars driving, drifting 

on the go

I loved this bit of writing about New York.  I also love the confidence this author shows by repeating a line from their poem at the end.

Reds

Reds, Red

ball flying

ball zipping

bat swinging

people cheering

innings ending 

home runs happening

Run Reds go!

There is more to this poem that makes the ball park come alive.  

When the students were done creating this new writing, they went back to pieces of writing in their Writer's Notebooks and looked for places where they could try to add fragments.  This allows the students to practice those, "last six turns on their bolt" that Kennedy talked about in his quote.  

Tomorrow I hope to show you some more of the work the students are working on to make their poems even better.  I also promise to catch you up on some of the things we are doing in reading and social studies.

I hope you are all having a great week.

Book Meeting

Today I got to attend a book club.  I loved this because of how many book clubs that I make our students attend.  My book club was a group of Donovan teachers getting together to discuss the book Notebook Know-How by Aimee Buckner.

It is amazing to get the chance to get together with the remarkable teachers that I am lucky enough to work with and share and discuss new ideas.  Today in our group we discussed how different teachers organize their notebooks, what goes in our notebooks, and the struggle to find the balance between writing with our students and conferring with our students.

All these are areas that I am constantly thinking about and tinkering with in my room.  It is the last idea that I struggle with the most as a teacher.  I want the class to see me as a writer.  I want them to see that I struggle.  I want them to see me work to make my writing better.  I want them to see me be successful.  I want them to see how I work through the writing process.  I think when the class sees me as a writer they realize that authors are not these mystical beings who produce these amazing texts out of the blue.  They are normal everyday people who take the time to notice things in the world, write them down, and then work hard to make their ideas better.

At the same time I want to have conferences with my students.  I want to be able to know exactly what they are working on in their notebook.  I want to be able to see the strategies that they are experimenting with in the notebook.  I want the chance to sit and just talk one-on-one about writing.  

In the end I do not think I should pick one over the other.  I think, as with almost everything in life, I need to find a balance.  I need to write with my students and at other times I need to put on my conferencing hat and have conferences.  I think year after year I get better at deciding when it is time to be a writer and when it is time for conferences.  Hopefully by thinking about these ideas and discussing them with great teachers I will give our students exactly what they need.

Thanks to Mrs. Reuber for organizing and facilitating this book club.

I hope everyone is having a great week.

Writing Joy

Today in both classes I had the best time during our daily writing time.  I always enjoy our writing time but today every second I turned around I saw something that I loved.

The first thing I noticed as I was walking around the room for conferences was a student with a poem out.  Now this does not seem like much but it was a poem that we had not talked about in some time.  I asked the student why he had the poem out.  "I wanted to write a poem about my family and make it like this poem."  I could not have been happier.  Good writers get ideas from other good writers.  Here was an author putting that into practice.  The poem this author shared during share time was brilliant.

Then I turned around and what did I hear, "That does not sound right."  Amazing words coming from a young author.  I leaned down and conference number two started.  These words, "That does not sound right," show so much about this young author.  First of all it shows that the student is going back and rereading their writing as they write.  This student realizes that revising does not just happen when a draft is finished it is constant.  I also love that this student has realized that writing needs to sound write.  This author got to work and when it was time to share it sounded amazing.

Later in the day I was having another conference and I saw a student who had written words in a very interesting pattern.  Some of the letters were up and some were down.  I asked why they had decided to write the letters in this interesting pattern.  "Mr. Tarr the poem is about fall and the wind is blowing the letters up and down like leaves."  Brilliant.  This author realizes that authors make choices and those choices need to have a reason behind them.  The poem was outstanding.

Finally (although I could share more) I had a conference with a student who was flipping back-and- forth between two pages.  When I asked why, the student showed me the first version of this poem.  I was so impressed and I told the student that I loved that he was reworking the poem.  Then it got even better he showed me the very first draft.  Here was a young author working on his poem for the third time before his first draft.  Here was a young author who has realized that good writers do not just crank out a first draft.  They work and work and work to make their writing better.  The amazing thing, each draft did get better.

I love when I can walk around our class and see students putting what they are learning into practice.  I am lucky to be blessed with such amazing students who are willing to try these things that will help make them better writers.

I hope you had a great start to your week.

Texts, Texts, and more Texts

In class today small groups started to present information about the historic tribes of Ohio that they had been learning about since Wednesday.  As the groups shared students were keeping track and making a timeline of when the different tribes arrived in Ohio.

When we were done listening to half of the groups share, I showed the class a map of North America from the 1700's and a list from a General Store in Ft. Wayne Indiana from the early 1800's.  While we were looking at these two texts I started to think of all the different types of texts we had read in the last two and a half days.

We had read a commercial, a how to video, poems, a text book, a map, a list (that happened to be a primary source), our independent reading books, dictionaries, and the class is filled with small reading groups that are reading all kinds of books.  I was happy to see such variety in such a small period of time.

One of the new shifts in education is introducing students to a variety of texts and making sure that there is an increased emphasis on nonfiction texts that students read.  I think that this shift could have a huge impact on our students.  I know that when I was in school during Language Arts time we only read stories.  This was great if you liked stories, but I loved reading nonfiction.  The lack of variety of texts that I was exposed to was startling.

Hopefully by exposing students to a variety of texts more and more students can find texts that they love.  Also the exposure to multiple types of texts will better prepare the students for what they may read later in life.  Now even though I am all for exposing students to new types of text, I do want to make sure that I keep exposing the class to quality literature.  After all I am Language Arts Teacher and literature is an extremely important part of my life.  I hope that by sharing some of my favorite authors and books that our students will develop a lifelong love of reading.

When I think about some of the books and authors that we have read together or aloud, the list is quite impressive.  In read aloud we have read last years Newbery Medal winner, then we read Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin.  Grace Lin is an author who has won her fair share of awards.  Our next read aloud book is going to be from Kate DiCamillo who just last week was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

In reading groups we have groups reading books by DiCamillo, Lin, Cynthia Lord, Beverly Cleary, and so many more amazing authors.  And then there are all the authors we have read in poetry.  This year we have read Frost, Hughes, Heard, Prelutsky, and Sandburg just to name a few.

I hope that by surrounding our students with all of this quality literature and also exposing them to all the different types of texts that exist in the world that our class will be filled with lifelong readers.

Hope you all have had a great week and will get some time to relax this weekend.

Great Day

Wow today was such a good day.  Both classes were working hard, and I had so much fun.

We are continuing to read the book Poetry Matters by Ralph Fletcher.

I absolutely love this book (I realize I have said that before).  The reason I think it is so amazing is because it makes some very complicated things seem so simple.  Also I think the students can relate so well to the book because Fletcher uses examples from his poetry but also includes examples from fourth, fifth and sixth graders.  The students see these examples and realize that they can do these things that authors like Fletcher and Heard use in their writing.  

We have already talked about the first two pillars of poetry (emotion and image).  This week we have started to discuss the third pillar of poetry which according to Fletcher is music.  In the music chapter the class has been introduced to the ideas of using alliteration and repetition for emphasis.  To show the students some other examples of poems that use alliteration and repetition we read the two following poems as a class.

I Am Running in a Circle

I am running in a circle
and my feet are getting sore,
and my head is
spinning
spinning
as it's never spun before,
I am
dizzy
dizzy
dizzy.
Oh! I cannot bear much more,
I am trapped in a
revolving
...volving
...volving
...volving door!

~Jack Prelutsky

The WolfGeorgia R. Durston

When the pale moon hides and the wild wind wails,
And over the treetops the nighthawk sails,
The gray wolf sits on the world's far rim
And howls: and it seems to comfort him.

The wolf is a lonely soul, you see,
No beast in the wood, nor bird in the tree,
But shuns his path; in the windy gloom
They give him plenty, and plenty of room.

So he sits with his long, lean face to the sky
Watching the ragged clouds go by.
There in the night, alone, apart,
Singing the song of his lone, wild heart.

Far away, on the world's dark rim
He howls, and it seems to comfort him.

Today after we shared the Jack Prelutsky poem I was amazed by the writing that I saw and heard during share time.  What I loved about what I saw during writing time was students using the example poem that we shared in class to create their own poem.  I had a student write a poem about being in a snowball fight, another write about babysitting their annoying little brother, another write about indoor soccer, another write about Kentucky basketball, and yet another write about gymnastics.  What all the poems had in common was they all had used Jack Prelutsky as a writing teacher.  

These poems looked like, sounded like, and felt like the poem I Am Running in a Circle, but all the poems were created by our fourth graders.  I heard another teacher this summer say she loves it, "when her students stand on the shoulders of other writers."  Today our class was definitely standing on the shoulders of other writers and their writing was amazing.  I will try and grab some of the notebooks this weekend so I can share some of the examples with you.

I hope you are all having a great week.

We are Back!!

I will not lie I had been going a little stir crazy at home, so I was so excited to get back to our room today.  I am just going to imagine that all of the students were just as excited as me.  I am sure they all went running out of their doors to leap onto the bus and get back to school.

Since we are still so close to the New Year, I wanted to focus on goal setting today.  To me goals and resolutions are exactly the same.  To start our discussion about goal setting we watched a commercial.

We watched this video three times.  The first time that the class watched they just watched for their enjoyment.  The second time I asked them to look for what they noticed (they noticed a ton).  Finally the third time they watched I asked them to look for what the young man grabbed after he set his new goal.  They were all able to tell me he grabbed his goggles.  After I got the answer, I had the groups turn and talk and think about why he grabbed his goggles.  They all knew that the boy was going to practice.

I love this commercial for talking about goals.  It is so easy to make a goal.  I have made a ton since the New Year.  The challenge of goal setting is the work that follows.  At an early release earlier this year a presenter showed us a video from a U.S. olympian about how she sets her goals.  I decided that we would watch a few parts of the videos to see how an olympian set her goals.  

  

In the video Emily Cook talks about how she made her goal to get to the Olympics.  Then she creates her goal pyramid and talks about all the steps she had to make to reach her goal.  

I really want our students to have goals.  I want them to have goals about school, about their future jobs, about where they want to go to college, and about anything else they want.  At the same time I want them to understand that when you set a goal this is just the first step in the process.  

Over the next few days we are going to have the class make goals for something they want to accomplish during the rest of this school year.  Today they worked on creating a goal about anything they wanted.  I enjoyed listening to all of the different goals from the classes.  I also shared some goals that I had made for this year.

Goal Number One:  Run the Flying Pig half-marathon in under one hour and 45 minutes (I realize this is not a blazing fast pace, but I would be happy).

Goal Number Two:  Continue to work on speaking fluent Spanish.  I have found a great app and have been working each day since the New Year.  My mother speaks fluent Spanish and she always wanted my brother and myself to learn, so hopefully I can show her I have finally learned.

Goal Number Three:  Try to add one blog post a week where I talk about something from the professional world of education.  

Goal Number Four:  Read more books.  I have gotten used to reading articles and blogs online.  I want to get back to reading more books. 

Have any of you set goals to accomplish in 2014?  Do you want to share them with us?  What will you do to make sure you accomplish the goals?  Let me know by leaving a comment if you want.  I would love to share your responses with the class.  

Hope you are all having a great week.