Baby Love

We are a fertile faculty I guess! Before school ended our school had a baby shower/celebration for the five mommas that were pregnant! I am beyond thrilled to share with you all that I am one of them.

This will be the first baby for my husband and I and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I could not be happier. I have prayed a great deal for this little one. Easter Sunday we announced our pregnancy as you see to the left. Then, at the beginning of May I told my sweet firsties the news. Their reaction was precious! I had found a way to reveal the gender to our out of town family (the first grandbaby for both sides) and I decided to buy an extra and do a class reveal party --> best decision ever! I am so glad I didn't miss this opportunity to share this special moment in my life with my students. The company I used is called Sosia To Go and I highly recommend them. They have several different options. I ordered the $15 Gender Reveal for Out-Of-Town Family and Friends: Pregnancy Reveal Fizz.  

Watch the video to see the reveal in action. I could watch it a hundred times... in fact, I probably have!

IMG 5456 2 from Mrs. E on Vimeo.

Sad to go, glad to be back

Well, not sure what to say other than my bad. There has been so much going on in my life the last couple of months, and none of it excuses a four month blogging absence. Yikes! That's a really long time!

Last Thursday was the last day for kiddos and today was the last work day. Tomorrow I start eight days of professional development. I know that sounds intense, and it is, but I'm pretty excited to attend my district's Reading Institute. Look for a post next week detailing some of my learning.

Sadly, at the end of those eight days I will be hopping on the red eye and moving to Georgia. Now that's intense. My husband is in the military and home is where the military moves us. We are devastated to leave Alaska. We both absolutely love the lifestyle, our home, and our friends here. I of course am doubly traumatized by the fact that I have to leave my school behind. These last two years teaching first grade in North Pole (yes, North Pole!) have been tremendous years of growth for me professionally and beyond fulfilling personally.

More updates to come SOON. I promise!

Let It Snow

There are so many good things about teaching in Alaska. One of those is having snow on the ground for 7ish months. It takes "winter art" to a whole new level. Yesterday my kiddos made the snowy scene you see below.

The key, in my opinion was the bubble wrap! I cut small sections of bubble wrap and gave each student one. They pressed the bubble side into the white paint and then dabbed it all over their paper.

If you need something easy this winter... this is it! Students first made individual house scenes and then we loved it so much that we made a joint-effort mural for the hallway.

It's hereeeeee! (And...I am alive!)

Wowza! I am still alive. This blogging, teaching, TPTing, taking 2 graduate level classes after school, etc. all at once is a lot harder than I thought! In any event, tomorrow is a big day. For the next 2 days (December 1st and 2nd) TPT is having a sale. In addition, my entire store is 20% off. That's a 28% savings tomorrow!

Thank you to the 3AM Teacher for the absolutely adorable sale banner. Click on the banner to go to my TPT store!

This year one of my goals was to find better ways to make sure my students were learning sight words. One life saver has been Heidi Songs. I'll reserve that for an entire post because she/it deserves it! Another great, yet slightly less exciting improvement that I've made this year is individual sight word flashcard rings. If you teach first grade and use Storytown this could really save your life. For only $3.00 (and much less for the next two days) you can have this and start implementing it in your classroom the next day.

First Grade Friendly:
*Easy to read font
*Lesson number at the bottom of each card
*Circle on each card showing students where to put the hole punch
*Dotted lines showing where to cut
*Paper saving options

Each week simply print out onto card stock or construction paper in black and white or color for each student. Students cut and hole punch and add to their D-ring. 

I quiz my kiddos every Thursday on their sight words and this has been a tremendous help to them --- practice right at their finger tips!

Happy shopping and I PROMISE to do a better job of blogging! 

Better, Faster, and Easier Feedback

Like most teachers, every year I pick one or two things to really focus on improving. This past year was my first time teaching first grade (coming down from upper elementary), so I felt like I had WAY more than one or two things to focus on….. IE, OMG, how in the world do you teach a child to read?!

So… that was overwhelming! In any event, one of the things that I have always struggled with is giving timely and effective feedback. This year I made that one of my professional goals.

One way I was able to do this was by grading small things every single day. First grade is all about routines. I like structure and so do my students. One thing we did every day was edit a sentence together. I quickly graded them daily and then tallied up their final grade on Friday.

This is what I found:

1.     My students LOVE the feedback! The rubric is out of 5 and we talk a lot about what a 5/5 looks like. (They are learning fractions at the same time!!) They even say things like, “I know this will be a 5/5 today!” If they don’t get a 5/5 they are told why on the rubric and they work to fix that problem the next day.

2.     I draw a star on 2-4 students’ work each day. The next day these students get to put their work up on the screen and the class and I talk about what they did well. After modeling this for a couple of weeks students start to raise their hands and say things like, “I think you gave him a star today because he has really good finger spaces and that’s something he has been working on!” It’s such a great way to honor students for their hard work. The point is not to always put up the best of the best each time. Talk about differentiating and learning from other students’ hard work and successes. Plus, they get SO excited when they see a star on their paper!

3.     It takes me 10-15 minutes to grade their sentences daily and I usually do it while they are at Specials. My students are trained to turn their packet in open to the day’s work. When they come in the next morning I have it on their desk with their morning work. Best part --- I’m not sitting at home on the weekends grading a hundred papers. All my work is done and it actually helped my students!

I firmly believe this was one of the smartest and effective things I did in my classroom this year. If you want to try it out for free  for a couple of weeks you can get my freebie here.

If you’re sold on the idea and want to use it for the whole year, click here for all 30 weeks.

Story of My Life

It's May..... and we're still working on this! This is my impromptu cheat sheet for the kiddos!

Fox In Socks Writing

Happy Read Across America Week! Like most of you out there, our school is celebrating the birth of Dr. Seuss this week. Each day we will be reading a Dr. Seuss book and doing a writing extension with it. Today we read Fox in Socks. I was pretty proud of myself for getting through all of those wild tongue twisters without too much of a hesitation. After, we each decorated our own pair of paper socks and then completed a bubble map describing them. Bubble Maps are one of the eight Thinking Maps. In my opinion they are one of the trickiest for first graders to grasp because you can ONLY write adjectives.

Here is my example and if you'd like this freebie click here to find it in my TPT store!

Writing great sentences using brace maps

Recently, I noticed that my first graders were writing really simple sentences. Part of me was ECSTATIC. What? They were actually writing real sentences with capital letters and end marks. Well, I'll be.....

But then, I started thinking about how much better they could be with a little more effort on my part. I began a series of mini lessons where I explicitly taught strategies for forming better sentences. I concluded that they weren't writing great sentences because I hadn't taught them how.

My first priority, even before adding descriptive words, was making sure that the sentence made sense and said everything it needed to say. So often my students would write a sentence and I'd be left wondering or needing to ask a question.

I opened the first mini lesson with a Brace Map on the board. The Brace Map, one of the eight Thinking Maps, is used to describe part to whole relationships and my students are well versed in using it. On the left hand side I had a sentence strip with the sentence Last week Owen Q. worked hard at school because he loves math. As a class we read through the sentence a few times. Next, we turned our attention to the part side. The Brace Map was divided into 5 parts -- who, did what, when, where, and why. Finally, students helped me break apart the sentence and place them into the correct parts. We literally cut apart the whole sentence and placed each section into it's correct part. We repeated this model for the next 2 days using different sentences.

On the fourth day, we left the carpet and began doing some guided seat work using the same principals from the three days prior. I found that it helped to have students cross off the part in the complete sentence (on the whole side) immediately after they found where to put it on the part side.

If you'd like to try this out in your own classroom here is the freebie from my TPT store. I've left it so you can easily edit my sentences. Also, the last page has lines on the whole side so students can try writing their own sentence. You can even have them practice going back the other way and have students create the whole sentence from the different parts you give them, or that you have them create.

Happy writing!

RTI in Anchorage

I was fortunate enough to attend the 2014 Alaska RTI Conference: RTI and the New Standards conference on Saturday, January 25^th and Sunday, January 26^th. Along with the keynote address, I attended Shelby Skaanes’ session entitled Intervention Design for Literacy, Anita Archer’s session called Writing Foundation Skills, and Melissa Linton and Michael Hanson’s session entitled Quality Tier 1 Instruction Using the Danielson Framework as a Professional Growth Model.  

My biggest takeaway from the weekend conference, besides the 3 pounds I gained from delicious wine and fabulous food, came from Anita Archer's session.  Specific attention was paid to handwriting and typing, spelling, and sentence formation. With research to back it up, Archer argued that students must master these basic skills in order to gain true fluency in their writing. I was really intrigued on her suggestions and discussion around spelling. 

       So, this week in spelling we tried something new. I did not introduce the spelling pattern/rule for the week on Monday morning and walk students through the list word by word like I usually do. Instead, I gave, what we call in our classroom a, low stakes spelling pre-test. In this case, not only was it a low-stakes spelling pre-test, but it was also completely blind -- meaning they had no clue what words I was going to call out or what pattern they were going to fall under. (In my class low-stakes tasks mean DON'T PANIC-- this is NOT a grade, it is just for you!) Before ever having seen the word list, I called out the first word and then asked the students to try and spell the word. Next, we all put our pencils down and I immediately wrote the correct spelling on the projector. Students then did one of two things. If they got the word correct, they could either do nothing, put a little smiley, or add a check. If they missed the word they simply crossed it out and wrote the correct spelling next to it. It was NO BIG DEAL to miss the word. In fact, I modeled missing several words and sounding them out how I thought they sounded. There was NO erasing!

A couple of really cool things happened:

1. Students were super engaged with every word because we corrected each word right after we tried it. 
2. Students started guessing the pattern!!! This week there were actually two patterns which makes that even more impressive. 
3. We did the sight words just for fun --- and they loved these challenge words! I can tell it really helped with their ability to read them all week long in the stories we read.  

Here is my modeled example. One of my biggest priorities was making sure my students knew how to cross out their words, rather than erase and rewrite.