This week we spent our time on Zoom reading about snowmen and writing from their point of view.  I adapted t his lesson from Scholastic.com that I saw while I was searching for academic, yet fun, lessons.  You can read about the full lesson here .  In this blog post, I am going to share how I adapted this to work with my third graders over Zoom for distance learning. We began by reading the story Snowmen at Night together.  I have a copy of the book, so I projected it with my doc cam while I read aloud.  We stopped to discuss some of the experiences being mentioned in the story and how they would be perceived by the snowmen in the paintings.  I would point to certain snowmen and ask, "what do you think this snowman is thinking?"   It was very informal but got the students minds set on the experiences of the characters in the book. After we were done, just like in the original lesson, I turned to the snowball fight and asked the kids to think about th......

Get it??  BACK to school but with a Book since this will be a series about how I use picture books  during the back to school times?? ;)  I crack myself up. This summer, I am going to be spending my time figuring out how I can take my old tried-and-true lessons and reconfigure them for the inevitability of hybrid or virtual teaching.  While we got a taste of it this spring, after school was shut down due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we were at the tail end of school.  We were focused more on survival than learning.  So while what I did in my virtual classroom was valuable (in my humble opinion) it isn't going to cut it for when we go back in August.  So in this series I will be sharing with you how I will use several picture books at the start of school to engage my new students, get them working, and set out learning goals for the year.   First up:   We Don't Eat Our Classmates I used   We Don't Eat Our Classmates  by......

This week has been full of themed days, in the hopes that it would keep my kids entertained and engaged enough to stick with us through this distance learning.  My last post was about our venture into Unicorn day , so I thought I would keep it up and tell you about the rest of the week.  I kept with the "unknown creature" theme all week since, well, I think it is fun ;)   So here are the other three themed days we did during this short week. Alien Day 👽 Since the Space X launch was supposed to happen on Wednesday (though it was eventually rescheduled to Saturday),  I thought an Alien Day went well.  We started with the video "Are Aliens Real?" from Mystery Science.  It is a very short, simple video that has lots of good information for the kids to think about regarding whether or not there are aliens living in the universe.   I took the questions that Mystery Science provided and typed them onto a slide for the kids to answer and turn in t......

The end of our year is fast approaching and my kids are getting restless through distance learning. Who can blame them?  After 9 weeks of this, it is starting to wear us all down.  So I decided to take a bit of a thematic approach to things this week and, so far, it is a hit!  I will be doing theme days each week, so come back every day to read about the lessons I did (and pick up the digital links so you can do the same) Unicorn Day 🦄 I started the week with a unicorn theme.  Why?  Well, because I saw that Mystery Science had this mini-lesson entitled "Are Unicorns Real?" and that got my brain turning.  So I set out to find (or create) a few assignments that went along with the unicorn theme. Over Zoom, I began my lesson by reading the book Unicorn (and Horse).  I found it on Epic but you can g et it here on Amazon  with my affiliate link if you would like to use the actual book.  Before we began reading, I asked the students to l......

The header on my Google Classroom has always been super blah.  I usually have a generic "school" picture that Google assigns, or even a plain color, on mine.  Occasionally, I will add a picture of my classroom to really spice things up.  But during Distance Learning, I wanted to use that real estate for something a bit more meaningful.   I was watching Molly of Lessons with Laughter do an Instagram story about customizing the header to be more personalized than the ones that are available on Google Classroom itself.    I loved the idea, and ran with it!  I thought I could use the space to be my #bookaday record for our distance learning venture.  Using the dimensions that Molly mentioned (1600 pixels by 400 pixels), I changed the page size of a Google slide.  Then, I imported a picture of some polaroids hanging on a clothesline and added a whole bunch of them on the google slide.   It ended up looking like this. If you ......

I am a sucker for inventive publishing.  I mean, who wouldn't love taking a 5 paragraph essay and writing the final draft in a cool and different way?  I do that all the time in my class.  So when it came to publishing this year's biography writing, I just couldn't let them write a simple essay and draw a picture.   Now, if you have followed along with my in the past, you know that I have creatively published this biography before.  I LOVE doing these Hanger People biographies but I felt like this year, since we are so into Google Slides and using our chrome books (which I have a class set of thanks to DonorsChoose.org !)  we could take these biographies in a different direction.  So instead of the hanger people this year, we created magazines. To begin, we of course started with the writing.  Being 5th graders, I knew that if I just told them to write a biography, they would be lost.  So instead, I helped to scaffold the writing for......

I like to have the kids write historically from the perspective of someone who was at that event.  Meaning, when I want them to write about, say a battle of the American Revolution, I don't just have them list off facts, I like them to take on the persona of a person who witnessed the battle and is telling the story. Such was the case when I had my students learn about the battles this year.  I had them research the battle using this form here .  It was basic, just asking them to fill in the blanks on basic information about the battle itself. Then I had them create a postcard (I used this template in google slides...though if you have no access to tech you can print it off and have them handwrite it.)  They wrote a first person narrative in letter form to a relative explaining the details of the battle they researched.   I asked them to make up an address and create a stamp. This could be any sort of picture they thought would make a good stamp dur......

I tend to get bored when I do things over and over each year in the same exact way.  I know many of you feel the same way, right?  Well, when we got to early colonial life, I wanted to keep with the same basic idea of what I had done in the past but amp it up.  Since we are so into stop motion in my room right now, I thought I could take a lesson that I had done before and add in the tech twist instead of the paper and pencil style we had done before.   We began by discussing what life was like for the early Pilgrims in Plimouth Plantation by reading Sarah Morton's Day and Samuel Eaton's Day.  I have an entire  class  set of each of these books, thanks to my  colleague, so that made the reading part very easy.  When we finished reading, the students made a flow map of each of the children's day.  I asked the to really think about the chores and tasks, making note of each.   I then gave each student a non-fiction sheet with......

I am always looking for ways to integrate tech into my math lessons.  For some reason, I find that particular subject so just hard to use tech in a way that the kids are producing versus consuming.  So this unit, as we embarked on composite volume, I found a way to have the students use Google Drawings and Google Slides to create their own composite volume figures and, ultimately, create an interactive bulletin board that will give all the students practice finding the volume of composite figures. My students had been practicing finding the volume of composite figures for about two days.  They basically just were using worksheets from the math book and I felt that they were ready for a bit of a challenge.  In the past, we have used Lego bricks to practice with additive composite volume (see that post here )  But this time, I thought we could change it up with tech. We broke out the chrome books and the students opened to Google Drawings.   Drawings is ......