Each year, I try to refine what I have taught in the past to help make it more meaningful or standards-based than the year before.  I find that by making small tweaks to lessons I have taught before, I am able to better reach my students. Such is the case with a lesson on setting that I did with my class this year.   You can read in full detail how I taught setting to my students here , but in this post, I wanted to share with you a tweak to the writing assignment that I found successful, and just a bit more rigorous. In the story we are reading, Gregor The Overlander (Underland Chronicles, Book 1) by Suzanne Collins, there are two main settings that are in stark contrast to each other, New York City and the fictional Regalia.  The author explains in detail the various components of both of these settings to lay out for the reader just how different each are.  She does this to give the reader a sense that the character "isn't in Kansas anymore" when he fal......

One thing I really love about teaching history is that I am able to get the students to look more critically and deeply into the events of our past and realize that there truly are many different sides to the same story. We did that this past week with the Boston Massacre.   We began with a discussion on what facts, opinion, and bias are.  We talked about how each of those things are different, yet present when we discuss historical events.  Focusing in on bias in particular, we examined how it can play a huge role in the way information is presented. I gave the students two different articles about the night in question (matching our standard of looking at two viewpoints on the same event).  One was from the Boston  Gazette    and the other from the London Chronicle .  In pairs and using three different colored pencils, the students read the articles, underlining evidence of fact, opinion, or bias (or, in some cases, adding multiple......

Today, my lesson plan changed last minute (like, literally 10 minutes before the kids came in for the day) and it went pretty well, so I thought I would share what we did with you. We have been using the RACE strategy to respond to comprehension questions about our reading.  If you aren't familiar with the RACE strategy, here is a great post by Becky at Create.Teach.Share (she also has a wonderful freebie that I used to introduce this concept to my kids.)  I wanted the kids to practice the strategy, read the next chapter in our book, and use the computers this morning (since I had totally forgotten we had the cart, hence my lesson plan change.)  So, to do this, here is what we did. I broke the kids up into groups.  Each group was to read the assigned chapter of the book in any way they wanted (silently, in pairs, as a group...it really was up to them) and discuss the chapter as they were reading.  I honestly was amazed that they actually did stop to dis......

My second grade son recently brought home a note from his teacher asking him to bring in an apple so they could make applesauce in honor of Johnny Appleseed Day on September 26.   So, me being the history lover that I am, decided to do a little bit of research on Johnny Appleseed and discovered that there was a lot there for my fifth graders to work with too.  So this week, I teamed up with my partner teacher, Susie the  Panicked Teacher , to have a little fun and learn a little bit about Johnny Appleseed at the same time. We began the day reading two paired texted about the man who came to be known as Johnny Appleseed.  The first was a legend that was filled with lots and lots of legendary notes about him.  My students picked up on the fictional facts immediately.  As one of them said, "No one on earth can possibly walk across a whole state in one day!  Especially not if he is planting apple seeds.  That takes time!"  When we were ......

While we were watching an episode of Liberty's Kids - The Complete Series (which, incidentally, my kids love with all their collective hearts) it mentioned how the mail was being intercepted during the Revolutionary War by both sides and that coding and other techniques were necessary in order to keep sensitive war communications secret.  The kids seemed really intrigued by the idea that Ben Franklin used invisible ink, so I ran with it. First, I had the kids read this information article I found about the various spy techniques that both the British and the Americans were using during the Revolution.  We wrote our purpose (finding information about the different ways people sent coded messages) and then began annotating the article.  After a good first read (lead by me), then a second read in partners where the students wrote their own ideas about each technique, I had them summarize 3 of the most intriguing techniques, with evidence from the text in their summary......

We finally began looking at the Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading signposts this week, starting with the tried and true Contrasts and Contradictions . I wanted to share with you a few of the things we did in class that helped the students to really grasp the idea of a character acting out of the norm for that particular character. To introduce the signpost to my fifth graders, I began with the "Thank You, Ma'am" lesson in the book.  I highly recommend purchasing the book and starting with this lesson, if you haven't.  There are a lot of great ideas contained within the book itself that will be helpful to you as a teacher when teaching the signposts. Click the link above that will take you to my Amazon Affliate link to purchase the book. During that introduction lesson, I created this  anchor chart with the students.  They wrote the information in their journals as I was writing on the poster.  Having the kids write this down really helped them to......

Respect.  It is such an important and integral part of a functioning classroom.  The beginning of the year is the perfect time to introduce lessons that reinforce for students what it means to be respectful of each other, of the classroom, of adults on campus, and of themselves.  So this week, I began my first in a series of lessons on respect with my students. I knew my objectives (that the students would speak respectfully to each other and to adults) but I wasn't exactly sure where to start.  So I turned to my trusty friend Pinterest and I found these AMAZING posters from Digital Divide and Conquer .  They are free in his shop and so perfectly matched my thoughts on what I wanted to teach the kids that I just had to print them out.   For each letter of the word Respect, there is one correlating aspect.  I chose to center my first lesson around the letter R, "Recognize that everyone is different." Inspired by this pin from the First Grade ......

Let me preface this post by saying that what we did here in this lesson is HARD.  There is no way around it.  It was just hard.  But, that didn't stop the kids from not only learning the intended objectives, but really learning it well.  I am so ecstatically over the moon about the outcomes in this lesson, that I am practically bursting at the seams here! So what is this hard lesson, you ask?  The midnight ride of Paul Revere. Paul Revere is an American legend.  He is one of the first "super heroes" born out of our quest for independence and freedom from England.  But the inherent nature of being a legendary superhero is that much of the story we love and cherish are, in actuality, myths. Myths?  Paul Revere?  WHAT??? As I approached this idea with the students, they honestly had no idea what I was talking about.  Paul Revere is the guy who rode in at midnight, alone, screaming "The British are coming!  The British are comin......

Analyzing nonfiction text is something that we have been focusing on this year with the full implementation of CCSS.  I am always on the look out for new resources to help me with this, and when Zaner-Bloser contacted me to review their new "I Read to Write Kits", I jumped on the opportunity. Disclaimer:   Zaner-Bloser sent me a class set of these kits in exchange for an honest review.  Though they did send them to me, the thoughts on the program below are my own and not influenced in any way by this. The I Read to Write kits are consumable workbooks for the students to use to dive into text.  There are three units in the 5th grade level, one about Space Exploration, one about the American Revolution, and another about Sports that use math.  Each of the stories are highly engaging and very relevant to what my students are interested in (and what I am interested in as a teacher....hello American Revolution!!) I have been using these with my class to get......