For the past two years, I have read the book The Fantastic Frame to my students.  It is a fun little novel series where two kids get sucked into a famous painting (the first painting is Tiger in a Storm)  After we finished reading, I took that idea and had the kids create their own shadow box with THEM getting sucked into the famous painting.  They then wrote a narrative to accompany their painting.   Once the students wrote their narrative, they created the background of the painting they said they were sucked into.  The first year we did this, the students could choose one of three different famous paintings.  The second year, I just had them do the painting from the book.   It was easier that way ;)  They then inserted the background into the shadow boxes. The boxes themselves are just standard 9 x 12 x 2 shipping boxes I bought off of Amazon.  I then cut a hole into the front of the box to make the "window". Once the backgrounds were in,......

The beginning of the year is filled with lots of get to know you activities.  But this year I wanted to make it a bit more academic, getting right into the nitty gritty of academic language from the get go.  So I turned one of those traditional "get to know you" activities into a lesson in Inferring! First, I had the students create a "Me Box" in class.  I used these instructions here , but the basic gist is that they filled the box with items that were special to the individual student.  The student chose what items to include, all with the idea that these items told the story of who they were.   While we made the box together in class, the students brought the items from home. Once all of the boxes were complete, the other students in the class walked around the room looking at the items contained within each box.  Using a sticky note, the kids tried to make an inference about the personality or likes of the classmates.  They had to think about ......

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......

These past few years, I spent a great deal of time honing in on the students' narrative writing skills.  Of course we have been using Paragraph of the Week since school started, and throughout the year they really did get good at basic writing structure, but teaching them to tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end, in a way that is exciting and engaging for the reader, is a whole different story. Most of my students were writing "bed to bed" stories, where they would tell me every.single.detail about their entire life when they really are trying to tell me about what happened last Christmas Eve.  This just isn't a great way to tell a narrative.  Sure it encompasses the actual event they are trying to tell, but I would fall asleep in the midst of trying to find out about that event ;)  So I had to do something to get the kids on track.  What better way to do that then to use candy! Now, I will say right off the bat, this wasn't the cheapest route to ......

This year, I am trying to do things that will keep our classroom positive and happy, so I thought I would connect some of the academic ideas we are learning with a bit of team building fun.  So as we wrapped up our unit on character traits (you can read about exactly what we did here ), I had the students think about the traits that their classmates embodied. So, this is totally made up, but you get the idea ;) I created a form on Google Forms that included each of my students' names.  (I made each entry a "short answer" question)  I then asked the students to think of 3 POSITIVE adjectives that described their fellow classmates and input that into the form.   I wanted them specifically to think of inside traits that we had learned about in our character unit, as outside traits were a bit too obvious.  To help the students really dig deeper on the character traits,  I projected this character trait list from Read. Write. Think onto the board. ......

This week we began working with prepositional phrases and I wanted to grab the kids attention with something hands-on (because, let's face it, grammar worksheets aren't exactly captivating.)  So I scoured the internet and pieced a few things together that resulted in a memorable lesson the students actually learned prepositional phrases from! I began by creating an anchor chart with the students defining prepositions, prepositional phrases, and samples of some of the more common prepositions students will be using in their writing.  They copied these into their grammar journals and we were off to the fun part. I instructed kids to fold a paper airplane out of a piece of colored copy paper.  You would have thought I told them they had won the lottery.  Once the airplanes were created (which, for some, was a lesson in and of itself), the students headed outside to fly them.  Once the plane landed, the student needed to write a prepositional phrase describin......

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 ......

Today's post is going to be short and sweet (I know, I know...so unlike me!)  Anyway, I just wanted to share with you my little "Bookshelf" door that I have put up in my room.  I tried my hardest this year to instill a love of reading in my students and wanted them to have a place to record their reading.  In the past I have done "What Are You Reading Now?" book rings .  While I feel like they were a good place for the kids to write down their reading, they just weren't visual enough.  So this year, taking inspiration from this pin , I put up some butcher paper and was on my way. This was VERY easy to put up in my classroom.  I just covered one door with brown butcher paper, painted some brown lines to look like a bookshelf, and was done.  I added a "plant" to the top and the READ letters, just to give it some dimension.  And that was it. Using a book spine clip art I found for free on the web (I just typed in "Book Spine Clip Art" an......

With Common Core fully in place in my state, one of the big standards that we teach in fifth grade deals with Greek and Latin roots.   In the past, I wrote a few posts about how I taught them ( you can find the posts here ), but it has been so long, that I thought I would share these ideas with you again.  I figure if *I* have to teach roots, you probably do as well. :) I really don't have a Root Word program.  Basically, I teach my students 4 root words per week.  To introduce the words, I have the students create index cards with the root, the definition, and a picture of the meaning on the front.  The back of the cards has sample words containing the roots, as well as meanings. They keep these flash cards all year long to study, create games, use during writing, etc....   For homework, though, I have actually tried to combine all of what I was doing before.  Now I have them use these AWESOME (yes, I just called one of my resour......

The novel Tuck Everlasting (affiliate link) is so full of rich characters that examining their character traits is a must.  Last year, I wrote about how we did that in a decidedly low-tech version here , but this year, since I have access to a class set of chrome books, we took it up the tech notch a bit. To begin, I asked the students to think about one of the characters what stood out to them in the book.  This could be any character, though I did preface by saying that those characters with more information (ie: Jesse or Winnie) would be easier to discuss than those with only a passing mention (ie: the grandmother).  Once the character was chosen, I had the students list all of the character traits they could.  To help them along, the students used this character trait list from Read.Write.Think .   Using those traits, they had to search through the book to find evidence of that character trait and list their own background knowledge justifying why t......