Are you looking for a fun and QUICK little response to literature that your students are sure to enjoy?  Look no further!  This post is actually a long time coming.  I have done this for years, ever since the Zoom days of distance learning, and I just never wrote about it here on the blog...until now!  So here we go. I read the students the book The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be by Joanna Gaines .  It is a relatively new book (published right as the world shut down) and it is just the perfect way to get the kids thinking about their own talents and things they contribute to our classroom society.  I had them create a circle map listing all of the traits that they saw in themselves:  their insides (personality), outsides (physical), talents, and interests.  Then, using that list, they wrote an acrostic poem about themselves.  I specifically asked them to use longer sentences with many describing traits versus just one word. I wanted mor......

This month we have taken some time to discuss influential and important women in history.  To aid in that discussion, we read the book Ambitious Girl by Meena Harris.   It is a wonderful story about a little girl who sees women being described in a not so positive light but decides to turn those traits around and make them positive.   So once we read the story, my students and I created a list of attributes that strong women would possess.  We thought of the women in the books we have read, women in our life, and the women we have studied. After making that list, and inspired by the author's note page in the book, I had the students use white crayon on white paper to decoratively display the character traits.  They then painted over it with watercolor, creating a watercolor resist.  Once the watercolor was on the page, the words popped well! We are next going to use the artwork to display the research we have been doing about influential women of the worl......

We have been focusing a lot on character traits in class these past few months.  As a reader, focusing on the traits that an author chooses to share with us about the characters in the book really helps us to understand the story as a whole.  So when we began reading our shared novel, James and the Giant Peach, we set out to really understand the character traits that Roald Dahl was giving us. I wanted the kids to have several opportunities to respond to the literature we were reading.  So we did three different responses, all building upon the skills from the previous one.  We made a "trading card", wrote one paragraph, and then wrote an essay (which we then put altogether on one big bulletin board!)  Here is how we did it. First Response:  Character Trading Card After reading several chapters, the students created bubble maps describing the character traits of the human-sized bugs.  I modeled how to do this using the main character of James Henry Tro......

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......

                     One thing that hasn't stopped since we have gone on lockdown is my daily read aloud.  Each day, whether it be live on Zoom or prerecorded using QuickTime and posted to my Google Classroom, I choose a picture book and read it to my students.   Usually, I just read the book.   Nothing more, nothing less.  But at times, there are picture books I read to my students that lend themselves very well to a fun, quick, and easy response.  One such book is Scribble Stones by Diane Adler.  (this is my affiliate link and will take you to Amazon to purchase the book)  This is a sweet story about how a little rock gains a little color and spreads happiness because of it.   On the inside dust cover of the book, and a page in the back, it tells how everyone can make their own scribble stone as well.  This got me to thinking.  Making a scribble stone is something fun that m......

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......

I have been teaching a long time.  Because of this, I tend to get bored with what I have "always done" and I find myself venturing out and mixing things up every once in a while.  So when it came time to review character traits with my students,  I tried out something new....we used a screencast! Ok...so before you ask what a screencast is, here is an example. Cool right???? There are so many different ways to use this technology in your class, but here is what we did.  Don't limit yourself to what I describe, but this is a good jumping off point for you. For our character trait project, the students had to go through a few different steps.  The students gathered into groups of 3 or 4 students and divided up the 6 major character groups in our class novel Gregor the Overlander.   They thought about the various character traits embodied by those character groups (i.e.: the crawlers/roaches are very loyal and would give up their lives to s......

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 ......

So this post has been a long time coming.  If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram , you know that we read Wonder by RJ Palacio as a read aloud this year.  My students were captivated by it...especially the Julian chapter. In the book, a major storyline revolves around the precepts that Mr. Browne, a teacher, teaches the students each month. These are short quotes that become sort of "rules to live by".  At the end of the story, Mr. Browne asks each of the students to write their very own precept and send it to him on a postcard.  So that is what we did. I first had each student create their own "Wonder picture".  You see, each of the chapters are broken up with a picture of the child telling the story.  The picture is drawn with very little facial features and only using black ink.  So that is what we did.  Here is mine I used as an example with the kids. Then, I asked them to choose a precept that related to their own life.......

Culminating tasks for novels and other fiction stories are always something I am looking for, so I thought that you, reader, might also be in search of some.   We have finished reading our novel study of Tuck Everlasting last week, so this week, we have been responding to the story as a whole class.  I wanted to share with you two of the culminating responses we have done.  Both of these can be done with ANY piece of literature, not just Tuck (though, I have to say, both my students and I really found ourselves immersed in the story!) The question is from Got To Teach's Pack for Tuck! First, I had my students answer some higher level, deeper thinking questions about the story.  To do this, we did a Graffiti Wall style poster.  Basically, I took 6 questions that were text dependent upon Tuck Everlasting and wrote each one on a separate piece of 17" x 17" paper (I used those dimensions because the window pane glass is that large and I wanted to display the......