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......

What a year this has been!  Can you believe it is MAY already???!!! Well, with May comes Open House at my school.  This is the time where we display the great projects and learning that the kids have been doing and invite the parents in to see it all. This year, since we were smack-dab in the middle of our 13 colonies unit, I thought it would be awesome to research what an actual early colonial village would look like and then turn the room into said colony.   This took a lot of research on the students' part, and a lot of butcher paper on mine, but I think the final product was amazing!  The kids did so much work, and it really showed.  So now, without further ado, I present to you the Colony of Moormania :) Here are two pictures of the entire room.  Both are views from the front of the room.Just click on any picture to enlarge. In this picture you can see the "Floating Colonies", the informational writing on the colonial regions, our ......

I teach at a magnet school.  (if you are unsure about what a magnet is, here is some background ) Because of this, my classroom (as is the entire school) is filled with a great deal of diversity.  Many of my students are the sons or daughters of immigrants to the United States.  Some are immigrants themselves.  So when we came upon our unit discussing Heritage, they each had quite a bit to bring to the table.  During this unit, we did many different projects to get the students thinking about where they came from and their own family roots.   I thought I would take this post to share some of those projects with you. To begin, we talked about what an immigrant was in general.  The students wrote paragraphs about them after we read several articles on the subject.  Now, this was before Common Core so now I can see that we totally could have tied in the close reading idea and pulled in actual evidence from the articles, instead of the basic ......

When I was in college, the big push was towards thematic teaching.  No longer were we to teach in isolated chunks of information, but we were to pull it all together under one big umbrella theme.  Because I learned that way, my brain is now wired to teach that way.   So when I approach a big unit of study, I not only am thinking about how my social studies (for example) will be taught, but I am trying to bring in literature, make a math connection, work out science experiments....all under the big umbrella of the unit. As most of you know, I am in the midst of my most favorite unit, the American Revolution.  When I set about planning this, I broke out my trusty old organizer.  I use this when I am entering into any sort of planning.  It helps me to see what it is that I want to accomplish and how I am going to do that.  It also helps me to visualize how things are going to go, how I will keep it all tied together....everything. I left it at school th......