Fifth grade is the grade that I have spent the longest time as a teacher.  I have taught many other grades, but really, when it comes down to it, 5th is where my heart is.  Because of that, I am super excited to bring you, my loyal blog readers, an entire blog dedicated to fifth grade!  I am a contributor on Fifth Grade Freebies , a blog that strives to bring you the highest quality fifth grade ideas, lessons, and FREEBIES for you to use in your own classroom! I am teaming up with 14 of the blog contributors to bring you an awesome blog hop filled with great freebies along the way....and when you make it to the end, there is a special giveaway in store for you! So here we are, the start of the hop and I have a nice little time-freeing freebie for you.  This is something I use in my classroom to help the students with the scientific process.  It is a little trifold that we use for each and every experiment that our class conducts.  I find that i......

Every year, as summer reaches its midway point, I sit down and think about what I would like to do the same the next year, what I would like to get rid of, and what I would like to try.  This summer has been no different. When I sat down and really thought about what programs make my year as a teacher run smoothly, four things popped up into my mind: 5th Grade Spiral Math Calendar Math Paragraph of the Week Essay of the Month Math Homework Calendar Math Essay of the Month Paragraph of the Week I can honestly tell you that these year long programs save my sanity.  Each one of them helps me to build eager, excited, motivated, and skilled scholars from my students.  Each one of them makes my day as a teacher fly by.  Each one of them lets me leave the classroom at the end of the day knowing that I did all I could to teach the standards and enable my students to excel. How do they do that, you ask? Well, all f......

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 ......

The 5th grade science standards in my state are...well....hard.  Especially Earth science.  I go from having a fairly good grasp of what is going on (ie: evaporation) to somewhat knowing what is occurring (ie: wind and convection) to completely lost (with the weather maps and predicting weather). After scouring the internet, watching video after video, reading article after article, I finally got enough grasp on it to effectively teach my students.  One site I found is called Study Jam.  Study Jams is GREAT!  I had never seen this site before but there are a ton of kid friendly videos (cartoons) that explain these really difficult concepts in simple language.  *I* learned a lot from it, as did the students.  Click on the picture below, it will take you to the videos. However, I wanted them to be able to show what they learned in a fun, constructive way.  So I came with this fun little activity that the kids really did enjoy....Weatherman F......

The last few weeks of school I found myself wrapping up our new reading series with the students, and applying all of the skills we had learned throughout the year.  Our last unit was heavy on non-fiction text, so I was combing through my brain thinking of new and different ways to respond....when on my doorstep appeared Laura Candler's new book, Laura Candler's Graphic Organizers for Reading: Teaching Tools Aligned with the Common Core.   It showed up just in time to save the day!  Let me preface this by saying that Laura did send the book to me, but my review is in no way clouded by that.  The opinions stated here are my own. As I browsed through the book, there were quite a few of these organizers that caught my eye...mostly because they DIDN'T NEED COPIES to use!  You see, this isn't a worksheet book, so much as a book with things that can be reused or created into foldables using plain paper.  Case in point, this one. This is an Informationa......

I love graphic organizers.  I just like how easy they are to get the kids thinking.  Especially when it comes to reading, I think that if I ask the kids to use their strategies and process skills in a fun organizer (instead of just writing it on a plain piece of paper) they tend to internalize their response a bit more.    For years I have been using my Reading Log to do just that at home.  Since implementing this log, I have found that the students are actually reading and writing their thoughts in a more meaningful way. Well, I wanted to try to do something like this in class.  I have already written about the Strategy Logs I have used in the past.  While I think they are great, I found I wanted something a bit more.  The kids were getting used to the logs and their thoughts and responses were suffering because of it.  The Strategy Logs also required a lot of copies, and frankly, this year I am out.  (I like to save them for Calend......

I like to integrate my teaching as much as possible (since we all know the sheer quantity of content we have to teach nowadays is staggering!) So instead of simply reading a biography about Betsy Ross during our unit on the American Revolution, I used the literature as a springboard for two different classroom courses of study.  You know about the Hanger Biographies .  The Betsy Ross Biography was a model that we used when filing in the whole class graphic organizers. What I haven't told you about were the flags.  The "main idea" of the Betsy Ross legend (as we learned, there are various schools of thought on whether or not she ACTUALLY did create the first American Flag) is that she is the originator of the flag. So each student put themselves in the role of Betsy and thought about what they would do if approached by the founding fathers to create a flag representative of the new nation.  We talked about what the symbols and colors on the flag meant. Enchant......