One of my favorite things to do is have my students write across the genres.  I like to give them one general topic and then assign three different writing prompts that align with that topic.  This results in 3 writing pieces that I inevitably want to display in my classroom somewhere.  The problem, though, is that as the students become better writers, and the writing becomes longer and more detailed, it takes up much more space than a single sheet of paper on a bulletin board.   So this go around, when I assigned them a 3-genre writing about axolotls, I also had them type the essays on a "step book" template.  It was rather easy to make on Google Slides.  I set up one slide and put a 1/2 inch black box on the bottom.  Then, on the second slide, I moved that box up so the bottom of the 1/2 inch box was touching the top of the first one. Then, on slide three, I moved the 1/2 inch box again so it was again touching the top of the previous one.  I ......

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,......

This is our first year with the program CKLA, so I am figuring out how to make what they give engaging and relevant to my students, as well as stick as closely as possible to the program.  The first unit, which is Personal Narrative, had us reading a story called Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio .  It was about a girl who contracted polio at the age of 12 and her year of recovery from the disease.  The story was VERY interesting to the students, who really enjoyed learning about the trials and tribulations of Peg, the main character.   To cap off the unit, and bring in a little bit more polio history into it, we read a non-fiction article from Scholastic News (It is subscription based, but I did find this video with the article on it here .)  It was about a school teacher named Eleanor Abbott who, having polio herself, invented the game Candy Land for children who were bored at the hospital recovering from the disease.  Here is where things got interesti......

Do you ever have an idea for a lesson but you don't know 100% where it is headed or how it will turn out?  That is what happened this year in the days leading up to Thanksgiving Break.   I knew I wanted to use the book Balloons Over Broadway and have some sort of writing and art response to it all, but I wasn't exactly sure what that would look like.  What my class actually ended up producing was FANTASTIC and is now currently my most favorite place to gaze at in my classroom.   We began by reading the book Balloons Over Broadway.  This is the story of how a puppeteer named Tony Sarg reinvented the Macy's Christmas Parade (which would turn into the Thanksgiving Parade) by adding large rubber balloons instead of live animals into the parade route.  We gathered a lot of factual information about the parade by reading this book. Then, we looked at videos of the parade itself.  Interestingly, my students had never seen this particular parade!  So I sh......

Several years ago I began using Johnny Appleseed Day, September 26,  as a day to incorporate STEM and Literacy thematically in my classroom.  When I taught 5th, I used lots of tech and STEM activities that went along with our curriculum that the kids LOVED (you can read about those activities here .)   But now that I am in 3rd, those ideas don't quite fit with the beginning of the year level of my students.  So with a little tweaking, I was able to make this more "user-friendly" for the 8 year olds.  I did this lesson both in person AND over Zoom with distance learning....so it can be done literally in any situation you might find yourself this year!  Here is what we did. We began the day reading Johnny Appleseed by Steven Kellogg.   (my amazon affiliate link) While we were reading, we discussed the genre of legend and tall tale, noting that within the story there were several instances of exaggeration.  We created a chart listing those th......

The other day, I assigned my students the following writing prompt: What if you were a fly on the wall?  What would happen to you if you were?   What would you do if you were a fly on the wall? I expected my students to write a narrative story about a time when they were magically turned into a fly on the wall and all of the mischief they would get into.  What I ACTUALLY got back from them were a lot of informational paragraphs listing various, random, non-connected ideas of what could happen to them.   I realized that I had not been clear with my students about the differences between the genres of writing.  When they were asked to write a narrative, my kids just didn't know what that meant.  They didn't realize that just writing ANYTHING wasn't enough.  They had to write within the correct genre for their response to be counted as correct. The kids tend to just write and not think about the subtle differences between the three genres......

Teaching about the Water Cycle is something that I do year in and year out, so each year I try to do something new and different if, for no other reason than to keep my own brain active and engaged. This past year, I combined the science of the water cycle with narrative writing and technology and, dare I say it, came up with a winner! Of course we started with learning all about the Water Cycle during science lab.  You can see some past science lessons here   and how I incorporated the Teach Me Something projects into those lessons to get the kids creatively thinking about the way the water cycle works h ere. Once the kids knew all about how the water cycle works, I asked them to apply that knowledge by writing a narrative.  They were to pretend that they were a water droplet making their way through the various stages of the water cycle.  Within the context of a fictional narrative, they needed to include all of the science words that we had learned up u......

One of the areas my students struggle the most is with writing expanded sentences.  They are so very good at writing short, simple sentences with no detail.  You need an essay full of short, three word sentences and my students are your people! But good writing isn't made up of simple sentences alone.  An author plays with sentence length to really convey meaning.  I want my students to be able to do the same.  I want their writing to sing the way that any other author's does.  However, that is no simple task!  The kids are content just writing about Jim going to the park with no further detail. So I decided to set out and see if I could teach my students how to expand sentences in a clear, coherent way. We have been talking a lot about how to make narratives better.  I am always asking them who did what when where why and how?    So I thought I would use that same idea to get the kids to expand their simple sentences. ......

I am a sucker for inventive publishing.  I mean, who wouldn't love taking a 5 paragraph essay and writing the final draft in a cool and different way?  I do that all the time in my class.  So when it came to publishing this year's biography writing, I just couldn't let them write a simple essay and draw a picture.   Now, if you have followed along with my in the past, you know that I have creatively published this biography before.  I LOVE doing these Hanger People biographies but I felt like this year, since we are so into Google Slides and using our chrome books (which I have a class set of thanks to DonorsChoose.org !)  we could take these biographies in a different direction.  So instead of the hanger people this year, we created magazines. To begin, we of course started with the writing.  Being 5th graders, I knew that if I just told them to write a biography, they would be lost.  So instead, I helped to scaffold the writing for......