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......

The past few years we have learned a bit about some of the traditions of Lunar New Year.  One tradition we learned about came specifically from China -- the Chinese Wishing Tree.   We began by reading the story The Wishing Tree by Rosanne Thong . (my affiliate link will take you to Amazon)  It is about a grandmother and her grandson who make wishes on the Banyon Tree in Hong Kong.  This is a fictional story but has a great author's note with nonfiction information about the Lam Tuen Wishing Trees in Hong Kong.   We then watched this very short video about the Banyon Trees in Hong Kong from the Associated Press.  It has no narration and is about 1 1/2 minutes long.  Just enough to show them how people attach wishes to long red ribbons with a tangerine on the other end to weigh it down.   We discussed our own wishes for the world and what we would want for the new year.  I had kids write down their wishes on a piece of paper.  The first ......

We have been learning about the Middle Ages in our CKLA unit and throughout the unit there are stained glass pictures, as well as Rose Windows.  We also coincidentally happen to be learning about angles, lines, and symmetry in math.  SO I decided we would use these two concepts and put them together into a fun (and quite frankly stunning) project!  Here is what we did. Stained Glass We began our geometry unit learning about points, rays, lines, and angles, so I decided to take that idea one step farther and have the students create "Stained Glass Windows" using the concepts of lines and angles. First, I passed out this sheet and a ruler to the students.  I asked them to create a design using the straightedge with no more than 10 lines on it.  (to be honest, in the final project on the windows, 6 lines was the max that came out looking nicely because of the width of the painters tape....more on that later.)  They then colored it in and labeled all of the ......

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......

If you are anything like me, you probably spent the few days before Earth Day trying to find a quick and easy lesson (or set of lessons) you could do with your class that would be meaningful but not too time consuming.  I mean, with THE TEST only a week away, I wanted to acknowledge the day but still have some worthwhile rigor thrown in there.  So here is what we did to make sure that is exactly what happened. We started the day watching the Earth Day BrainPop .  It was free on April 22, which was perfect for my needs.  It gives a little history and insight into how the day came to be.  Then we watched the BrainPop Jr video about reducing, reusing, and recycling.  (this one is also free to access without an account.)  That helped my kids to see ways that they personally could reduce their waste.  We made a list of all of the different things we heard and ways we could reduce, reuse, and recycle.  Next, I read the kids The Earth Book by Todd......

This year, my district began using the iReady program across all grade levels.  It has been an interesting journey so far and I thought I would share a bit about the incentives we have in place in my class that are helping the students to progress through the lessons.  Here are a few things you need to know before we proceed: 1)  iReady is mandated for 45 minutes in BOTH Reading and Math per week by the district. 2)  We are only using the diagnostic and the adaptive MyPath lessons. 3)  I do not have admin access on my end, so the features I have available to me are limited. So now that you have a little clearer picture of the iReady expectation in my district, we can move on :)  When I started the program at the beginning of the year, my students simply weren't doing iReady.  They had no intrinsic incentive to do it, so I needed an extrinsic one.  So I searched the internet and tweaked some ideas I found to suit the needs of my class. First and f......