What a Great Week!

This week has truly been fabulous. Launching Daily 5, studying caterpillars, and the beginning of Fairy Tale & Shapes units, wooh!

So in honor of a wonderful week, I'm not only linking up with Doodlebugs Five for Friday but I also created a FREEBIE to go along with Daily 5, hooray! as well as a shapes freebie and am linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday!

First things first... If you're looking for the freebies, scroll down to #2 for a Daily 5 freebie and to #4 for a shapes freebie!

If you read Tuesday's post, you know Daily 5 is my new obsession! I am so proud of my kiddos and how well they have adapted to the change to our normal centers schedule. I truly can't wait to start Daily 5 on day 1 next year!

If you missed the post on my ravings of Daily 5 and CAFE, check it out here. And be sure to stay tuned as we visit my former across-the-hall-neighbor next week. I can't WAIT to post a blog about her adorable room and fabulous teaching!

I hope you enjoy the pictures (from the post linked above) of my kiddos trying out Daily 5 this week!

If you know anything about me and my classroom, I LOVE cute, I LOVE bright and I LOVE fun when it comes to my classroom decor! For all these reasons I have created a Daily 5 Freebie that features a full page poster and half page poster for each Daily 5 (plus computers if you use that instead of or addition to the 5 rotations). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of those up in my room, possibly as a clip-in system. I also will be extending this freebie to include CAFE as well, but that might not be until the summer, so if you want them for next year, keep your eyes open ;)

Click the image for a direct link or click here to go to the product page on my TPT store.

My FAVORITE thing to teach in reading is Fairy Tales. If you want to check out another post of mine on fairy tales check it out here.
This year I created a new castle for my kiddos ideas of fairy tale traits to fill. They did an awesome job this year, adding a new trait to my list: special helpers; and the only one from my list that they didn't come up with on their own was special numbers!

In addition to identifying the traits in a fairy tale, we are keeping track of the Cinderella stories we read to see which traits the different versions have or don't have.

We've been doing exit tickets after we read each story for the kiddos to compare and contrast the one we just read to another version. I realized that I haven't really used exit tickets yet this year (which made me a little upset with myself). The kiddos thought they were "so cool" especially the first time because they had to hand in a ticket before they could get their snack... oh the little things that keep kiddos happy!

In math, we started our geometry unit... 2D shapes, 3D shapes and partitioning. I introduced 2D shapes and found that my kiddos were very familiar with the different shapes, but were a little confused between trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms. We made this anchor chart together which goes into detail for each quadrilateral.

To give my kiddos even more practice with shapes, especially those tricky quadrilaterals, we made a shape book. You can grab yourself a copy here. Just copy double sided (with rotation on or make each page go the opposite way), fold down the middle and staple!

We FINALLY did the culmination of our shadows unit! We actually did it this past Friday, but I had already posted my 5 for Friday post, so I'm including it in this week's Five for Friday!

We went outside 4 different times and traced and measured our shadows so we could see how shadows move throughout the day. The kiddos (and I) had a blast!

They also did a great job figuring out why their shadows changed... granted we had read about shadows earlier in the year, but the fact that they could pretty much all tell me their shadows changed because the sun isn't in the same place in the sky during different times during the day and because the Earth is rotating. Yay for my kiddos!


And a little bonus...
Check out how fast these caterpillars are growing!!!! In just a week... it's incredible!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Let's Try Daily 5

If you follow my blog, you may remember that I had started reading the Daily 5 book. Well, during airplane time of April vacation (mostly because no matter how early a flight is I can't sleep) I not only finished Daily 5, but I also read the CAFE book.

I NEVER write type this much, so sorry in advance...

I highly recommend these books to ALL teachers, but especially teachers like myself who are questioning the value of literacy centers, guided reading and even their literacy block in general. I know it's only my second full year of teaching, but especially this year I found myself asking how meaningful center work is for my students. I hated that it seemed center work was more of a "keep them quiet while you meet with reading groups" rather than activities that were truly making my students better readers and writers. Sure my centers have been differentiated since day one, and sure most of the activities were an extension, re-application or second/third exposure to work we were doing in the classroom, but it just felt like I wasn't making the best of my students' time. Plus, it's A LOT of work to organize 8-10 centers every week and a half or so (I always have had enough centers so no more than 3 students were at each).

So long story short (or not so short), this is when I decided Daily 5 HAD to be the way to go! One of my FAVORITE teachers, and former across-the-hall-mate started it this year and LOVES it! And well, I stole borrowed a lot from her last year, including my beloved WBT, so she had to be on the right track! Here's her CAFE board...

It gets even better though... I start talking to one of my grade level partners and he is also fed up with centers as well as guided reading... and he wants to try Daily 5 next year too! (It keeps getting better!) So I tell our super awesome, super supportive principal (who used to be a reading teacher) about our idea and she LOVES IT and suggests at our next grade level meeting that we should do a "book study" in lieu of grade level meetings for the next month and ORDERS US ALL THE BOOKS! AND our other grade level partner also LOVED the idea! We even got to spend our most recent PD session watching Daily 5 and CAFE videos... so cool! AND we are going to visit my beloved, used to be across-the-hall-mate (mentioned above) next month to see how she runs Daily 5! Ahhh life is good in second grade land at our school, that is for sure!

But wait, there's more! Another favorite teacher of mine, who I met through my grad program, but happens to work in the same district as me, just started Daily 5 over the past few weeks with her grade level team, and our principals want us to collaborate, hooray! Here's her adorable clip in system for Daily 5 in her room. I know she got them for free on TPT, but I'm not sure from which TPT store... sorry :(

Here's my lame-o system at the moment, since I haven't had time to get anything laminated... grr! I don't have read to someone open currently, it's on the flipped around sentence strip. The sentence strips are just to remind students their choices, I'm not having them clip in or anything right now.

I'm having my kiddos make a choice and I keep track on a clipboard so I know where they go. I think even if I move to a clip in system, I would still want to keep track in some way so I know where they are going and making sure they are definitely doing Read to Self every day. But all those details I don't mind waiting until next year to figure out!

I introduced Read to Self as "SSR during our normal center time"... the kiddos picked up on it quickly and easily!

I used my old center bins for word work bins with different spelling word choices in each bin. This was easy for my kids to transition to as we have always had a spelling center. I told my kiddos word work was different spelling centers, which made for an easy start to these! I am letting 2 kids work per bin right now. If you've seen pictures of my classroom before, you know next year (or sooner) these bins will be much cuter! I'm also trying to decide if I want one bin per student to limit the temptation to chat with whoever they are sharing their bin with.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have a listening center in my class (or many books on tape/CD for if I did) so Listen to Reading is called Read on the Computer for the time being. My students can work on Lexia and Successmaker during this time. I am not sure what I will do for next year.

Finally, my kiddos are able to work on any of the writing in their writer's notebook or writing folder during Work on Writing. Next year, I'm considering melding my writer's workshop into Daily 5, so my kiddos work on whatever our writing mini-lesson was about that day. Any thoughts from teachers who use Daily 5 in their rooms?

In addition to launching a modified Daily 5 in my room over the past few weeks (keep in mind, we don't have book boxes, we haven't done all the explicit lessons for each daily 5, etc.) I'm testing the waters of CAFE strategy grouping and individual conferences. I have to say I LOVE individually conferencing with kiddos and helping them to set goals SO much more than typical guided reading. The cool thing though is the CAFE strategies (Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, Extending Vocabulary) can be used in typical guided reading too, which is what my beloved former across-the-hall-mate does. My kiddo here is practicing the CAFE Comprehension skill of summarizing with his independent reading book using sticky notes at the end of each chapter.

I am not sure for next year that I want to completely divorce the guided reading setting, and perhaps will do "book clubs" certain days of the week or have my amazing para do book clubs (she already takes reading groups and skill groups for me... like I said, amazing!). No matter what I decide for the rest of this year or how Daily 5 and CAFE look in my room next year, I really hope you'll join me on this journey as I figure out how Daily 5 and CAFE will fit into my classroom life for the rest of this year and next year!

Do you use Daily 5 and/or CAFE in your room? What are some of the pros/cons you find?

Giveaway at Frampton's FUNdamentals and Munchkins Inc.

I have a soft spot for second grade bloggers and since I found Sara on Frampton's FUNdamentals I have been a frequent visitor of her blog.

When reading her 5 for Friday post, she talked about her giveaway and it is FABULOUS! She's teamed up with her grade level partner at Munchkins Inc. and they are giving away lots of goodies!

Check out the giveaway:

And be sure to check out both of their blogs, links above.

My fingers are crossed that maybe I'll win their giveaway :)

Post Vacation Science & Earth Day

I hate to say it, but boy did this week feel long! May have been because we got back so late Sunday night from our honeymoon cruise (I know you feel sooo bad for me haha!) But I must say I'm happy it's Friday!

I'm linking up with Doodlebug's 5 for Friday on my first post in about 2 weeks...

As I'm sure you know, Earth Day was on Tuesday! It was supposed to rain during the day Tuesday (it didn't!) so our grade level took the kiddos out Monday and cleaned up the school grounds. Between the 3 classes we had 3-4 full garbage bags after only about 20-30 minutes of walking around the grounds. They were very proud of themselves! Unfortunately, I had my phone with me to take pictures, but completely forgot in my effort to make sure we all stayed together, whoops!

Continuing with the Earth Day theme, we spent a good hour on Tuesday dedicated to recycling. We watched the Earth Day brain pop video on conservation. It was actually the free video of the day so even if you aren't lucky enough to have a subscription in your school, next year I'm sure they will have a free Earth Day video again! I read a simple recycling book to them and then they partner read this year's Scholastic News magazine about Earth Day. This year it focused on trash getting into rivers and other water supplies. With the information they learned from the 3 sources, the kiddos made brochures about recycling. The brochures answered questions such as: Why should we recycle? Where does the trash go? What can be made with recycled material? etc.

 We've been working on letter writing, and have switched gears to persuasive letter writing. I took the opportunity of Earth Day falling the week we started persuasive letters to have the kiddos write a letter to our school convincing our community of students, teachers and staff to recycle. The kiddos did a fantastic job giving detailed reasons why it is important to recycle. 

I ended up combining our brochures and letters to create a "Can we persuade you to recycle?" display outside of our classroom.

 Our caterpillars arrived this week! Last year, first grade did caterpillars/butterflies and second grade did millipedes, pill bugs, moss and some other plants that we made terrariums out of. I must admit, I'm a little more excited about butterflies :) The kiddos went wild when they got to see their caterpillars for the first time yesterday. We had to have a talk about not naming them and not saying any certain cup is "theirs" since not all the caterpillars will make it to butterflies... which caused some sad little faces, but better than tears if someone's caterpillar named "Cattie" died!

I just can't end this post without a few honeymoon pictures. True it was 6 months after getting married, but it was worth every second of the wait. We went to Honduras, Belize and 2 ports in Mexico. Every port was beautiful and we couldn't have asked for a better week!

It Takes a Village

Here is the final book review for my graduate class...

Set in the African village Benin, Jane Cowen-Fletcher's It Takes a Village, tells the story of a young girl named Yemi and the strong community that helps her. Yemi is asked by her mother to take care of her brother Kokou during market day. When Yemi and Kokou go for a walk, Kokou quickly wanders off. While Yemi is searching for her brother and worried he might be hungry, thirsty, warm, tired, etc., he is being taken care of by various villagers at the market. When Yemi finally finds her brother, she learns that it truly takes a village to raise a child.

This story offers an accurate depiction of the Benin culture and a reviewer on Amazon even stated that she had lived in Benin for 2 years and found the illustrations, culture and values to be extremely accurate.

Reading Level:
DRA 20
Guided Reading: L
Interest Level:
 Pre-K-2

Themes: family, community, African culture, responsibility

Teachers... here are some resources to help you to use this book in your classroom.

Web Resources:

• Scholastic Extensions:  This Scholastic page offers some discussion questions as well as ideas for connecting this story to and teaching about writing thank you notes.
• Lesson: This link will bring you to a word document that offers a lesson plan to go along with the story.
• SlideShare: This link will take you to a slideshare presentation for a lesson using this story. The lesson focuses on responsibility and good citizens and therefore offers a nice Social Studies connection.

Vocabulary: market, compound, mangos, wandered, vendor, searching, responsible, support, restless

Activities:
Before Reading:

• Ask students what they think the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" means.
• Take a picture walk and ask students to share what they see that seems different or the same from their town.

During Reading:

• Read the story a first time without showing the pictures. As you read have students tell about the movie in their head or draw a picture showing what they are visualizing. Then read the story showing the pictures.
• At the beginning of the story, show students Benin via Google Earth or use this link for students to learn facts about Benin. This could also be done before/after reading.
• Right after Yumi's brother wanders off, ask students to make a prediction about what Yumi might do and what might happen to her brother.

After Reading:

• Discussion Questions
• How is the setting different from your community?
• How would you feel if you lost your sibling in public?
• How do you think Yumi was feeling when she lost her brother? How do you know?
• Do you think Yumi made the right choice when she went searching on her own for her brother? Why or why not?
• Create a Venn Diagram comparing your town and Benin

Across the Curriculum: Social Studies
Use the slideshare link to help you create a lesson about community, responsibility and good citizens.