Adobe SPARK

Have you guys heard of this??

Holy moly.

I can't even tell you about how I excited I am about this.

I am in Hong Kong at the ICEC Asia conference. I am so happy and thankful to be back in Hong Kong. I have gotten to see friends. I have been able to get eat delicious food. Its been fun.

The conference is amazing so far. I literally have learned so much about just in the one day that I have been here so far.

The most fun thing that I have learned about so far today is Adobe SPARK. This is a free website. All you have to do is create your own account!

This is an app as well as a website. Guys- Go. Check. This. Out. This is great for kindergarten to high schoolers.
First there's Spark Post.
I can not wait to use this in my Bible and Writing classes. We are going to use pictures that may apply or help us as we are remembering our Bible verse.
Our writing classes will focus on adjectives so students will get to play with pictures and then using their describing words to describe the pictures.

Seriously- how cool is this?? I can't even wait.

There's also Spark Page.
I don't actually know how I would incorporate this but it would be great for presentations especially on other countries or other cultures.

Finally there Spark Video.
This is something else I can not wait to use. I don't think I can post anything at the moment to let you know how awesome this is. There's a video that leads someone through retelling a story. They can create a voice over story. We do this quite a bit when we ask students to retell for an oral grade.

I literally am so excited to go in Monday and download these apps on my iPads.

Go check it out.

Happy Thanksgiving friends!
Love,
Stephanie

Rethinking Daily 5

Well I did it. I moved schools and am now living in North East China. Everything is still new and I still am learning whats expected of me and how to get places. I consider it a win if I don't cry that day. Not that any day is bad... I miss my friends (although my new ones are fantastic), familiar places (I can't order food yet), my students (I love my class this year but am missing the 3rd grade hugs!).

With all that said, I love my new job. I love the people I work with, my assistant, my students... everything. I love that I am feeling encouraged to run and be creative and stretch myself as a teacher who makes mistakes. I also love that I can make mistakes because mistakes help you learn!

One of the mistakes I have made as a teacher is not repeating things. I mean, I do and I love Whole Brain Teaching where the philosophy is "Teaching is repeating." So we do some repeating. I don't repeat procedures enough. I do it maybe 3 or 4 times and then expect that they have got it. Welp, I'm in week 3 and they still have no idea.

Take Daily 5. I would have been happy just getting through the first 5-6 site weeks practicing, building stamina and then introducing the new choice. Yeah.... I have failed.

We have been building stamina and last week we hit 18 minutes. But they were not transitioning well. They were not reading the whole time. They were not engaged in their books. They were not building stamina that benefits the whole room. Instead, we were letting things like taking too long to come back to the circle or being too loud when reading to yourself break our stamina and then not be corrected.

I was getting frustrated. Because I am team teaching, we have 32 students. This means that behaviors are magnified. One person not listening influences everyone to not listen. One person not reading... everyone is not reading. Ugh.

So in desperation, I sought out help. I found someone who has had a few more years of experience with the set up of Daily 5 and realized, even with a stellar 18 minutes, we had to go back to square one. We had to reestablish that being quiet meant not just quiet mouths, but quiet bodies and quiet feet when moving. When we were reading, we are not looking around the room "pretending" to read. When we are writing, we can be thinking but once we have a thought, we should be writing, writing, writing!!

So after implementing a new I-Chart with behaviors that I expected and several times we are back to 6 minutes!! 6 whole minutes to blissful students reading and writing. I think my favorite is when they do not move quietly to a spot and they groan!! I love that this tells me that they LOVE reading! They are looking forward to it!!

Be still my heart.

<3

Mario

Wow!! What an end of the year!! We had 2 full days and a half day. So of course I had to keep my kids engaged and learning and active.

I was able to watch a periscope about a week ago with Hope King's fantastic idea about Super Mario. Basically you can do this with ANY content!!

I used it for reading. I printed off passages from NewsELA and then put together a packet with reading comprehension skills. We had level 1 which was asking and answering questions, level 2 summarizing, level 3 authors purpose and so on. Day one my kids had a blast! They came in excited and ready to go. They dove into those passage and worked so hard. I am so proud of how ready they are for 3rd grade.
The 2nd day we did the same activity with different rules. They had to have deeper questions. They are had to explain all of their thinking. They had to read more difficult passage's. They were FRUSTRATED. It took them 45 minutes just to ask and answer questions because my co-teacher and I kept sending them back asking them to clarify their questions or give better answers. It was awesome because they didn't quit. They buckled down with their partners and read and reread their articles looking for information. I was so impressed with 2nd grade.

I can't believe how well they did! I love that they were so engaged and that they were ready to do something difficult and do it well.

It is the end of the year and I have been incredibly blessed by this group. I cannot wait until next year and doing second grade again.

Year 4 is a wrap!!

Love,
Stephanie

Vocabulary Review

It's almost the last day of school. I think I can.... I think I can...

We as a class are done. Like a real family who has been together for 8 hours each day for 176 days... we are driving each other crazy. With all the changes next year (Im not coming back, the location of the school is changing, 2 families are moving away) my class is struggling to maintain focus and be present. Instead, they are trying each other's nerves and crying at random.

I suppose if I am honest- I am kind of feeling done also. I still have a massive amount of packing before I leave for the states and I question my decision to try to take everything daily.

So in an effort to make things better, I decided to pull out a classic favorite. 

TWISTER!

We started playing twister sometime after a vocabulary PD that I was involved in. I love Word Nerds and try to read it once a year. This book makes me smile with all of the research and engaging ideas. This year I have wanted my classroom to be all about engagement... 

So the way it works is I collect about 4 vocab words from the students that we have talked about that week. Each word gets a color. Then I call out the body part and the definition. They usually have a powerpoint cheat sheet with the colors and the words but its a great vocabulary review! 

It is such a fun way to review our vocab words and they love watching their friends get all tangled up!  

With that, I am going to go encourage my little loves to be kind to each other and have a blast these last few days.

Love, 

Stephanie

Asking and Answering

There are no words to describe how much I love Daily 5 and Cafe.

Today my kids and I talked more about questioning. 

Now questioning is something that happens naturally. But because they are second language, they stick to the easy questions like who or where. Today we tried to go more in-depth with questions like how or why. This was a challenge on multiple levels. First, the questions caused quite a bit of thought. Each student had to stop and think about how they knew the answer or a terrific reason to answer the why questions. It was amazing. I modeled the strategy using the book spoon.   

 

Then they had to ask and answer questions on their own with their Judy Blume book. Finally they found a partner who they don't usually talk to and ask and answer questions with each other. It was a great class time!!

They are having  a blast and this last full week we are trying hard to review and make sure we are solid with all of our reading strategies because it in true teacher fashion- I have stolen an idea from the fabulous Hope King. I am totally planning a Mario themed end of the year reading game. we will be playing it for the last 2 days of class and I am PUMPED. I have shared the idea with both 2nd grades and we have started practicing using NewsELA articles in History, Writing and of course, Reading. I can not wait to see their faces when they walk into the room on Monday. And by walk I mean crawl through the tunnel I am planning.

This last week I am making it a point to celebrate students, their thoughts and answers and them in general. We have started new chants to show how awesome we are as a class. Initially I was really into it, but it took some time for my class to be on board. Even still we have had a blast once they go into it celebrating ourselves and our awesomeness! It is something everyone should do. 

With that, I am off to go and celebrate for a little while longer.

Love,

Stephanie

Teaching Well

Its the end of the year. I still want to teach well.

I have so many emotions. I go from excited to bummed in a matter of minutes. I go from pumped to scared literally at any points of the day. I love my students and the music classes I get to teach... and then I realize I get to teach 2nd grade only next year.

And I have mixed feelings about that! Not because of the stress or the pull of wanting to do it all well, but because I am sad about leaving all of the precious little ones that shape my life and my teaching.

We have had a busy week for only 3 days. It's been a GREAT few days though! I have been doing a Daily 5 and CAFE webinar and WOW! We did prediction and main idea with supporting details. CAFE lays everything out with a book for the teacher so this has been an amazing resource.

I texted people Tuesday and said I was so sad no one came to watch that class because it was excellent! We start on the floor and sang our Main Idea song to the tune of "NO". I wrote an emoji post a few weeks ago that include this song so my class was so excited about singing about it!
{Check it out at Emoji English }

Anyway, Daily 5. We read the book Stephanie's Ponytail.

Which because they call me by my first name, I had them hooked. They even said "Your hair is always in a ponytail!!" We talked about main ideas and how a main idea is what the story is about. Then we asked the question "If this event is taken out of the story, would the story continue and be okay? Or would the story change? If it changes than we have found a supporting detail!" I read the story aloud and then we did a quick turn and talk about what we thought the main idea was and how we knew. It was EXCELLENT.

We then went back to our desk to work on main ideas and supporting details in our chapter book Freckly Juice. But that quick lesson and strategy was the BEST lesson I have done so far.

I still have 7.5 days left at school and a mountain of paperwork to do!

Happy Almost Summertime,
Stephanie

Writing, Spirit week and Judy Blume! Oh my!

Have you have had a lesson that just kind of failed?

I love Amy Lemons and Hope Kings Write On unit about fairytales. It explains everything and gives you so many resources and ideas about teaching how to write a fairytale.

So when we started talking about how we have to have a beginning, middle and end to our story, I was pumped. My kids had just learned about personal narratives so naturally I thought this would be easy.

It wasn't.

It wasn't because they didn't understand the parts of a fairytale. It was because they couldn't think of an idea on their own. They wanted to copy the folktales that they had read or the fairytales they had seen with Disney. I had one little boy decide to completely copy the folktale the Lion and the Mouse.

Face. Palm.

So we paused and talked about what writing means and how we as authors are trying to creative something that is our own. We went back to the drawing board and talk about a list of ideas that we could use for our fairytales. After this little chat- we did a much better job although thinking of original ideas is harder than it looks! My kids totally rocked it and are still just as excited about writing that I am.  Today we will do Shared Writing which I have never done before. I am a researcher so I am excited to try out this new writing method. From what I have read, it is all about the students telling the teacher what to write. With 17 kiddos, I am a little nervous, but I have my principal and my grade level coming in and I am already thinking of more ideas to incorporate Shared Writing in my classroom.

Also how cute are these bookmarks from Hope King? I love them! I also spent way too much money on this amazing Astrobright paper. I love it and have been through probably half the pack already.

This week is spirit week and my class has been crazy but great! We aren't winning in getting spirit bucks but we are learning lessons in being good sports! We had shirts made for our class unity day and they turned out FANTASTIC! It is one that I know I will keep forever!

We are also doing more with Daily 5 and CAFE because my new school is going to be doing it next year. So I am trying to incorporate reading strategies, strategy groups and more into my reading lessons. We have taken a chapter book- which my goal at the beginning of the year was to have everyone reading chapter books by the end of the year and I am teaching strategies that we can use with a chapter book. It has been so helpful in my classroom! I can't wait to fully incorporate Daily 5 and CAFE in my classroom next year.
                                                           

We also started writing "Letters to 2nd grade". I may have started tearing up when I decided to bring back this journal. I did it a few years ago in 1st grade and I LOVED there thoughts on my class, myself and what they liked and didn't like. So far this year is no exception.

When I say my heart is in second, I really mean my heart is totally in love with 2nd grade! I have loved every minute of this year, even though this has been a challenging year!

With that, I am off to go hug my cray class a little more before we end the year in a few weeks!!

Love,

Stephanie