Novel Study and Mother's Day Activity

I know I am posting again, but I had to share the CUTEST mothers day activity I found on Stickers and Staples last night! 

How adorable right!? The kids draw pictures of things they would do for their mother on each app block and then write an explanation of each. Finally, they write a sweet letter on the last page! They give it to their mother as a present! My kids were so excited doing theirs today! I wish I had thought to take pictures so you could see theirs! The images are from Stickers and Staples when she did the activity with her class! 

Also, I have been working on a new project! I ordered two novel sets this year through Donors Choose and haven't been able to read one of them with my class yet. I thought it would make a fun end of the year unit to study all about volcanoes. The unit will be jam packed with activities for ALL content areas. I have only just begun, but here is a sneak peak! I have so many ideas for this unit, I don't have the time to sit and list them all because after all, it is the Friday after our state testing and this girl is freakin' pooped!

 I hope to have it very soon if you are interested! And, as always, if you have any ideas for the unit, please let me know and I will be happy to include them! Let me know what you guys think!

Have a happy weekend!!!

Back from the Dead

I am so sorry for my prolonged absence but I hit a little summer fever back in, oh...April...

I still haven't really started thinking much about school yet, but I am getting there with only 3 weeks of freedom left!

I will begin my comeback soon! I promise and I will share all that I can!!

On another note, if you are interested in art, I have just posted some new paintings in my etsy shop. Please click here.

Happy summer!!

This week has been crazy...

I have been totally swamped this week and haven't really had the chance to sit down and write a decent post and I should probably be in bed right now...but, here I am blogging.

So, this will be short and sweet. I know I have posted a ton of Social Studies and Science activities lately, but they tend to be my favorite and the most fun! I'll be posting some Math Place Value games in the near future so be on the lookout!

We have been learning all about our state over the past couple of weeks. The regions, the rivers, the landforms, cities, you name it. We've learned it.

We took different colors of yarn and glued them on construction paper to show where our four major river systems are located. Here are a few:

To introduce the students to the 6 regions of South Carolina, I made posters for each one with pictures, phrases, and facts about each one. Students rotated around the room to each poster writing an I wonder, an I know, or a connection to each one. Here are a couple of the posters and some of the responses. (I apologize if you can't read what some of them wrote. Neither can I!)

And my final gem for the evening are the lovely tableau's my kids made after learning about the Blue Ridge Region of SC. We viewed a powerpoint with pictures and information about the region and I asked them to work with their group to come up with frozen picture of something they might do in the Blue Ridge Region. (Sidenote for all you non-South Carolinians who have no idea what the Blue Ridge Region is: This is a mountainous region. I'm not sure if mountainous is even a word, but you can hike to waterfalls, see wildlife, go canoeing, hunting, or sight seeing, and just enjoy nature here.) Here are the tableau's the kids came up with. I was soooo impressed at what they did and how quickly they were able to come up with what they did. But, then again, that's the great thing about tableau's is that they are a quick and easy way to assess what they learned. I also like to ask the rest of the class what they think the tableau is showing. They are all usually dead on!

In case you were wondering, the two kids on the floor are the fish in the river about to be caught by the fisherman! Sooo cute!!

These friends are canoeing together. I love the little sightseer with his binoculars and how the girls are paddling while the boys are just along for the ride!!! Adorable.

I will try to post more this weekend, but we have a new roommate moving in and it will be quite busy around here! Hope you all are enjoying your week! I am soooo ready for the weekend! Holla!

Now that school is in full swing, I am finding it hard to make time for blogging about the things I am doing in my classroom and the things I am learning along the way. I love my students to pieces, but good gracious they are sooo low this year. I have to take everything down a notch when I am teaching so that they are ALL with me. I feel bad for the couple of high ones I do have. They are probably bored out of their minds!

Anyway, onto the goodies for today. This week we have been talking about SC symbols. The state tree, bird, gemstone, etc...As a culminating activity to the two day lesson, students cut out pictures of the symbols and glued them into an outline of our state. I thought they turned out really cute and you can do this with any state! Here are a few examples:

I thought they turned out pretty cute!

I hope everyone is having a great school year so far! I'll try to keep posting on a regular basis, but I can't promise multiple posts per week. I'm a busy girl these days and I my students require ALOT of attention.

Teaching Relative Location

Being at a Title I school is tough. Most of the kids have little knowledge about where they live, many don't get the support they need at home, and most of them have never even been outside their own little towns. It breaks my heart. I took a few students to the movies last year as a reward, and two out of the three said they had never been to a theater. I almost cried. I showered them with popcorn and soda until their little hearts were content.

Last week, we began reviewing where we live. We reviewed the continents and oceans (which many of them couldn't recall from second grade--I've got my work cut out for me...), we talked about what continent we live on, what country we live in, and which state, county, and city we live in.

Since third grade focuses on South Carolina history, I really want them to have an understanding of our state, what it looks like, WHERE it is in relation to our country, our continent, and the world. We looked at the shape of South Carolina and brainstormed a list of things it looks like. They said a triangle, pizza, a pie, an eagle head, an ice cream cone, etc...You get the idea.

Then, I had them get in groups of three or four and make a tableaux of South Carolina. Here is what they did.

They did such a good job! After this activity, I had them take a sticky note and draw a picture of SC without looking at a map. Inside the picture, they had to write two things they learned about our state. We still have a lot of work to do understanding our relative location, but I am ready for the challenge! I have a bunch of eager children and I'm going to give them everything I can!

More with Tableau's in the Classroom

If you read yesterday's post, you know that I have been attending an arts integration professional development all week this week. For three days, we get immersed in each of the five art forms (Dance, Music, Theater, Visual Art, and Creative Writing). Today, I attended the Theater and Visual Arts immersion classes and they were wonderful!

As I said yesterday, my paired teaching artist will be a Theater artist so I thought I would share a couple of activities we learned today to foster learning in different content areas through tableau's. For more information on tableau's, visit my post here. To make it short and sweet, a tableau is a just a frozen picture you make with your body.

One activity we did was focused on reinforcing Social Studies. Specifically, Native Americans and conflicts between them and early explorers. The instructor asked us to brainstorm reasons why the conflicts occurred. We named land, resources, riches, protection, etc. After we discussed these reasons why conflicts started, we were asked to work with a group of five to create three tableau's. A before, a during, and an after tableau with four members making a tableau with their bodies and one student being the narrator, explaining what is going on in the tableau. It's important that each member makes a different tableau with their body, but that all of the tableau's work together showing a coherent picture in each group.

After we completed this tableau activity, we brainstormed a list of emotions that Native Americans may have felt as they watched the explorer's ships arrive on the shore and come on land. We also brainstormed a list of emotions that the explorers felt upon seeing the Native Americans for the first time. This leads me to the next activity, called Museum.

With our list of brainstormed emotions, we were asked to find a partner. One partner would be the potter and the other the clay. We were asked to first mold our partner into statue that represents one of the brainstormed feelings that the Native Americans might have had upon seeing the explorers. After each partner was in the tableau, we were able to walk around and view all of the statues in the museum. Then, we switched and our frozen partner molded us into statues that represented how the explorers might have felt when they first met the Native Americans.

It was really neat to see all of the different interpretations and examples of emotion. I really felt like I was feeling what they were trying to show. I think it's really important for this activity to remind your students of how important it is to remain focused and still. STATUES DON'T MOVE!

One thing you could do to practice this skill is to get your class in a circle and do a Focal Point and Distraction Exercise. Ask the students to find a focal point in the classroom and keep their eyes on that one spot. Choose a student (the class clown is always a wise choice) to go around the circle and try to distract each student in the circle by making them laugh or break their focus point.

I am so excited about being paired with my teaching artist to get started planning our integrated theater unit! I still have to decide what content area I want to integrate with the theater/drama piece.

Anyway, I hope these activities can be used in your classroom. Tableau's are really wonderful for children of all ages because sometimes children can express their thoughts and learning better when they're using their bodies instead of their words. I will share more later this week!

SMART ARTS

I signed up for the SMART Arts professional development in our district this summer and have been going to these classes all week. I am very excited because after you complete this week long program, you get to have an actual teaching artist come to your classroom to team teach an 8 session unit!

There are five disciplines of art, which are listed below. We will be immersed in each of these five disciplines throughout the week and then will be paired with our teaching artist on the last day to begin developing our units.  

1) Visual Arts
2) Music
3) Dance
4) Creative Writing
5) Theater/Drama

The teaching artist they have paired me with is proficient in Theater and Drama. At first, I have to admit I was a little disappointed. I am very much a visual arts and music person, but I am sure whatever unit we plan will be fabulous and fun. I do a lot of Reader's Theaters in my classroom and my kids LOVED it so I know it will be great.

Throughout the week so far, we have learned a few activities that you can do in your classroom to incorporate the arts. Here is one fun creative writing/visual arts activity. I will share more later.

Reading a Photo

We looked at a picture of a family native to our area and were asked to list just observations of the photo, not inferences. Then, we were asked to discuss what might be happening in this family's household at 7 am on a weekday keeping in mind what smells, sights, and sounds we might experience there. After we did the discussions with our groups, we did a writing activity where we chose a person in the photo (or would be person in the photo) and pretended we were them. Our instructions were to use a color and a sound, to begin with "What I need is...," and to keep writing until we were told to stop. We were asked to write for 7 minutes.

Just so you can get an idea, the photo was a picture of what "seemed" to be a family. I use that term loosely because when you don't actually know the story/history of a picture, you can only make assumptions and inferences about who the people are, what they are doing, and how they are connected.

There was a woman poking her head out of the door and an older man holding a baby while sitting on the front porch. It was an African American family and judging from the appearance of the home and the setting, we judged them to be low income.

So, when we were asked to discuss what we thought was going on in the photo at 7 am on a typical day, we figured that there were probably other school aged children living in the residence. When it came time to write, I chose to be a school aged child living there and my story went something like this -- (Note of caution: I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but I have taught in a predominantly African American school and this is how many of my children would speak to or treat me and each other.)

What I need is to be with my friends more after school. Mama is always yellin' and screamin' at me to do something around the house and get my homework done and then I don't have no time to go outside before she makes me wash up and go to bed. She's always wearin' that gray jersey. She wears is every day and I think maybe she should buy a new shirt. I don't tell her this though because she might turn right around and smack me right upside my head. I just want to go outside and play to get away from her just for a while so my mind doesn't have to always think about how much I want to be out there! There's too many people livin' up in here. That baby's always cryin' and needin' something and my other brothers and sisters just plain get on my nerves. Always arguin' with each other and touchin' my stuff.

I think this is a good activity to get students to think outside of themselves. You can do this with paintings or sculptures of art as well. When it comes to abstract art, which is my forte, people interpret things differently so I think it would be interesting to have your students look at something and BE that thing. Write about BEING that thing. What is IT thinking? Doing? Saying? I say "IT," but I mean it to represent whatever character or thing you make it.

Last year, I attending a story telling class that integrated visual art and we have to look at a gallery of one artists work and choose one that we really liked. We were asked to imagine ourselves in that work of art and JUST write without stopping.

Activities like these are such great tools to just get your students thinking and being creative. What kinds of art integration activities have you been successful with in your classroom?

Online schools has classes to increase your knowledge in the arts.

Freeze Tag Tableau and Kinesthetic Geometry

Todays professional development was awesome! Several teachers at our school participate in a program called I.D.E.A. (Intensive Development in Education through the Arts) and they conducted a few short classes teaching the rest of us a few things they do in their classrooms.

The first class I went to was using stretchies to teach geometry. A stretchy is basically just a circular piece of elastic material. Students use the stretchies to make shapes, angles, and other geometric figures using their bodies. They can also use JUST their bodies to make different shapes, lines, and angles. I will try to find the video they showed of our kindergartners using the stretchies. It was awesome!

The second class I attended was called Freeze Tag Tableau. Tableau is just a fancy word for frozen picture with your body! I am attaching the document that explains how to do Freeze Tag Tableaus. These are quick and easy assessments of what your students have learned. They help keep each individual student accountable for sharing what they have learned.

A lot of the IDEA teaching strategies come from the Kennedy Center teaching artists in Washington, D.C. Sean Layne visits our school and comes in to help IDEA teachers implement these arts into their classrooms. If you are interested in having your school participate, you should check out what they have to offer.

Sound Writing with Marcia Daft

First off, I want to apologize for the long hiatus. I took a vacation with friends and got away for the weekend, plus two school days! It was much needed and I am very refreshed!

I came back to school today to a half day training by Marcia Daft. I spoke of her in a previous post about the syllabication which you can view here.

Marica has been focusing on reading and writing fluency at our school since we haven't met AYP for a few years now. Today, we talked about Sound Writing and Word Painting, but I am going to share with you some information about the Sound Writing. I will post more on Word Painting later!

Sound Writing focuses on the aesthetic beauty of language. You can arrange words and sounds in patterns so that it is pleasing to the ear. This is why most people really enjoy poetry because it is beautiful and it's nice to listen to!

Some ways to make your poetry more aesthetically pleasing:

• repitition of important words
• rhyme (duh) - internal, end, and rhyme scheme
• alliterations - alliteration, assonance, and consonance
• rhythm - all language has accents and syllable which form a rhythm
• form - organizing writing into a predictable pattern (ex. Do you see what I see? story)

Here is the link to several of the poem templates we were given by Mrs. Daft. I think you will find them to be extremely helpful when teaching different types and elements of poetry. There are examples from real classroom students in each template.

Also, I know I still owe some of you an email about the using food in math lessons! I promise I will get those out as soon as I find the time!

Teaching with Tableau's

For some reason, yesterdays post about Rounding numbers isn't showing up. I'll try to repost that later.

Today, in Social Studies, we tried the tableau's for our Social Studies reading passages and it went awesome!! Just in case you don't remember my past post about teaching with the arts, a tableau is a frozen picture with your body that represents an event, an idea, or big concept you teach.

I designated each group a paragraph from the Social Studies text about the beginning of the Civil War and told them to come up with 3-5 frozen pictures that go along with what they read. I really thought they would struggle with it, even after I modeled how to do it, but they did just super!

I read the paragraph out loud for each group and they performed their frozen picture story for the rest of the class. Then, we had a discussion about what each group did.

I asked them to reflect afterwards about how effective it was to help them remember what they read and they all agreed that it was not only more exciting than just reading the text, but that they really remembered and understood what they read because they were bringing it to life.

I also realized that this is a great activity to help teach teamwork. Each group has to work to together to brainstorm ideas for what tableau's they could use for each sentence or two. It helps them listen to each other and contribute their own ideas.

I'll stop bragging now, but just to reiterate, tableau's are GREAT for spicing up boring ole Science and Social Studies textbooks! Not that those subjects are boring because they're not. Just the text.

Your students will love you forever and have so much fun!

Lines, angles, and rays! Oh My!

We have been studying geometry in Math this week. I have been up to my eyeballs in attributes of circles, lines, line segments, rays, angles, parallel, perpendicular, you-name-it! I've really enjoyed teaching these ideas and my students have had fun learning, mainly because I have taught tons of songs and played lots of Simon Says (as an assessment tool of course!)

Here are a few songs:

This song, to the tune of (Miss Suzy Had a Steamboat) Slightly inappropriate lyrics but you know the tune, teaches about lines and angles.

A line has two arrows (arms out pointing in both directions)
It goes on and on.
A segment has two endpoints (arms out with balled fists)
A ray has only one. (one balled fist, one finger pointing)
When I make a muscle (duh, make a muscle!)
It's a right angle, too.
Look at my square corner, (point to elbow)
You can make it too!

Right! Acute! Obtuse! (Make each angle with arms)

The next song, to the tune of "Where is Thumbkin" teaches the three pairs of lines:

Perpendicular, perpendicular.
Parallel, parallel.
Intersecting line, intersecting line.
All is well, all is well.

I have my students make each pair of lines with their arms as we sing.

After we learned about kinds of lines, angles, and pairs of lines, we played Simon Says! I've learned that 3rd graders are really BAD at this game! They can make all the hand motions all right but they can never remember to stay put if I don't say Simon Says first! I can get the whole class out in one full swoop!

Other activities I wanted to do, but didn't have time to do are listed below:

1. Musical Angles: Give each student a piece of string. With music playing, students move to the music. Stop the music and call out a different angle each time. Students must pair up to make the angle. If they don't have a partner or they make the wrong angle, they are out.

2. Line Collage: Give your students pipe cleaners, toothpicks, popsicle sticks, construction paper, crayons, markers, or just whatever else you choose to make a collage with parallel, perpendicular, and intersecting lines and let em' at it!

3. Angle "Tic Tac Toe": Click on this link for an assessment of right, obtuse, and acute angles.

4. United Streaming: If you have access to this site, you can have students watch the Math's Mansion: Learn Your Lines segment or Videomath: Lines.

What other activities, songs, or chants do you use to teach this concept in your classrooms?

Integrating Arts into the Classroom--This is a good one!

I am sooooo flippin' excited to share with you what I learned today!! Many of you may already have your own idea of what Arts Integration looks like, but hopefully this will give you a whole new idea on what a variety of things it can mean.

When we started this professional development today, we were asked to think about what our idea of art integration was. I wasn't thinking very broadly and my brain settled on things like collages, painting, and drawing, (Yeah, I know. I wasn't exactly thinking outside of the box. It's been a day, okay!) but it is SO much more than that! Movement, drama, poetry, you name it-are all elements of art integration! I am sure you all already know that, but I think we all need a little reminding sometimes.

I often have my students create hand motions to help them remember abstract concepts in Science and Social Studies since they tend to be so filled with content so I was impressed with myself that I was already doing these things. 

Once we come up with these bodily pictures, it sticks and I know my kids remember what I taught because they have made that mental image of their movements and it's been burned into their mind. Maybe not forever for some...but you just have to review them every now and then and they will remember without a doubt!

Okay, onto the good stuff. The first and most important part of what we did today was called "tableau." Now, call me a moron, but in my frazzled brain today I began thinking Oh, that's a land feature. (Insert remark about common sense here) Wrong! That would be a plateau. Don't worry, my mind isn't always that confused. It's been one of those days, but that's a rant for my other blog which you can visit here. =)

Annnd, back to the topic at hand. So, vocabulary word for the day-tableau-a frozen picture you create with your body to represent a mood, a feeling, or an idea. I realized that I've been doing these with my students all year, I just never knew the proper term for the word!

The activity that we learned today integrates this idea with Writing and major content areas like Science, Social Studies, and Math. We were given a chunk of text from a Social Studies book and broken into 6 groups. Each group was assigned one paragraph from that section and was responsible for creating a tableau or three for their paragraph. You can use more than one tableau for your section because there may be 2-3 big ideas that you want to express with your frozen pictures. 

After you've given adequate time for each group to create their picture stories, the students will perform for the rest of the class. The instructor reads each group's paragraph out loud--at a slow pace--while the group "performs" their tableau's.

Then, you can have a discussion about what your students got out of each performance because some ideas may be hard to see right away.

What a lovely way to teach boring Social Studies and Science texts!? Right?

After this has been accomplished, you have students write in the first person about what role they played in their performance. For example, in our reading today, this was our paragraph:

More than 200 years ago, canals were dug across the land to connect rivers. Canals made it easier for ships to carry good from place to place. The Santee Canal was built to connect the Santee River with the Cooper River. This canal made it possible for cotton to be shipped by boat from Columbia to Charleston. (Sorry, I teach South Carolina History...)

Boring, right?!

So, my group made frozen pictures of digging, rivers, canals, you get the idea. I was the river. Flowy and free and sorry...I promise I'm about to make my point.

Back to the roles each student plays, you have them think about their role and write about what they think, see (colors are important), smell, taste, feel...in that role. You need to give them a fairly short time limit for this part. We were given 5 minutes, but you can adjust according to your class.

As the leader of this activity, you need to preface this by discussing important ideas to include in that writing. Coach students with an example. Ask them questions like "What would you smell if you were a river? What colors would you see? What would you do? Be the river!"

I hope this isn't confusing anyone, so to satisfy my curiosity, here was my example:

Remember--I am the river. Okay, here is me writing about me being a river.

I am a river. (Gotta love that topic sentence) I flow on and on over smooth rocks and pebbles. I smell fresh and sometimes dirty when it rains and stirs my sediments. I am a deep blue on a cloudy day and when the bright sun comes out once again you can sometimes see right through me, except when those rains come again. They turn me into a dirty, murky, mixed-up mess. I feel free and wild like a bird, (How'd ya like that simile!) nothing to stop me from my carved path. I slither into the tiniest places that only the fish and tiniest creatures can find.

And my favorite part about this is the sharing! Call on some of those eager volunteers and let them read their little hearts out, because they WILL want to share. After the first student shares, do a recall. Recall is telling two to three words or phrases that really resonated with you when you heard the student read that. You may have to model a few times, but then have students start recalling words or phrases that really stuck out from what their classmates are sharing. I would do it after each person shares. This is great because it really makes students focus on listening intently to what each person has to say.

As an extension, they suggested having students revisit the tableau performance and have students write their own dialogue to go along with their idea. This is a great way to incorporate the use of languages devices like onomatopeia, simile, and metaphor.

I know some of you primary teachers may be thinking, well that's all well and good, but how does this apply to my students? You can have them create their frozen pictures and discuss what roles they played. Draw out those adjectives and verbs in a class conversation or have them draw a picture. Your tableau's will probably not be as in depth, but they will at least be able to SHOW you what they learned.

After discussing and reflecting on this as a faculty (side note--several of our teachers use tableau's already and have been trained in the SMART arts) one teacher quoted one of her students saying, "I like tableau's because you finally get to do something in school." WOW!

I mean, I don't have to tell you all the ways that using drama and the arts in your classrooms are useful because you are all intelligent human beings. BUT, the one thing I will say about this is that many subjects or concepts that you teach to students are so abstract and packed with content that's it's often difficult to keep it all filed in their memories. When they can make that frozen moment in time, it makes it meaningful and connected to them personally and they will likely not forget, not to mention this is a gold mine for your ESL students who may have a very limited vocabulary. My school currently has a 42% Hispanic population, so you can imagine how useful this is for my little gems.

I know I was long winded today, but this is such an awesome tool for teachers across all grade levels and curriculums and can be adapted and used in SO many different ways.

I would love to know if any of you are already doing things like this in your classrooms and if not, how can you use this in your classroom?