Currently {February}

Currently Linky's with Farley from Oh Boy It's Farley is my favorite, and so is February. 

Listening: I am listening to the Louisville basketball game, and if you know anything about Kentucky, you know you either bleed blue or red. Well I for one bleed blue. My entire family bleeds blue, except my younger brother. He is a Louisville fan and nobody knows why. 
Loving: This week in Kentucky it has been beautiful. The sun has been out, the snow has all melted and the weather has been warm. I think I can get used to this! 
Thinking: I'm thinking that at 9:05 p.m. I could go to bed right now. My mom has been in the hospital and my routines have been all changed around, which has worn me out. Does anyone else get worn out if their schedule is changed?
Wanting: I am wanting some Ice Cream, this warm weather has put it on my mind. 
Needing: I need to grade papers. My mom has been in and out of the hospital recently, which means lots of subs for me and lots of ungraded papers. Midterms go home Thursday, so I'd better get my butt in gear. 
Swooning: Did I mention that I was wanting some ice cream? It might be because I recently found out that Graeter's Ice Cream can be bought in Kroger. Black Raspberry Chip, is calling my name.
What are you up to?

American Revolution {Part Two}

When I said that teaching about the American Revolution was my favorite subject ever, I wasn't kidding. We have been at it for a few weeks now and it is finally coming to an end (insert sad face).  I find that making social studies engaging can be hard, so for this unit I really pushed myself to find some out of the box ideas. While searching the web I found some wonderful teacher bloggers who have the same love of teaching the American Revolution as I do, and I knew I had to take their lead. 

While pursuing Pinterest I found an activity about Paul Revere that I knew I had to do. Stephanie from Teaching in Room 6   had a great lesson idea for teaching the myths that surround Paul Revere and that midnight ride. During our reading unit where we discuss multimedia and the tone and beauty of a text my students read part of the poem "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and go on a online ride along side Mr. Revere. Later on during our Revolutionary War unit we read the entire poem along side a letter from Mr. Revere himself to displace the myths from that ride. 

For my students I knew that I had to do some differentiation. For my higher kids, I had them read the original version of the poem as well as the letter from Paul Revere.  For some of my other students I knew that the abridged versions would be great. I divided my students and had them read either the poem or the letter. Then, students partnered up to discuss the differences and similarities in the accounts. While they were discussing they were to record the myths and facts from that night. We then got together to create our own anchor chart. If you are interested in this resource you can grab it in my store for $1. 

When we learned about the Boston Tea Party we had an actual tea party. While I read the "The Boston Tea Party" by Russell  Freemand my students enjoyed glasses of sweet tea. We also listened to "The Boston Tea Party Song." My plan was to tea paper with my students to use as journal entry pages for an exit slip, but snow days got in the way and google classroom had to take its place. If you are interested in the Boston Tea Party exit slip that is below, click here. You can choose to print it for students or upload it on to google classroom. 

Finally, to sum it all up we are working on a Project Based Learning experiences to show our knowledge of the American Revolution, informational writing, informational text structures and text features. More information coming about this! 

I hope that you can engage your students with some of these activities and spread the love of the American Revolution to your students. 

The American Revolution in Upper Grades {Part One}

I love teaching the American Revolution. It is by far my favorite thing to teach when it comes to Social Studies. I just love to see how our country fought for their freedom. Now, even though I love to teach the American Revolution, it is not easy to teach. I have found that my kids don't know that much about the topic and that seems to slow us down. That is why I have been working hard this year to #setthestagetoengage when it comes to this topic and let me tell you there are some AMAZING things out there that helped me. 

Let me start off with how I address my students lack of schema when it comes to social studies in general. Meet the schema box. This is where I pull tons of books from our school library (which I might add we have a pretty awesome librarian who helps me) that have to do with our current social studies topic. My students can pull from this box whenever they want to. I have found that this helps my students feel more confident in social studies because they can actually make some connections about what we are learning. I have also found that if I add some books about our next topic students begin to make connections between events. 

Another helpful resource that I have for the American Revolution is the pack from Collaboration Cuties. I have been using this in my classroom as morning work for students to build schema on the topics that we will be discussing each day in social studies. The kids really love the flippables that they can use in their interactive notebook. By building schema before the lesson, we are able to dig deeper into events during our social studies block. 

We begin our unit on the French and Indian war, which leads into the Stamp Act. If you are interested in a exit slip for the French and Indian War I have one here and here. Before students can really understand the Stamp Act the have to put themselves in the shoes of a colonists. In years past I've done the lesson where one student is the king and he makes students pay taxes based off of rules he passes. This year, I found an awesome resource by Kristine Nanini and the best part of all, it was FREE. My students got so upset when they had to give up their m&m's to the king and they got even more upset when some of them had more m&m's than others when it was all over. This lesson was so much more meaningful to my students than if I would have told them how angry the colonists were. 

After this lesson, students read more about The Stamp Act, and added this event into their timeline in their social studies notebook. Then they were assigned the task to create a political cartoon depicting The Stamp Act. They loved this activity and it was a great assessment for me to see who know knew what The Stamp Act really was. 

  If you are interested the rubric used to grade this assignment you can grab it here for free! 

Up next was the Boston Massacre and this is my favorite topic to discuss during this unit. So much happened leading up to the Boston Massacre and after it was over. I wanted to do something engaging with this event so I immediately searched Pinterest.  My search led me to a blog that I had never seen before, but quickly became one of my favorites. To Engage Them All has so many wonderful engaging activities for students. Immediately I knew that I had to do the crime scene lesson for my students. Kara has everything that you need for his lesson ready to go and guess what, its FREE! You can't go wrong with awesomely engaging free lessons for social studies. This lesson was a HUGE hit in my class. I even heard some of my students who don't usually like social studies talking about how much fun this was.  I will have to say that this lesson was made for 8th grade students and I did make some changes to the detective guide for my 5th graders.  I set up the crime scene before school so my kiddos had time to stew over what could have happened in our classroom. They couldn't wait for social studies to see what had happened. 

This is just the beginning of our American Revolution. Come back next week to join our tea party and midnight ride with Paul Revere. 

Grinch Day 2015

Day 2 of Christmas break and I am loving it! I hope that you are having an awesome break too. I figured that since it was almost Christmas I should probably blog about my first ever Grinch Day!  

When I saw all of these awesome teachers doing Grinch Day I knew that I had to do this in my classroom too, but there was one problem. Every classroom that I found online that had a Grinch Day was a primary classroom and I teach 5th grade. The more I thought about it the more that I knew I could have a Grinch Day too, just for big kids. 
I knew that I wanted to incorporate The Grinch in our day as much as possible, so I started with our morning work. Morning work for me is usually a review so I created a Grinch themed math review of diving, multiplying, adding and subtracting decimals and whole numbers to solve the Grinch's code. He said "Merry Grinchmas" of course! 
Next, I included some of the Grinch into your math and reading centers for the morning. Students had a choice to either find synonyms and antonyms for the word "Grinch" or solve Grinchy word problems, which were also review. 
For our reading block we started off reading the story "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and looking for character traits of the grinch. Students worked in pairs to find character traits and evince to support their thinking. Since I only have one copy of the book,  and my students needed to have specific evidence from the text to support their thinking of character traits for the Grinch, I found on YouTube a read aloud version of the story and put it on our Google Classroom Website for students to listen to for their evidence. 

After my kiddos found character traits for the Grinch, they compared and contrasted the Grinch before the stole Christmas and after he stole Christmas. This lesson was a wonderful review for us since we worked on comparing and contrasting characters at the beginning of the school year. 

After everyone had time to work we shared together the character traits that the students found and made an anchor chart. 

Everything we did on Grinch Day was printed on green paper, which was a big hit with the kiddos. We even took our spelling test on green paper. The Grinch took over the backgrounds to our computers, and he even made an appearance at our holiday party at the end of the day. 

I have some pretty awesome parents who went along with the Grinch theme for our class party. I took the picture before the grinch punch made its appearance. 

Some of my parents sent in Who-Pudding and even these awesome Grinch cupcakes. All in all I would say that Grinch Day was a success and this will become a new tradition in my 5th grade classroom. From now on those primary kiddos won't have all of the fun! If you are interested in any of the activities that I used with my 5th grade class you can find them on my TPT store, Grinch Day for Big Kids. I plan on adding teaching notes and pictures to this resource soon. 

I hope you have a wonderful holiday break and enjoy your time with friends and family. 

Snowflake Bentley: Winter Craft

4 more days, 4 more days I can make it...I hope. There are only 4 days standing between me and winter break and I can. not. wait. This week I am trying to do some fun and engaging activities to keep my kiddos learning, but having fun too, I mean its the holiday season after all.  Today we integrated art and reading to create wonderful art pieces to go along with the book "Snowflake Bentley" by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. 

If you haven't read this book, it is a must. It is really unique is so many ways. The book can be used as fiction and non-fiction if you read it in different ways. For this lesson I read the book twice, once just reading the story of Snowflake Bentley for my students to make visualizations. I read the book a second time to read factual information about Snowflake Bentley and his amazing snow photographs. 

For this lesson I was really focusing on the standard below. We have been working on this standard for a week now and I really wanted to allow my students to have the chance to create their own multimedia. 

While I read the book, my students sketched out their visualizations and the evidence from the text that supported that visualization. We discussed what they visualized, what colors they saw and the tone of the text. My students then sketched out what multi-media they would add to the text in their reading notebooks for some pre-planning. 

Since this lesson was meant to be a connection between art and reading we discussed color choice and how that affected the tone of the art piece. We first used crayons to draw our snowflakes or images on plain computer paper. Students knew that the wax from the crayons would resist the paint and therefore the snowflakes would be the focal point of the artwork. 

After students had their artwork drawn with crayon they used water color paints to cover the entire paper. I bought some liquid water color a few years ago and have used it several times. I highly recommend purchasing liquid water color because its easy to use and lasts so much longer than regal water color. 

The kids loved this activity and I was impressed on how they turned out. One thing I would change if doing this in the future would be to not use white crayons, we though that it would show up nicely after we painted our paper, but grey or black seemed to work much better. 

If you are looking for a quick, little prep activity to get you through the holidays this is a winner! My kids loved it and it make a easy winter bulletin board! What have you been doing to make it through the holidays?

December Pick 3 Pinterest Party

I'm always up for a party, especially a Pinterest party where I don't even have to take off my pjs! Today I am lining up with Inspired Owl's Corner, Just Reed and Pawsitively Teaching for December's Pinterest Party. 

Even though I teach 5th grade, I always want to make sure that I incorporate a little fun in my day. My first two years of teaching I struggled with this, it was so difficult to get holiday and common core to work together. One of my all time favorite teacher bloggers is Jennifer Findley from Teaching to Inspire. She is always inspiring me to do fun and engaging activities with my kids while also teaching the standards. I've been using these wonderful Christmas books and activities for my reading centers this month and it is a huge hit! 

Crafts are always fun during the holidays and I love how students can put their fraction and geometry skills to work with this Candy Cane Play Dough recipe. This would be awesome for a review activity before break! 

What's Christmas without decorations?! I can't wait to use this coordinate graphing freebie in my classroom to review a math skill and make my classroom a winter wonderland that can last even through January! 

I have so very much enjoyed being apart of the December Pinterest Party! 

Currently December

Every new month I cannot believe that it is a new month. There are only 100 days left in this school year, it has really flown by! 

I am currently listening to one of the old school Christmas movies on ABC Family. My favorite, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, comes on at 9:00. You can check out the ABC Family 25 days of Christmas schedule here. What is your favorite Christmas movie? 
I am loving the last day of the TPT Cyber Smile Sale. I bought some awesome new Christmas resources. This year our math curriculum map changed so I was in need of some math centers for our new subject area this year. One of the resources that I'm looking forward to using the most is Christmas Coordinate Graphing Ordered Pairs that I purchased from Kristine Nannini. This will be great practice for my kiddos before we do some problem solving with the ordered pairs. 
I am thinking that I really need to get a move on my Christmas shopping. Every year it just sneaks up on me. I think I'm doing really good at planning, but I'm always rushing out for a few last minute items. 
I am wanting my dinner to be ready! Its been rainy here in Kentucky and soup was the food that I was really wanting. Right now I'm just waiting for my potato soup to be finished. The easy crock pot recipe from Pinterest is on of my quick favorites. 
I'm needing to get a move on grading some papers, but I really don't feel like it tonight. I'd rather just sit on the couch curled up watching Christmas movies with my dog. 
My Christmas tree is fake. When I was a kid my parents would sometimes get a real tree, but not very often.