Lucy Calkins Newbie

Happy Fall Break to me! Anyone else out there get a fall break this time of the year? It has been a life saver for me this year, I feel like I've never needed a Fall Break as much as I've needed this one. One of the many reasons why I've been looking forward to fall break this year is so I can devote some time to Lucy Calkins. My district adopted Lucy Calkins for reading AND writing this year and its been a pretty rough transition for some of us (cough, cough, me). 
In past years I have taught reading and writing in the workshop model, just not specifically with Lucy lessons. I've found it to be overwhelming trying to implement both. I've read blog posts from other teachers and talked to a few teachers on Instagram and had many discussions with my school curriculum coach  so I wanted to share some tips for Lucy Calkins Newbies like myself. 

There are so many resources out there on the internet when it comes to how to use Lucy. I began by watching some of the videos provided by Heinemann. You can check out these videos by clicking here, or just by searching around the Heinemann website. To watch these videos you don't have to have any special code, just add in some information about yourself. 

One of the things I  was struggling with as a 5th grade teacher was that my students didn't have the schema that Lucy was referring to in her books from previous grade level lessons. By watching the videos I discovered that Lucy actually suggested going back to 3rd grade resources before teaching specific reading and writing lessons for those 5th grade students who hadn't had those lessons before. I learned so much just by watching these videos. 

Planning can be time consuming. I don't just teach reading and writing. I also teach math, science and social studies to 27 kiddos AND I'm the only 5th grade teacher at my school. This means that I can't spend hours planning each day just for reading or writing. To become knowledgeable in Lucy for my students I had to come up with a better way to plan. After talking this over with several people I cam up with some planning tools. 
These tools are super quick and easy to use. I simply jot down a few notes to keep myself on track for my mini-lesson. I've found that this helps keep me focused while teaching, since Lucy has a lot of detail in her lessons and it gives me a place to keep conferring notes to go back to each day. 

These planning tools really made a difference in the amount of time I was planning each day and kept me more organized. I wasn't meeting with the same kid two days in a row, unless I needed to, and I always have something to go back to if I forgot what I said to a student while conferring.  If you think these planning tools will help you as well, they are FREE in my store! I have two different planning tools for both reading and writing. I've been printing off several at a time and keeping them in a 3 ring binder for storage and easy access. 

We all know time is very important and nobody has enough of it. Lucy has an insane amount of anchor charts to keep up with. I've found that I've had to pick and choose which ones I was going to actually use because I didn't have the time nor the space to keep these charts.  I knew that this wasn't beneficial for my students, and we were always flipping through anchor charts in my room trying to find the right one that we needed so over Fall Break I've been working on a project. I've been recreating the Lucy anchor charts for writing where from year to year they are easily printable. This saves me time AND space in my classroom. My plan is for students to glue these anchor charts into their writing notebooks so they can easily flip back to the ones they are looking for. 

Hopefully this will save time and space for me in the future. I'm even thinking about printing them full page to hang in the classroom while we are in each writing unit. If you are interested in these printable anchor charts you can find them here. You can purchase each individual unit or save $2 and purchase the whole bundle, click the picture below for details! 

I'm planning on doing the same thing for the reading units as well. So check back soon for details on that! 

Last but not least, you know your students the best. What I've found in the Lucy reading units is that some of my content isn't being covered and I'm having to supplement with my own lessons. From other people that I've talked to that seems to be what they are doing as well. Just remember its our job to TEACH students, not just go through lessons in a book. I hope that somewhere along the line I've relieved some stress of a Lucy Newbie and if you have any questions let me know. 

If YOU have any tips for a Lucy Newbie comment below, I would love to hear them!

RTI Organization

Shew! This year has been nothing more than a whirlwind! With only 2 days until Fall Break, I'm finally getting some time to relax and blog.  Since my school year has been super busy already this year, I've found that I've been spending more time trying to keep myself organized. One of my many struggles as a teacher is finding time to do it all, and RTI is one of the many things that I'm struggling to keep ahead of. That's why this year I've decided to create RTI folders for each of my Tier 3 students who I meet with the most. 

For me, organization serves two purposes, to keep me from digging around in a zillion piles, and to be cute functional. Luckily I found 3 matching pocket folders with prongs and some full sheet Avery labels and RTI folders were quickly made! These full sheet Avery labels have been a huge time saver for me this year, I can't believe I never used them before! 

Inside of the folder I spend a full planning time making weeks of Number Worlds copies. (Number Worlds is our district Tier 3 RTI program) I've found that if  I spend the time now making RTI copies that it saves me time during the week. This way I can devote more time to the many other teacherie things I have to do. 

If you are want your own copy of the RTI folder covers you can grab them here, or click below to get your own editable copy. 

I hope this little bit of organization saves you as much time as it does me! 

First Day Activities

Let me start off with pointing out how FAST summer went by! It doesn't matter if we get out in May or June, the summer seems to always seems to go by too fast! My first day of school was on Wednesday and I wanted to share with you some of the activities that we kicked off our school year with. 

The first activity that we did this year was the toilet paper activity. You should see the students faces when their new teacher is asking them to take toilet paper for no reason! After everyone gets settled in, I have them write one thing about themselves for every square of toilet paper that they need. In the past I've found that its difficult for them to actually write on the toilet paper, so this year I made a sheet for them to write on. 

Kids love the chance to share about their summer, or something about themselves and its an easy ice breaker as well as sets limits for students to share.  Next up was getting our class mission statement and rules started. This is one of the first things that I do each year because it can really set the tone for the entire school year. I started off by reading a really cute book to my students. "Mrs McBloom, Clean Up Your Classroom!" by Kelly DiPucchio is a funny book about a teacher who is retiring and can't figure out how to clean our her messy classroom. Click here to purchase the book!    After I read the book aloud, student then had the chance to write about their idea of the perfect classroom. Once everyone had thought about how their perfect classroom would sound, feel and look students got into groups and shared their ideas. Each student had 1 minute to share about their perfect classroom. 

This activity lead into the groups making our class mission statement, each group made their own mission statement and then we complied the best of each one into our final product. Even though this activity is very time consuming it is worth it in the end. 

My FAVORITE activity to do on the first day of school is making goals. On the first day everyone is excited and eager to learn so it seems to be the best time to talk about goal setting. This year I found an awesome book "Salt in His Shoes" By Deloris Jordan and Roslyn Jordan. This is a story about Michael Jordan and how he worked hard to meet his goals. Click Here if you are interested in purchasing this book. I really liked this book because it appealed to my boys and they could relate to Michael Jordan and his goals. 

After discussing goals and what a good goal looks like, students were set free to plan out their goals. I directed students to include at least 2 academic goals and 1 personal goal for the school year. Once everyone had their amazing goals, we created our art project to display our work out in the hallway. 

Aren't these just the cutest things you've ever seen?!

I love having something from the first day of school to display out in the hallway that is so meaningful. 

Finally to end the first day of school was homework! I have done this activity every year and I've never had a student forget to do this homework. 

The Brown Bag Activity is always a hit in my classroom, even if it is homework. The kids really love getting to share about themselves and bring in some of their favorite things. I love that is works on students speaking and listening skills early on in the school year! 

If you would like any of these activities, with lesson plans, for the first few days of school for your big kids, just click here! 

I hope that you have an awesome first day of school and a great school year to follow! 

June Show and Tell Tuesday

Summer seems likes its just getting started but its already June 21st! Time is flying by and I've been pretty busy this summer. I'm excited to link up with Forever in Fifth Grade for my first ever Show and Tell Tuesday.  I've spent most of my summer so far at county fairs here in Kentucky. My husband drag races ATV's and it seems like every night I find myself at a different county fair. Recently we took our child  dog, Ruger, to a race and he loved it from he trailer, but the closer we got to the track the less he seemed to enjoy himself.  I had been wanting to go to the Zoo for awhile since the Louisville Zoo recently had a baby gorilla, and lets face it they are the best. We went with a group of our friends to visit the baby gorilla and it was HOT that day. A lot of the animals were not that active because it was so hot, but we did get to see several of the gorillas and even the baby!  The baby gorillas mother died giving birth, so the zookeepers have been taking extra steps to make sure the baby gorilla lives. If you look closely you can see the baby laying on the chest of the zookeeper. 

Google Classroom Partners

A few weeks ago I talked to you about some of Google's new partners. One of my favorites was OpenEd.com, you can read more about that here.  I've been checking back to the Google Partner website that lists all of their new classroom partners and each week there are more and more awesome website that have partnered with google.

Today I've been looking at one of the newest partners, Actively Learn. When I first started to explore this website, I will tell you the truth, I wasn't that impressed. It seemed to be another website with a small database of free reading sources, and an even bigger resource off paid resources, but the more I began to dig around the more I began to like Actively Learn.    When you first get logged on, and you can one click log on with Google, you are first taken to the workspace. This is where you can add assignments, upload your own content and collaborate with other teachers. Basically, this seems to be where you will prepare all of your lessons before you push them out to students. 

Actively Learn has provided a sample document for you to play around with. On this document there is a short tutorial video to show you how to use the website tools. You are able to highlight any part of the text that you wish, add comments, questions and even videos. This could be a great way for you to differentiate texts for students in your classroom. By previewing a text before assigning it to students you will be able to identify the most difficult parts of the text and provide additional information in the form of videos and pictures. 
You will also be able to add questions throughout the text to assess students understanding. I love that you are able to choose between short answer,  multiple choice and a poll. Another great feature of this website is that you can assign the common core standards to your questions, so your students, parents and even principal will know exactly what is being assessed. 

And finally, the BEST part (at least to me) is that you are able to upload internet articles, Google Docs, PDFs and even create quizzes. My school bought us subscriptions to Scholastic Story Works (you can read more about how I use that resource here) and I struggled how to use this resource with Google Classroom because my students were unable to annotate the text as they read in the way that I wanted them to. Now, Actively Learn has solved my problem! 

Since Storyworks allows you to save the articles and stories as PDFs to your computer, you can now upload them to Actively Learn and students can add notes, which in turn allows them to annotate while they are reading. You can even organize your thoughts with categories such as thoughts, main idea, text structure and so on. 
One last AMAZING perk about this resource is that students are able to highlight text and have it read to them (WOW!) and even translated into another language. 
Even though there are some wonderful pros for Actively Learn, there are also some cons. I did not see anywhere to import your Google Classroom roster, it looks like students have to sign up for Actively Learn using a code similar to Google Classroom. Also, there are some free resources already uploaded to the website, but a lot of the great rescues look to be paid. 
Overall, Actively Learn seems to be a great addition to my Google Classroom toolkit. I'm sure there are many more uses for this website that I haven't uncovered yet. Have you found any great websites to use with Google Classroom? I would LOVE to hear about them. 

2 for Tuesday

Summer is here and so is 2 for Tuesday! I am super pumped to be linking up with Chalk One Up for the Teacher this week with two great products on sale! 

The follow two products are going to be 20% off until tomorrow because I'm a little late getting my 2 for Tuesday going today! 

My leadership notebook was just updated today! It will be on sale for $4.00. My students love being able to track their own pre and post data, set goals for themselves and reflect on their goals. 

Leadership is a big deal at my school, and each teacher has a motivational quote hanging outside of their door to inspire teachers and students to be the best leader they can be. These 12 leadership quote posters are on sale for $2.80!

Don't forget that you can find all 2 for Tuesday sale items on TPT by searching #2forTuesday. Happy shopping! 

Google Classroom Partners

Summer break is finally here!! It is a teachers favorite time of the year. I love having time to actually relax for once and spend time with my dog family.  Since I've been on summer break I've been reading some about Google's new API partners (I actually have no idea what that means, but I do know it makes things a lot easier for me!) so I decided to take a look and see if there were any new partners that would help me when school starts again. I found this helpful website, here, that listed all of Google Classroom's most recent partners and spend some time looking into the ones that I had not heard of before. 

The first one, and I think to be the most useful to me was OpenEd.com this website seemed to be great for teachers who are already implementing self paced learning or who are like me and wanting to try next year. Next year one of my goals is to begin doing self based learning for some of my students in math, and this website seems to be just what I am looking for to get started. 

Teachers are able to search through a database of videos, assessments, quizzes, lesson plans and games in a variety of ways. I really love that you are able to search by specific Common Core Standards in Reading and Math. This website seems to have lots of videos and resources for all subject areas and grade levels as well. 
I really like that this database uses many other resources such as National Geographic and Kahn Academy so I could it see it saving me time from searching each individual resource. 

In the assignments tab teachers are able to assign specific students different lessons and since OpenEd is a partner with Google Classroom all of the assignments are easy to push out to students through Google Classroom. 

In the mastery chart tab you are able to see which students have completed specific assignments, videos or lessons and how they did on those lessons. Then, if a student is having trouble mastering a concept you can pick videos for them to watch for extra help, or even pull them in a small group based off of their needs. It seems that this tab would be very beneficial to see which students are on task or off task during work time as well. 

Finally, in the roster tab students can join by using a specific class code, similar to Google Classroom or they can be uploaded straight from Google Classroom.
I love the many different ways this resource can be used in the classroom, and as an added bonus everything from assignments to rosters will work seamlessly with Google Classroom. Check back soon for more Google Classroom Parters!