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!

Engaging Audiences

Long time no see friends! This school year has flown buy and I cannot believe that I am 2 weeks away from state testing! We get out of school on May 20th and our state testing begins on May 3rd, which means I have been in test prep crunch mode for the past few weeks. 
On-demand writing may or may not be the death of me. 5th grade students in Kentucky are testing on  reading, social studies, math and the dreaded on-demand writing. One of the biggest problems I've been having my with students this year is using the correct tone and word choice for the audience that they are writing to which is why I knew I had to find something to engage them with. 
I went to work researching some ideas on what I could do to have my students be engaged in their writing and be working on writing to the appropriate audience. I found an awesome lesson where students were to pretend that they were in the cafeteria and a food fight broke out. Their task was to describe this event to their teacher, their parent and their friend. 

This idea seemed great to me, but I still wanted there to be a deeper level of engagement. So, I started looking for videos on Youtube where there were food fights in the cafeteria and I found the perfect one.  There is a scene from the Bratz movie that shows a complete food fight and my kids LOVED watching this.    In my room I paired kids up and had them watch the video on our Chromebooks, there was so much laughter that you would have never known we were doing writing! After they watched the video they had the job of describing the event to their best friend, principal or parent. Each group was assigned a different audience to write to. 
Before we actually began writing we discussed word choice, tone and the appropriate choices for each audience. I gave them a graphic organizer to use that I purchased from Butterflies and Daydreams. 
After every group had a chance to write to each audience we shared and then compared and contrasted the way we wrote to each audience. My students then had the chance to edit the opinion piece that we were working on at the time. 
If you would like to see the original lesson you can find that here.

I have also put some samples of my student writing on a Google Doc. If you do this lesson in your class please add on to the Google Doc so my students can see other ways to write to specific audiences!

Project Based Learning

Let me start off by getting something off of my chest. I have seen a lot of talk on Instagram and Periscope (which I love both and love communicating with other teachers) about making sure that you are a maker not a taker. 5th grade where I teach is not departmentalized, so I teach math, reading, writing, science, social studies and on top of that tier 3 reading and tier 2 math. That is a LOT of planning and I don't have a lot of time. So if I see something awesome on Instagram, Periscope or someones blog I'm going to use it, right? That's why teachers share isn't it? 
What I am about to write about was not my original idea (I wish I was clever enough to come up with this) it came from Teaching With a Mountain View.  When I began learning about PBL I knew that this idea was one that could easily be adapted to fit my students needs from year to year and one that they would LOVE. 

Like you've heard me say before, I love teaching social studies and the Revolutionary War but sometimes life can get too routine in 5th grade and we have to spice things up a bit. This is where our magazines came into play. We had spent about a week looking at the different text structures of informational text as well as text features and we were finished with our American Revolution unit. Then came in the fun part. Our Principal came to us looking for some help. She wanted to add some cool student work to our website and knew we could handle the job. She didn't care what it was, just something to add to the website for parents to look at. 

Once she left, my students began a Know and Need to Know List. What did they know about what our principal wanted and what did they need to know about what she wanted. They then began sharing ideas and with some sneaky leading from me my students decided they wanted to create magazines about The Revolutionary War. To get my kids to this point I showed them the blog post from Teaching With a Mountain View so they could get some ideas about what they wanted to do.  I used the planning sheet that can be found on the original post for my students to begin planning their magazine. To make this idea work for my class and my students I made a few changes to the planning sheet. I had about 5 kids who had to complete all of the aspects of the project. 4 who only had to do 3 articles and then a group of 3 students who worked together and a pair of students who worked together. I knew this would work better with the time frame that we were working with and the quality of work I expected for my students.  After my students had planned their magazine articles we spent some time as a class deciding how long this would take us and how we would make sure to get this project done in time. From the Buck Institute I found this awesome project planner. This allowed my students to plan out from day to day what they wanted to get done on their magazine to meet the deadline. I have found that with a project this big planning each day and setting goals was very helpful to keep us on track. You can click on the image below to get your own copy of the project calendar. Buck Institute also has a ton of free PBL resources as well. 

Then it came down to the student work. Students spent time writing rough drafts of their articles, and then typed them all on a Google Doc to upload to our Google Classroom website. This made it so easy for me to give feedback to students when I got to school in the morning or each night. Google Classroom really kept our project flowing nicely and students were able to have independence on what steps to take next on their project. 

Students set their own goals daily and moved at their own pace. After I gave the OK on all of their magazine articles, they then moved on to creating their Magazines. We started off using the website MadMagz but quickly found that it wasn't as user friendly as I first though. Then we quickly moved to FlipSnack. As students began working on putting their magazine together I met with them in small groups to give them a quick tutorial on how to use the website, but they quickly became experts themselves. One tip I do have for Flipsnack is to have your students all use one account, I did not do this and now we will be unable to print all of our magazines because the premium account costs $36. 

As students began to 'be finished' I had them look over their rubric to make sure they had met all of the criteria to get a 4 on their magazine. This sent several students back to work to make sure their magazine was the best it could be. 

I am so impressed with the final products that my students came up with. Even though this project took longer than we had planned it freed up time in social studies because we could move on to a new topic while still learning about the American Revolution. They were able to show their understanding of text features and structures through their informational writing, and my students were helping our principal along the way. Once we were all finished we held a gallery walk in our computer lab for all of the students to share their work with the rest of the school. You could not imagine how excited they were to show off their hard work. 

You can click here to look at one of my students magazines. She went above and beyond the call of duty to make this magazine what she wanted it to be. 
I have found that by empowering my students and giving them an actual purpose for projects gives them the drive that they need to complete such large tasks. Several times during our project students wanted to quit, but as I reminded them about why we were competing the projects they changed their mind because they did not want to let our principal down. 
If you have any questions about this PBL feel free to e-mail me. I cannot explain how much my students loved this project and the valuable knowledge they gained through the process!