There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow

Each Friday, each of my classes spend time with younger students as their book buddies. The 8th graders venture to the 3K room. 

At the beginning of the year, some of the three-year-olds were a little afraid of the eighth graders. As a result, we decided to begin the time together as a large group for a shared reading. Pairs then separate to work on an activity to go along with that book. This Friday, we read There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow by Lucille Colandro. I love this series of books. They are 
fairly humerous, and the eighth grades even get into it as well. As the music teacher, the 3K teacher even belted the book out to the tune of the song! 

Afterwards, the pairs were given a blue piece of paper with the outline of a snowman, scraps of colored paper, glue, scissors, and....



MINI MARSHMALLOWS! 

We told them to create snowmen. Many weeks, we have a sample project for them to model. Other weeks, we allow the eighth graders to lead their 3K partners through it. Without a model this week, we got a lot of variety in these works of art! 

 Thankfully, I bought a lot of marshmallows for the occasion! 

Back Pack Drop Off Scavenger Hunt

A lot has happened since my last post to this blog... this could really go without saying, it has been two years. Long story short, I am now a reading and language arts teacher in Wrightstown, Wisconsin, approximately twenty minutes from my hometown, and I am finally surrounded by my family in close proximity. St. Clare School does things a little differently than St. Mary School, so I will be spending a lot of time getting acclimated to my new surroundings. I also completed course work in August to earn my reading teacher certification through Viterbo University. My classes over the past year have given me the opportunity to get up close and personal with two wonderful books I can't recommend enough! (Along with many other wonderful resources!)

The Book Whisperer
by Donalyn Miller

Igniting a Passion for Reading
Dr. Steven L. Layne

My first bulletin board at St. Clare School --
also an answer to a scavenger hunt question

My new classroom will be home base for the sixth graders and the reading and language arts room for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. My new students were in this classroom all day last year as fifth graders, so it was important to me that it didn't look exactly like their old room, but still had a comforting familiarity. There was a flag left hanging in the room that I almost put in the hallway to be disposed off. Thankfully, someone mentioned that the students had made it together for a project or trip. I decided it was essential to find a place for it in my classroom and hoped the students would notice.

The Tuesday before school started (August 25), my brand new students brought their school supplies to Back Pack Drop Off  Night to see their old teacher and meet the two new teachers at school. I wanted to have an activity for them to do when they dropped off their materials that would encourage them to look around the room and not just drop their things off and leave without a glance my way. I decided to have a scavenger hunt.

Scavenger Hunt

When the students entered the room, their parents signed a sheet letting me know the best way to contact them while the students found their desk and put their supplies away. There were instructions on the board to tell me their favorite book and grab a scavenger hunt clue from the table. This was a sneaky way for me to assess how well they could follow directions written on the board. There were seven questions for the students to choose from:

1) Name a movie represented on Miss Bohman's desk. (I have a minion mug from Despicable Me, an ET doll from ET, and my key chain is connected to a Toy Story lanyard.)

The bee by the flag

2) Which word on the 'Be' bulletin board describes you? (See the bulletin board above.)

3) What insect is hanging out by the American flag? (There is a bee on the wall with the words "'Hive' read something worth 'buzzing' about!")

A day without laughter...

4) A Day without ____________________________ is a day wasted. (One student was sure she had the right answer when she proudly exclaimed "school!")


5) What color dot will you find on a historical fiction book? (For this they had to look at the library guide to see that a green dot is found on all historical fictions.)

6) Name one of the featured authors. (There are certain authors that my students in Bloomington really loved. As a result, I have influxes of books by those particular authors: Gary Paulsen, AVI, Andrew Clements, Roald Dahl, Lurlene McDainel, Jean Craighead George, Coleen Murtagh Paratore, and Beverly Cleary.)

featured authors

Library guide, checkout,
Miss Bohman is reading...

7) What book is Miss Bohman reading? (I found this idea in Igniting a Passion for Reading by Dr. Steven Layne after looking for a way to expand on ideas in Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer. Both wonderfully insightful people point out that our students seeing us as readers is very important to building lifelong learners. I was reading Rump on Back Pack Drop Off Day.)

6th grade information board

8) When is Miss Bohman's birthday? I have included my birthday on the birthday chart at the front of the room. They had to dig a little deeper to find my name on this one! Also-- the picture is from before the birthdays were written on the chart!

The students had fun exploring the room to find the correct answers, and they also got a feel for the room they would be entering on the first day of school. Once they found their answer, the students wrote their name, question number, and answer on a scrap sheet of paper. On the first day of school, I chose a winner from the correct responses, and we talked about each of the answers to the questions as a group.

I hope your year has started off as wonderfully as mine!

~Amy

Sight Word Games

materials for sight word slap

Boom!

This summer I have been hired to tutor a first grade boy. I am out of my element here! I have been scouring pinterest looking for activities to assist me in finding activities to do with him to make sure reading doesn't become a chore to him. So far, I found a link to the game Boom. Then while walking the aisles of the Dollar General in search of resources, I passed some super-nifty ladybug shaped fly swatters. I had found Sight Word flash cards at another store. When I passed the fly swatters, a light bulb ignited, and Sight Word Slap was created! I wanted to create this game because going through flash cards is not exciting and "love of reading" inducing. However, going through flash cards in order to set up the field for the ability to slap the table with a fly swatter can get pretty exciting! 

Boom! 

Materials: craft sticks with sight words written on them, craft sticks with colored dots (boom! sticks), container

The container to keep the sticks in is a canister from the dollar section of Target, which I decorated with mod podge and clips of book covers from my teacher catalog. It's beautiful! 

In order to put the sight words on the craft sticks, I wrote them on index cards and taped them to the sticks. 

Rules: 

The craft sticks need to be put in the canister with the sight words towards the bottom (including the boom! sticks). 

• Take turns picking sticks from the canister. 
• If a sight word is on the stick, the student must read the word out loud. If the word is read correctly, the student gets to keep the stick. 
• If a boom! stick is taken out, the student must put all the acquired sticks back in the canister! 

Sight Word Slap

Materials: Sight Word flash cards (can use index cards with words written on the cards), fly swatter

Rules: 

• Gather the group of words you are going to use for practice. 
• Go through the words with the student. Once the student reads the word correctly, the card is laid out on the table.  
• Once 7-10 cards are laid out on the table, say a sight word out loud. 
• The student then needs to slap the word with the fly swatter. 

For example, in the pictures on the right, the word said out loud was "like." 

End of the Year Gifts

The end of the year is coming fast, and my students and I are ready for some rejuvenation! The eighth graders graduated on the 19th and had their last day of school on Friday with the banquet. This coming week will be the final week of classes, and the following week only has two days! We will have a day of cleaning and a day at the park. 

Every year I look to send my students off with a bang. Pinterest now makes that a lot easier. I tweaked some ideas there to create these little beauties. 

These end of the year gifts cost less than fifty cents each! I made the labels on my computer.

I found some scrap booking paper at a rummage sale a while back and used that to make the back of the labels. The Krazy straws are from the Dollar Tree. I wasn't going to use the water bottles at first, but I eventually decided to because I thought they would add a nice touch. 

The hardest part was figuring out how to attach the straw to the bottle. I decided to use a small piece of tape to adhere the straw to the side of the bottle.  

Graduation Gifts

Have you ever noticed that picture frames LIE? When a frame says it holds a 5x7 picture, what it usually means is, "I'm sure you didn't really want to remember the stuff around the edges! If it was really important, you should have gotten a bigger frame!" This has recently been an issue while preparing for the 8th grade graduation.

The 8th graders graduating is a big deal at St. Mary School. We really want them to know that we will miss them next year! The 7th graders play a big part in helping us send them off to high school on a good note. As the 7th grade advisor, I have been busy helping my students plan the banquet. I spent some time at the Dollar Tree looking for decorations on Sunday. I found some graduation picture frames to use for the place settings at the banquet. Inside the frames, I put a word cloud I made at Tagul.com. The seventh graders helped by going around to various students and staff at St. Mary's and asking for adjectives to describe the 8th graders. I told them to write down every adjective, even repeats. the cool thing about Tagul is the more a word is used, the bigger it appears in the cloud. 

I typed the adjectives (and some nouns) into a word document. So the names would be the biggest words in the cloud, I typed the student's name three times. Then copied and pasted the list into the tag source at Tagul. Then I made the colors as close as possible to the class colors the students had picked (tropical blue and tropical green). Finally, I saved the files on my computer so they could be printed, which brings me back to my earlier point. 

The first time I printed the clouds, I made them 5x7 because the frames were 5x7 frames. BIG MISTAKE. The edges of the cloud were cut off! I also didn't have the box checked for the picture to fit in the frame. Anyway, when I printed them as 4x6 prints, they worked perfectly!

Monster Instructions

I mentioned in my post about dump salad that the fifth and sixth graders are preparing to give demonstrations.Their topics cover a wide range of activities. For example, two students are demonstrating how to show animals at the fair - one will demonstrate sheep, and one swine. Another student is teaching us a dance move. A few students are teaching us how to draw.

As they are preparing their presentations, they have certain forms to fill out. The first form had them write their topic, what they knew, what they need to know, the materials they need, and the steps to complete the task. The second form asked them to write out the steps more specifically. 

This threw them for a loop! They had just written the steps - why would they have to write them again? The first person to turn in their second form had copied the steps from the first form verbatim. He was flabbergasted when I handed the paper back to him.

One of my drawers had written, "Draw two wheels" for step number one. I dramatically went to the board and drew two wheels in the middle of the board. As it turns out, the front wheel should be smaller than the back wheel! This opened their eyes a little more, but they were still confused. After seeing more forms like the first, I knew I hadn't explained it well enough. 

I figured I better do something to make them understand how specific their instructions should be. The next day, instead of working on our projects, I had an activity for them to do. I gave the students scrap sheets of paper and then asked them to draw a SIMPLE monster that anyone in the class could draw. That was tough, we have some artists in that class! 

I gave them five minutes to draw the monster. It was so nice out, I told them if they were working quietly at this time, we could do the rest of the activity outside. They have never been so quiet (it was a REALLY nice day!) 

Towards the end of the five minutes, I assigned each student a number. There were two ones, two twos, etc. Then we lined up in pairs to go outside. Each pair had a clipboard and more scrap paper. I told the students to spread out and guide their partner through replicating the monster WITHOUT showing the monster. 

After one person was finished describing, the partners switched roles. We learned a LOT! Hopefully now they understand why they have to fill out the second form. I told them to write "ORG" on the original drawing. However, if you can't see it, for the most part, the original drawing is on the left, and the replica is on the right. 

Adjective questions

Back again with more adjectives. Today the third and fourth graders discussed the questions that adjectives answer: What kind? How many? Which one? 









Each student got a worksheet and we went over some examples. Then I handed out the activity sheet. On the sheet, there were sets of nouns with adjectives. Together we found and circled some of the adjectives on the sheet. The students did the rest independently. Then each student took out his or her handy-dandy scissors and cut out the word pairs and glued them under the question the adjective answered. It was interesting that by the end of the activity I heard them thinking out loud to themselves, "What kind of group? How many groups? Which group?" The wheels were turning, and they did a great job! Here's a finished product! 

Adjectives for Mom and Dad

Over the weekend I went up to visit my parents in Brillion, WI. They were working hard replacing the roof on the house. I was on babysitting duty reading TONKA books until my lips bled (best dollar I spent at a rummage sale EVER!) My mom was lamenting on this windy, rainy day for two reasons. First, this is not the ideal weather for roofing a house. Second, according to her, "Mother's Day is always yucky weather!!" She said that fathers get a day in June that is always nice, so it isn't fair. 

My aunt countered with, "But we always got the nice school-made gifts, while the kids were out of school before Father's Day." 

I'm not going to get into the rest of the discussion, but it did go on from there. 

Which brings me to the project the 3rd and 4th grade English class has been working on. We are studying some of my very favorite words: adjectives! I always felt bad about the lack of Father's Day gifts, so I try to do a little something for the dads. This year I found two very similar projects. Through Pinterest, I found the blog Mrs. Lirette's Learning Detectives, which brought me to A Cupcake for the Teacher's Teachers Pay Teachers Store. Now, if I was a kindergarten teacher, I would have purchased these in a heartbeat to use in the classroom. It has the adjectives ready to print as well as the written sayings. There is a Donut for Dad and To Mom with a Cherry on Top. However, I wanted the students to generate their own adjectives and write it out themselves.  The results were quite fetching if I do say so myself! 

I started off by having them make a list of adjectives to describe their moms in their journals. After about seven minutes, I had them make a list of adjectives to describe their dads. Now, it was pretty tough for some of them to ONLY think of adjectives because when you ask a child to describe their parents, the first word that comes to their head is usually an occupation. I let them use some nouns. I mean, if you want to say your dad's a farmer, what adjective do you use to describe that? I did tell them to think of adjectives that someone would need in order to do their job, which helped a little! 

One of the fourth graders noticed the "I am..." poems still displayed in the back of the room and recognized the adjectives. She got a lot of ideas! For the ones that were really struggling, I brought the group together and we all listed some adjectives together. They could write down anything they thought would work as we brainstormed together. 

I asked the students for their mom's favorite color besides red or brown. They were okay with not being able to choose brown, but the fact that red was off the table was nerve-racking for some of them. In the end, they did all make a decision for the ice cream. I made tracers for the ice cream scoop and the cherry. They shared them in their groups. While one person was tracing, the rest of the group was writing "I love you with a cherry on top!" on white-triangles. They wrote in pencil and then covered the writing in permanent marker. Then they could work on their adjectives. I had made white strips of paper which they could write multiple adjectives on a strip and cut between. After I checked their adjective spelling, they were able to go over the  pencil marks with colored marker. Each group needed to share a pack of markers as well. This worked fairly well because each student was working independently and together at the same time! There were enough things for the students to do that didn't have to sit and wait around for someone else to finish. Because they were finished on Friday, they were sent home right away. As a result, I don't have student examples for the ice cream cones. 

I had tracers for the donuts, which the student cut out of brown paper. This time, I asked for Dad's favorite color. Some of the students were stumped. I asked them what color Dad wears most often... their answer... BLUE jeans! There were a lot of default blues, a couple John Deere Greens and one International Red. Not everyone is finished with this project. 

Tomorrow, for the ones who are finished, I will  put them into groups to play Slapples to Slapples, a school-friendly version of Apples to Apples. I thought I found it on Teachers pay Teachers, however, I can't find the same thing again. It was free when I got it! The kids LOVE it, and they are practicing with adjectives at the same time! I did find this which I think is just an updated version of the game. It costs money, but I think it would be worth it! I will have to print the cards out on card stock so they last longer. 

I am...

As I said in an earlier post, the fifth and sixth graders have been writing poetry. Each student was issued a poetry journal (a large sheet of construction paper folded in half with 10 pieces of lined loose-leaf paper stapled inside). 

Because St. Mary's School turned 100 this year, we had a wonderful celebration. I wanted to have some student work on display, so I decided to have the fifth and sixth graders publish one of their poems. I found this idea on Pinterest and thought it would be perfect! The pin took me to a  wonderful blog called Runde's Room.  The backgrounds for these poems were made in their art class with their art teacher.

They started out by using pencil to draw curved lines on a piece of thick paper. Then they filled in the lines they made with paint. Her focus was for them to mix and blend colors. 

After painting in art class, they came to English class. In their poetry journals, the students made a list of adjectives - as many as they could think of. Next, they needed to rank their adjectives in order of significance. 

Once the paintings were dry and flattened, the students took Sharpie markers and drew over the lines between colors. You can see on some of the finished products that some of the lines between colors were difficult to find because of the blended colors. I actually really liked that effect! Next I had the students write their adjectives on the lines. I told them the top of the letters should reach from the top to the bottom of the space, and that the most significant adjectives should have the biggest letters. I also encouraged them to use fancy writing to improve the aesthetics of the piece. I told them to write the top ranked adjectives first so that they would fit the most important ones on the poem.
 
Some of the students realized right away that they should write the words in pencil before they went over the words in Sharpie. If I do this project again (which I definitely think I will), I will make that a requirement. It also would have been nice to have a way to allow the students to create a rough draft. Then if the students were not following directions, I would have been able to redirect them more easily. As you know, Sharpies are called permanent markers for a reason!