Beginning of Year Bag of Goodies

This is an idea from fdcritt76 at ProTeacher.com.  I have modified the list a bit.

Bag of Goodies

Attach the following note to a Ziploc bag or paper lunch bag:

Welcome and enjoy:

A Starburst because you are a star in this class.

Laffy Taffy because we’re going to have fun.

A hug because everyone needs one sometimes.

Smarties because you are so smart.

A pencil to write down all your fantastic thoughts.

An eraser because everyone makes mistakes and we are going to learn from them.

Crayons for all your colorful ideas.

A sharpener to keep your skills sharp.

A penny for good luck.

A lifesaver, because I will always be here for you.

You can put this on pretty paper or even laminate it so they can keep it, if they want.  Love this idea and I will definitely use it!

Paragraph a Week Writing

Although I doubt that I will implement this Paragraph a Week Program exactly as is, I think it is a great resource that could blend in with what I’m planning and grow into something amazing.    This program uses an evaluation of Purpose, Direction, Ideas, Style, and Presentation to give students practice with different forms of writing.  It also reinforces good study habits and preparation of long term assignments.  It is geared towards fifth and sixth grade students, but can clearly be modified to suit third or fourth grade classrooms.  Here’s the link:

Paragraph a Week

Addressing Bullying in the Classroom

In just about every classroom, you will find students having disagreements and heated interchanges.  Much of the time, they are not on the clock of the teacher.  However, when you are blessed to have students trust you and tell you what is going on in their lives, you may have a chance to effect changes and address bullying before it gets completely out of hand.

I’ve experienced adult bullying firsthand.  By the time a child who bullies is an adult, it is usually too late or extremely difficult to help them.  Now is the time to catch that behavior and effect change by utilizing the power of empathy.

The American Heritage Stedman’s Dictionary defines empathy as “direct identification with, understanding of, and vicarious experience of another person’s situation, feelings, and motives.”

Here are some of the steps I take as a teacher to encourage empathy in interactions between both a student and other students, and a student and myself:

1. Talk to both students involved – Oftentimes both students are deeply entrenched in a vicious cycle of hurting each other.  It helps to know both sides of the story.
2. Ask the student the reason for their behavior – As adults, we often like to pop up immediately with the blanket statement “there could have been no reason for them to misbehave that way”.  When we do this, we model a complete lack of empathy ourselves.  We have a lot of hurt kids, just waiting to excise their pain.  If we can’t listen, we are left with less of an impact on our kids when we want them to exhibit empathy and understanding.
3. Be consistent with consequences – Just because a child has a reason for their behavior, doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences.  In my classroom, it sounds something like “now I know that you are hurting, but there are always consequences for this kind of behavior”.  Your tone of voice is very important.  I’m definitely not perfect, so I have to monitor my voice for impatience or annoyance.  Neither one of those emotions benefit a hurting child.
4. Point out woundedness – Remind the student of how we are all hurting at times, some of us more than others.  I like to use the analogy of petting a hurt animal.  You just want to be friends with a hurting animal, but that animal doesn’t understand and lashes out.  Humans can react the same way when they are hurting.  I remind my students to stop and take a look at that other student and see if they are hurting.  People build the tallest and hardest walls when they are hurting.
5. Teach them to ask if they did something to hurt or bother that student – Sometimes we have no clue about what bothers someone.  I tell my students, the next time someone bothers you, be direct.  Ask them, “Did I do something to hurt you? Because I don’t know why you would say that to me.”  I use my own failings and then empathy as an example.  It is really important for teachers NOT to appear to be perfect.  You have NOTHING to offer your kids with teaching empathy if you try to hide your failings.  I usually use examples from my marriage, my relationship with my mother and siblings, and relationships with friends to fuel the empathy fire.
6. Tell a teacher and back off – Students need to know that sometimes others are beyond our help and that prayer is the only way they can have an impact in their lives.  I work in a private Christian school, so I am allowed to convey this to my students on a daily level.  I don’t have any students that have an inability for empathy in my class.  I have seen it demonstrated honestly in every student.   However, I have seen a lack of empathy before.  It is a scary thing, and I never want my students to fall into that trap of thinking that they can fix someone.
7. Ignore a repeat bully but tell an adult! – Ignoring a bully doesn’t mean the student tells them that they are ignoring them.  Ignoring them should include communication only when absolutely necessary.
8. Care and empathize – Remind students of how wonderful they are and how much you care about them.  This year has been such a great year for my own growth as a teacher.  I’m allowing that delightfully caring and genuine part of myself to come out and take a greater role in the classroom.  Definitely smile and laugh before Thanksgiving!

Scientific evidence suggests that while we can’t prevent anti-social disorder and bullying in all adults, these are the years when many children can be turned from that path.  The biggest factor in that development is what we model for them in caring and providing boundaries, and what we explicitly teach them about how to interact with others.

Writing as a Conversation

On October first, our fourth grade class drank in row after row of riveting artifacts and information in The Ancient Americas exhibit at the Field Museum.  We feasted our eyes on:

• stunning Incan textiles made by highly skilled women weavers from cotton and the furs of alpaca and vicuna;
• captivating illustrations, animated videos, and ancient artifacts from four cultures showcasing the innovations of the earliest hunter/gatherers;
• the immense Puebloan pottery exhibition with over 350 pieces from various times and pueblo societies;
  
• the massive bison killed with only the tiniest puncture into its underside, so that it could be viewed from head to hoof in all its glory;
• and finally, the Pawnee Earth Lodge, a full-scale replica of a traditional Pawnee lodge, where we were treated to a presentation that allowed us to learn while experiencing ancient Pawnee tools through seeing and touching them!

As we trailed through the Exhibit, many fourth graders were on overload.  Their response sheets were empty, simply because they had so much to see, and weren’t sure how to put it into words.  This was another great opportunity to remind them that writing is really a conversation.

In our classroom, we have already introduced Peer Conferencing.  Peer conferencing is a great stepping stone to the inner conversations that students should have with themselves as writers.

When writers have a conversation they:

1. Ask a question - Kids are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they have access to in our digital world.  Slowing down the blur of information and activity to ask a question is a sure way to get them focused on what really interests them.
2. Investigate – Having students carefully look for and investigate the answers to their questions not only creates better writers, but also develops them into better readers, scientists, and thinkers.
3. Ask more questions – I often remind students that just because they’ve answered a question, doesn’t mean they are finished asking questions.  We reach a higher level of thinking and writing prowess by asking the six cardinal questions of writing and journalism: how, who, what, when, where, and why.
4. Mirroring – In peer conferences, students are taught to mirror questions off the response of each other until they reach a rich and meaty product.  The Questioner asks questions of the Writer/Responder.  For each answer given, the Questioner digs out the heart of the answer and rephrases it as another question using the six cardinal questions. Once the student answers begin to flourish into rich products, the Quick Hit conference is concluded as the student goes to work to write.
5. Leave the Trash Behind - No one wants to hear a boring mundane line like “I played a video game” in live conversations, so why would they want to hear it in our writing?  In fourth grade, we are working on taking out the trash before we come to our writer’s conversation.

Leaving out all those things that “only your momma is interested in” may be difficult, but it produces writing that captures the attention and takes our students and children to a whole new level.  Teachers and parents can benefit by accepting nothing less than our students’ best thoughts in writing.

Writer’s Workshop and the Apple Orchard

Its time for apple orchards, cider, and beautiful fall weather!  Our class trip to Kuiper’s Family Farm was a delightful mix of:

• tasting crisp, juicy apples as we learned about the different varieties; 
• buzzing around the bee shack, as we touched our hands to the cool glass while trying to find the queen bee and her drones;  
• squinting into the sunlight as apples went from the tree to the sack to the bucket;
• swinging our legs as we perched on seats of straw on the hay ride;
• and finally, watching the cider pressed and squished through loud, sharp machinery to end in a delicious gallon of cider!

When we arrived back in the classroom, it was time to use our writing and observation skills to create a Writer’s Notebook entry.  In our classroom, we spend over two weeks introducing idea generating strategies alone. 

Our favorite strategies include:

1. Writing Off Literature – With this strategy, students are taught to respond to literature in unique ways.  Certainly, telling the reader what happened in the story is a great place to start, but we look for the deeper personal connections and thoughts that students have about the literature they are reading/is being read to them.  One of my students responded to the initial mini lesson by writing a story about himself and his sister, comparing them to the story “Hondo and Fabian”.  They like to do some things differently, but they always come home to their favorite places at the end of the day.
2. Writing From a List – While students begin by generating “Best and Worst Events of My Life” lists, we also model ways in which they can use lists to help them make a writing project more manageable and generate new ideas. 
3. Questioning – We all have questions that we’ve always wondered about. As writers, we write those questions down and respond to them in our Writer’s Notebooks.  Some students may try to answer the questions by using research, while others simply enjoy thinking about possibilities.
4. Writing From a Word – Students write one noun on their paper.  They study the word for a minute and then begin to write using that word to start “stream of consciousness” writing.  Their writing may not end with the first noun, but it certainly helps to jumpstart their writing engines.
5. Observations – Students use their five senses to work with this idea generating strategy.  Our first lesson has them walking around the classroom, observing what they see, smell, hear, taste, or touch. 

We were able to put our Making a List and Observation strategies to good use when we returned from our field trip.  Students began by listing the different segments of the tour.  Then they used their observations to draw a word picture of one part of the tour.

Writing at the beginning of the year can be scary for students.  I am so proud of my students and the bravery with which they have begun their journey as fourth grade writers!

Launching Reader’s Workshop: 5 Important First Steps

Looking at the eager, sunny faces surrounding me, I am filled with elation at the prospect of a successful year in leading my students toward independence.  As teachers, we have to realize that even students who seemed quite independent in the previous grade will need to be retaught and retrained to seek independence.

Being ready to independently read and respond in any subject is the cornerstone of educational independence.  My focus at the beginning of the year is always on reintroducing independent reading and response routines.

Here are the first 5 Steps I take when launching Reader’s Workshop:

1. Give students an expectation and time frame for transition from subject to subject. Before you can begin to teach, you must be sure that you have enough time and attention from the students to teach in.  This is also important as students are learning to self-monitor for independence.

2. Practice the routines many times with your students, particularly during the first few weeks of school. I find that modeling the appropriate behavior/response first, then modeling it the wrong way, and finally modeling it the right way once again is the best way to teach students a routine.  Any time we have to rerun routines after that, I have a student helper (usually the kid that likes a lot of attention) do the 3-point model for me.  Don’t be afraid to stop your students in the middle of something and run a routine.  You don’t want them to get back into or develop any bad habits.

3. Have a place aside from desks where you can gather your students. Children need to move.  By allowing them to change to a new place and position in the room, we can eliminate “body boredom”, a twitchy, distracting problem that seems to drain our students of energy and attention.

4. Generate charts with students that list the expectations for both teacher and student. We may need to lead students toward listing certain behaviors that must be on the chart, but what we really want is their response.  When students generate a list of expectations, they are more likely to follow them as their own.

5. Pump up the students with your own love of reading. I encourage both teachers and parents to tell kids what books you are reading and what you like about them.  Find interesting words and phrases that you “just have to share“.

While there are many other aspects to launching Reader’s Workshop, these five elements grant teachers the time to instruct, and students the independence and interest to continue learning and growing at a rapid rate.