Parent Communication

I love this!

I work in a Title 1 school where about 90% of our kiddos qualify for free or reduced lunch. We have many very involved, very caring families--but unfortunately all students are not in that situation. Sometimes we have to do the best we can without that support.

I think communicating with families is very important. They need to know what's going in class and also what's going on with their child. Where are they academically and behaviorally? I do this in several ways, I never want to hear a parent say they didn't know about an event:

1) Remind 101-I totally jumped on that bandwagon last year. I had 15/26 parents sign up and I think that's a pretty good turnout. They have flyers you can print with instructions on how they should sign up. The only problem I had was remembering to actually send the texts! :)

2) Class website-I do mine through Weebly.com and have had very few issues with them. I upload lots of pics and videos as well as doing digital portfolios on there to show their growth throughout the school year.

3) Dialogue journals-this is something I started last year and plan to continue. I have a journal for each student and will write something about their week to send it home on Fridays. I try to find something funny or interesting that they said or did and share that with their family. My hope is that they will write back over the weekend and return it on Monday. I want them to feel free to voice any questions or concerns they may have-sometimes I believe they feel like they are bothering you, even with just an e-mail. I would say about 50% of the parents participated regularly last year and a few said they really looked forward to reading the anecdotes about their child. So I got some composition books for the kiddos to decorate this year to continue with the tradition.

4) Weekly newsletter-I send mine every week despite rain or snow or broken copiers! :) I include the objectives for the week as well as any calendar and class updates.

5) E-mails-About once a month I will take pictures of an activity we are doing and forward those to parents who have provided me e-mail addresses. Last year I took first day of school photos and sent those to all the parents establishing that form of communication.

Do you have any other ways you communicate with your parents?

Morning Warm-Up

My reading instruction is broken into the whole group lesson and then small group instruction/workstations. In the beginning of the lesson though, I like to just do some daily activities to get their little brains churning before we dive into the nitty-gritty.

1) Morning Message: My kids get very bored with this very quickly. Their standardized testing in language arts requires them to fix "broken" sentences :)--proper tenses, capitalization, etc. So I do like to use a few sentences where they can review this. But I also include analogies so it does contain some higher-level thinking. Sometimes I will choose 2 things and ask them to compare/contrast them as well-this was a bunny and a dinosaur. I also like to do a Mad-Libs-type activity, where I ask them for adjectives, etc. and then we fill in the blanks-I love "Be gorgeous!". These pics are pre-Smartboard :

2) I wish I could remember where I saw the activity that inspired this idea for me-but I can't find the blog post. They were doing a bulletin board of it. However.....

I am going to give them an answer (probably a word for vocabulary review) and let them give me the questions. I cannot wait to try this out with my kiddos. They love wordplay and I think could really stretch their thinking with this activity. So if I said "penguin"-they could say "what is a bird who loves to slide on ice", or "who was an evil mastermind from Batman" (it was Batman, wasn't it?), or "what kind of animal is Tacky". What they could come up with would be limitless!

3) Poem for fluency: we read the same poem every day of the week and on Fridays they add it to their Poetry Journals. By the end of the week, especially if it's one with good rhythm, they usually know it by heart-so they are not only practicing that fluency, but also connecting the text with the words they are saying. I do use fun poems like Prelutsky, but also authors like Frost and Langston Hughes. How perfect is this one for our first week to go with our dragon theme:

4) Songs-I am a big fan of singing songs with the kiddos. This is also a reinforcement of their print connections because the words are on the screen and they are re-reading them each day. If you don't know the site: http://www.canteach.ca/ - a great resource for theme-related songs.

5) Ethics debate-this one I have posted about before. I have the kids turn to a partner and discuss a question-are they pro or con? What's more important?

6) I love using photographs! I will put a photo on the screen for them to practice describing words, creating titles or asking questions based on the information they are missing-unanswered questions. This site is an incredible resource: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3842331/  . They are pics from around the world and some can be from war-torn places and therefore a bit graphic, so it's not something I let the kids go on by themselves.

7) Quote of the day-I give them a quote and ask them to tell me what it means. Sometimes this is very difficult for them. I'm going to do quote journals this year! :) I will share when we get them started. Our 1st quote is from Pete the Cat--"I just keep walking along, singing my song".

Do you do a morning warm-up for your reading lesson? And if so, are there any activities you would add?

Bulletin Boards

Let me just preface this by saying bulletin boards are NOT my forte. :) You would think by now, how many I've had to put up I would be better at it--but no, sadly, not the case. I am always just a few inches too short or a little bit crooked. I didn't put the letters up yet, but I was actually pleased with how they came out. Remember I am doing a dragon theme for the classroom and had a terrible time finding dragon borders/cutouts. Luckily I was complaining about this to a colleague who said-oh, I have a dragon in my room. Well, there you go.

We have a huge board in the back of the room that you have to get up on a ledge to hang things up there. My old knees and I don't like that part. They are blank because I will hang up the kids' work and things like the social contract that we post the first day.Here's what we have so far:

They love wordplay so I know the first thing they will say is that I spelled "rain" wrong. :)

A Daunting Task

Teachers came back to campus today for our pre-service training. We had not been allowed on campus before today and this is kind of a daunting sight to come back to:

(please ignore the shoes-my poor feet are not used to wearing shoes all day! :)

We will luckily have time each day to work in our rooms, but still it feels like I don't even know where to start. I can't move this until I get this put away. And wait, where am I going to put this. I hate changing classrooms because then you have to wait until the teacher who was there before you takes everything they want to take along with them. So easy things like my files-I can't even put in the file cabinet yet. *boo*

Oh well, it will come together, it always does. I am excited that our new principal is incorporating book studies this year-I truly believe it helps us continue learning. I can read a book, but until I discuss with someone else and maybe gain that new perspective, I don't think it's as effective.

P.S. If there's a teacher at your school whose room looks like mine does--please don't keep popping and and reminding me that I have a lot of work to do or that you have a lot of stuff. *sigh*

I am working on my welcome letter to send out to families. Usually I give them a task to do and bring the first day, but I couldn't think of anything exciting. Isn't this cool paper I found-we are the Bears (thus the pawprints) and our school color is green-perfect right!?

Hope everyone who is trickling back to their classrooms are overcoming their daunting tasks as well! :)

S.C.A.M.P.E.R. for Back-to-School

If you haven't heard of S.C.A.M.P.E.R. it's a really great little acronym that can help you step up the rigor in your activities. A great explanation of how one way it can be used is here: http://engagetheirminds.wordpress.com . I was thinking about how to use it for our back-to-school type activities. I don't think we'll need the typical ice-breakers this year, because except for a few students, everyone was in the same class last year. Since we do a lot of assessments those first few weeks, I want some "fun" activities in between.

S. - substitution-I'm thinking about school supplies-what could we use to write with if we had no pencils/crayons?

C-combine-combine 2 school supplies together for a more efficient tool.

A-adapt-adapt say a pencil or eraser to make it better. They are always writing on erasers or breaking them, maybe they can come up with a way to make them more 1st Grader-proof! Or how would you adapt to going to school in Alaska?

M-modify-invent a new school supply tool for us to use.

P-put to another use-I love using a pencil for this-it really stretches their thinking-what else could I use a pencil for. Personally, I put my hair up with one (before I got it cut shorter that is) or open cans with it-what else could it be used for. And I won't except any kind of writing as the answer!

E- Eliminate-What would the 1st week of school be like without school supplies? What if we had no summer vacation? (I know in some year-round schools this happens).

R- rearrange-what if we had a winter vacation instead of summer vacation? What would school be like in the summer?

I was also inspired by Ms. Patton: http://pattonspatch.blogspot.com -hers is a RAFT activity, but I'm going to have the kiddos choose a school supply item and write from its perspective. Do the crayons get as excited sitting on the shelf waiting to be bought as we get buying them? How do they feel sitting in a desk all day? (My kiddos were over the moon they get their own desks to put their supplies in).

Now, I won't do all of these activities, the kids would be rigored out-but I will choose a few. It also gives me an idea for my new kiddos, how adept they already are at those deep thinking skills. We have to have a jumping off point!

Inspiration

We all need some right?! So here are some of my favorite quotes and videos that I am going to keep in mind as we prepare for those new challenges:

I've posted this one before, but that just makes it a classic, right? :) I think this is so true. Sometimes we have to remember to just put that smile on our faces and persevere.

Well, I still enjoy all these things, so I guess I can keep teaching. :)

This is soooooo true for GT kids, let me tell you! I can't tell you how many times I've seen kids who can talk about ethics or use words like extraordinary, but they can't figure out what to do if they can't go the way we normally do in the hallway. Just go around it!

Ha ha! Crazy but in a good way. I think you have to remember to have fun and have a sense of humor.

How cool is this?! It's a vending machine for books--a school in California got it to try and encourage reading. Now that's outside the box thinking! I would love to have one of these, but I would probably end up spending way too much money!

I truly can see this applying to your classroom. You don't have to do what everyone else is doing or what you've done for 20 years--you can be different!

This is my prime example of why we should let children play with blocks. Three students in the span of about 10 minutes built this-I turned around and there it was. Their goal was to make a "train" using all the blocks. What an example of creativity if you give them to tools to get there!

And some videos:

And this one suggested by Terri over at    http://engagetheirminds.wordpress.com        :

I think many, many teachers "save the shoes" every single day!

How To Make An Argument

A little late, but I wanted to link up with Ms. Patton over at :  http://pattonspatch.blogspot.com in her linky to share teaching strategies.

Now you know I work with the young kiddos, and the one thing I notice Day One is that they will answer a question, but not really be able to give you the why. For example-we'll be doing a graph of their favorite foods and they will choose pizza, but when I ask why pizza I will just get a blank look. If I'm going around the room, most will just answer what the person before them did.

So we have a daily activity where they are to come up with an opinion to answer a question, but then also be able to explain that stand. I will put a question on the Smartboard--is it better to be an only child or to have siblings? What's more important trees or flowers? What's the most important job a person can have? They turn to a partner and discuss and then turn back to the whole group and share some of their ideas. I model for them as well.

In just a few months, they are not only able to answer a question and explain why but sometimes it goes beyond that. In May I actually had another teacher observing my class and I asked the question: should there be a woman President? They discussed among themselves and then were sharing their opinions. One little boy said that men are stronger and more responsible, so they would make better Presidents. The girl behind him raised her hand and said "can I ask 'Johnny' a question?". She said to him-but Johnny, all the teachers you have had so far have been girls, aren't they strong and responsible? It was a champion moment for me, because not only is she questioning and thinking about an opinion, but she is able to very civilly extend the discussion. It helps with their writing as well. They start justifying answers-not just the Grinch was wrong, but the Grinch was wrong because and will give a reason.