Nuts to You

Today we came to the end of Nuts to You. Well it is not really the end. We have five epilogues to finish tomorrow and a note from the author. Five epilogues. I cannot remember a book I have ever read with that many epilogues. Then again I cannot remember a book with talking squirrels using a Scottish accent.

One thing I really noticed was the class has really started to find the signposts on their own. Today the class was able to find a Words of the Wiser. Yesterday they found a Tough Question. The ending of the book was really well written. I loved the messages we found today. I am still not sure where this book ranks to the other books that I have read aloud this year but it was a fun read aloud.

I have been so impressed with independent reading this week. The room has been quiet and students are reading amazing books. We have students reading authors like Jerry Spinelli, Louis Sachar, Carl Hiaasen, Gary Paulsen, Barbara O'Connor and the list goes on and on. On some of the days I have been letting the time we get to read get longer and longer. I think some of the students have really enjoyed this time. One thing that I true believe is that students need time to read good books. So have a great break and hopefully you can make a bit of time for books. 

Book Ideas

I thought I would make a list of books that might make some popular gifts among our students. Hopefully this will help you with that last minute shopping to find the perfect book for a gift.

Popular Books in the Classroom:

These books are flying off my shelves right now and I think any of the students would love a copy.

If I get a new book from the series, it is gone being passed back and forth between students. I know that these books look like they are filled with Star Wars but they are really more than just a Star Wars book. Plus it is a series so it could lead to lots of future reading.

This series I am not very familiar with just yet. I have had four or five students writing about it to me this week in their Conversation Calendars. The book sounds amazing. 

Gary Paulsen has become one of our go to authors. The students love his book. Students will start with Hatchet and then head to Brian's Winter and then The River and then more and more Paulsen books. He is an amazing author and I love to see how much the students have been enjoying his books.

Another author that has become quite popular right now in my room is Carl Hiaasen. Be careful though Hiaasen writes books for adults and children. Some of my favorite titles of his include Scat, Flush, Hoot, and Chomp.

Some Picture Books:

Although our students might not admit it I think that they love picture books. Here are a few titles that would make great gifts.

Quest is the next book from Aaron Becker after his amazing book Journey. I have shared Journey with the class but I have not had a chance to share Quest. The artistry in Becker's books is amazing. This book is another example of a wordless picture book which the students really seem to enjoy.

One book that has been flying around my room this year is The One and Only Ivan. This picture book tells the real story of Ivan the Shopping Mall Gorilla which was the basis for the book The One and Only Ivan.

Some New Books:

Just a few titles that the students may not have heard of just yet. I do not know a ton about these books except that many are saying they are some of the best of the year.

Hope this list helps and that you are having a great week.

A Farewell

On Friday we said goodbye to Ms. Cavallaro. It amazes me that her time with us went so fast. Ms. Cavallaro has played a huge role in our school year and she will be missed. I keep thinking about all the brilliant lessons that she was able to share with both classes.

As a parting gift to Ms. Cavallaro, both classes made her a book entitled 54 Things Every Teacher Should Know. Each student added a piece of advice that they wanted to share with Ms. Cavallaro. The book was filled with plenty of nuggets of great advice. Here are a few gems from the book:

• Don’t let the “my mom took it out of my binder” trick get you
• Teach higher grades so we are in your future class!
• Never be a math teacher...it is too hard
• Make every day a day they want to learn
• Make your kids work hard but not too hard!!
• Have party Friday every Friday
• Have a little fun!

This week we are trying to get done with our book Nuts to You. 

Today on the journey home our squirrels faced an ice storm and a bobcat. This book has been filled with twists and turns and I cannot wait to see where it takes us in the last few days. As we read this book, we continue to concentrate on characters. I hope you can continue to concentrate on talking about characters at home. We have talked about how we need to notice how/why a character changes, figure out a characters motivation, notice character feelings and traits, and many other ideas.

I hope you had a great start to your week.

Conversation Calendars

This week and next week students will be filling out their conversation calendars when they are done with reading time. One week half the students will be on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule and then the next week they will be on the Tuesday/Thursday schedule. The other half of the class will be on the opposite schedule. I love these conversation calendars. During the two weeks I get to have five conferences with each student. That means when the two weeks is done I am able to have over 250 conferences.

On the day students are supposed to write they will grab their Conversation Calendar and write to me in that days spot about what they were thinking. Then the students turn the paper in after writing. While students are writing the other half of the class meets me at the rocking chair and tells me about what they were reading. I take each stack of papers home at night and write back. I might ask questions or agree with the students or just try to keep the conversation rolling. Finally the students get their paper back on their next writing day. They read what I wrote back and our conversation continues.

We told the students that over the next two weeks we want them to try to make their conversations about the characters in the books they have been reading. We have been introducing different ideas of what students can think about when it comes to characters. The room is starting to fill up with different character posters.

These are not the exact posters from our room but I forgot to take pictures of our posters today so these will have to do. If you are reading at home over the next few weeks, you could try to talk about the characters in the book or movie or television show you are watching. These conversations would just support the ideas that we are talking about in class. 

I hope your week is off to a great start.

An Accent

In our new read aloud book Nuts to You one of our squirrels Jed was taken by a hawk and dropped far from his home. Two squirrels from Jed's home decide to set off on a journey to find and bring back their friend. I am loving this book so far. Even though our quest has just begun I know that we are in for a bit more of an adventurous book than our other read aloud books.

One of my favorite parts of the book is that Jed has found himself in a new part of the forest with a very different type of squirrel. These squirrels have a tint of red in their fur and love to eat pine cones. I think the class also loves the accent of the new squirrels. I believe the accent the author was trying for was Scottish. I have been trying my hardest to recreate the accent. I have failed. I am awful at accents. At best I am pulling off a terrible Australian accent.

Even with my accent failing I am loving this book.

In Social Studies we got to move on to talk about the three branches of our government. One of our goals is to teach the class the different responsibilities of the three branches. Today we started with the legislative branch and their responsibility of making laws. If you are going to discuss how laws are made, there is only one video to show. 

We challenged the class to listen to the video and then put the steps of how a bill becomes a law in order. The tables raced to see which group could complete the task first. We were amazed to see how quickly the groups were able to place the steps in order after just two viewings.

Hope you are having a great week.

Sorry for the Absence

I am so sorry that I was not able to blog on Monday or Tuesday. I had it all planned to blog five days this week and then around 2:00 on Monday the flu attacked. I am back on the mend and hopefully can get back to filling you in on what he have been up to in room 215.

Today we finished Charlotte's Web. I will miss the time of watching the class scatter around the room in their groups to read this classic. The room would fill up with the sounds of students reading this classic and it was quite a sight to see.

Yesterday, when I was out, the class read the one moment that I love most in the book. It is the words of the wiser spoken by Charlotte:  

“You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.” 

We had been searching for this moment. The class knew they had to ask themselves what life lessons can be learned and how might it affect the character. I thought the class did a great job of figuring out the life lesson and then deciding how it might affect Wilbur. 

In writing we are just starting to write the first drafts of our personal narratives. Ms. Cavallaro had done a great job of explaining different ways students could make their personal narratives better. It has been amazing to see how the students took these ideas and have started to use them in their narratives. 

Finally in Social Studies we started government. We have been looking at the Constitution this whole week. One of my favorite things about teaching government is getting to show some School House Rock. So far we have showed this great video but more our coming. 

I hope you are all healthy and having a great week!

Our New Read Aloud

Last week we finished up Absolutely Almost.

I really enjoyed this book. I still cannot decide if I enjoyed it more than Half a Chance.

Both books are great and hopefully the students enjoyed them as much as I did. Today I introduced our next read aloud. I love reading new books. My goal each year is to read aloud the book that might win the Newbery. I have been lucky the last two years to have read aloud the book that became the winner. This year I have a favorite to win. I am saving that book for our read aloud when we get back from winter break. 

The book we started today was Nuts to You. 

Last year the winner of the Newbery was Flora and Ulysses. The book centered around the story of a girl and a squirrel. As you can tell from the cover squirrels are going to play a big part of this book. 

I loved when we started this book today that a student predicted this book will include Words of the Wiser. When I asked the class what animal in the woods might be the character to deliver the Words of the Wiser, they all predicted that it would come from an owl. 

It is was nice to see that the class was already realizing that they should not just be looking for the signposts we have discussed in Charlotte's Web. Hopefully as we read the book the class will love it as much as our other books. I also hope that we can find some of the signposts we have talked about so far.

Changes

This year is bringing many changes. Ohio has adopted Ohio's New Learning Standards. The way that fourth graders are assessed will also look very different from what you experienced last year. I think it is important to make you aware of these changes. I am planning on spending one night a week (for the next few months) on the blog talking about these new ideas.

Tonight I thought I would take it easy and just give you a website. The website will take you to PARCC online. PARCC is the group creating the new assessments that fourth graders will take this year. Here is a brief description of PARCC that comes directly from their website:

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a group of states working together to develop a set of assessments that measure whether students are on track to be successful in college and their careers. These high quality, computer-based K–12 assessments in Mathematics and English Language Arts/Literacy give teachers, schools, students, and parents better information whether students are on track in their learning and for success after high school, and tools to help teachers customize learning to meet student needs. The PARCC assessments will be ready for states to administer during the 2014-15 school year.

If you do go to the site, it will appear that PARCC is an online test. This is the case, but this year our fourth graders will be taking a pencil paper version of the test. I hope that this information helps. If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch with me and I will try to answer them the best I can.

Hope you are having a great week.

Another Signpost

Today the fourth grade language arts teachers got to attend a professional development to talk about writing across the curriculum. I hate to be away from the room but I believe professional development is so important. I always walk away from a professional development day with a handful of ideas that I can use in the class right away. Today was no different. I cannot wait to give these new ideas a try in our room.

In class the students continued to work on reading Charlotte's Web.

When the class is reading this book they are on the look out for signposts that will help them to a deeper understanding of the book. I already talked about our first signpost...Tough Questions. If you did not read about Tough Questions, just scroll down a few days to learn about that important signpost. Another signpost that the class is on the lookout for is Words of the Wiser. 

Words of the Wiser is one of my favorite signposts. Many of the characters that I love in books and movies are the ones delivering the wise lines. There is Yoda in Star Wars, Mookie in How to Steal a Dog, the wise turtle, Dumbledore, Charlotte, and the list goes on and on. 

When students find these Words of the Wiser moments, they need to stop and ask themselves the question: "What's the life lesson, and how might it affect the character?" The advice from this wise character can often lead you to the theme of the book. So be on the lookout for examples of these wise characters in the books, television shows, and movies that you are watching. If you notice an example of the wise words, stop the movie or pause the show or grab that bookmark and have a discussion about how those words might affect the character.

Hope you are having a great week.

Tough Questions

Today Ms. Cavallaro introduced our first signpost that we are going to talk about as we read the book Charlotte's Web. 

The book that we took these ideas of signposts from is called Notice and Note.

The authors of the book found six signposts that you can almost find in every book. When reader's find these signposts they can start to have a deeper understanding of the book they read. We have decided to just introduce two of the six signposts as we read Charlotte's Web.

The signpost that we introduced today is called Tough Questions. You can see the poster above that explains the signpost. To introduce the idea Ms. Cavallaro showed a clip from the movie The Lion King. In the clip Simba asks himself the tough questions that we are looking for in our book. 

Ms. Cavallaro then taught the class the question they will ask themselves when they notice the question. Now students can search for moments in Charlotte's Web where the characters ask themselves tough questions. We will continue to talk about tough questions and showing the class examples of characters in books and movies asking themselves Tough Questions. If you are a reader yourself or love movies, you might want to look for these signposts yourself. They do make reading more enjoyable. When you find one of these Tough Questions moment you can ask yourself the same question our students will be asking when they find an example:

What does this question make me wonder about?

Hope you are having a great week.

Charlotte's Web

Do you know that in 1953 Secret of the Andes won the Newbery Medal? The reason that I bring it up is we just started to read the book it beat out Charlotte's Web. I love Charlotte's Web. It is a classic. I constantly try to read the new books from the new authors. I think it is important to know modern books but I think it is just as important to know and read the classics. This book is a classic.

We are going to read this book as a class. A whole class novel. This is something new for me. I think there is value to reading a book together as a class. First it helps build a community in our room. We will all share the experience of reading this book together. I also now that in upper grades the whole class novel is often the main way of teaching. Our students need to be prepared for that experience so we might as well start. 

The main reason that Ms. Cavallaro and I wanted to read this book together is to introduce some ideas that we found in the book Notice and Note. 

The rest of the week we are going to introduce two signposts that students can find while they read a book. I will try and explain these signposts on the blog the rest of this week.

I hope you had a great start to your week.

Book Talks

We have started our second round of book talks this week. I love getting to hear about the new books that our students are reading.

These are some of the titles that we have heard so far and some that we are going to hear in the next few days. The main reason that I love book talks so much is it gives the students a chance to hear about books from fellow students. I try as hard as I can to find a book that is right for students sometimes I get lucky sometimes I don't. When students hear about a book that a friend read, they always seem to get lucky. 

When I have our reading conferences in the days following a book talk, I always notice the books that were shared are now the ones that are being read. Books fly off the shelf when students see that other students loved the book. We have about two more weeks of these book talks (we are only have two students share a day). I cannot wait to hear more of these talks and see the excitement over the books build.

Hope you are having a great week.

Absolutely Almost

I have said this before but my favorite part of the day is read aloud. It is great to sit at the rocking chair and share a book with the class. I love to hear the thinking that the class has to share about the book. This week and even last week our main character Albie has been going through a lot. 

He has lost a group of friends at school and he feels that his father does not have time for him and things just keep getting worse and worse. Today Albie tossed a model airplane out of his window, his whole birthday was ruined, and his life seemed broken like that airplane that crashed to the ground.

On Monday we asked the class to think back about the book and try to fill out an A to Z list. We have done this A to Z list earlier this year during our thinking about the drought. I love the A to Z list. Students can really show off what they know about a topic or a book when they fill out these A to Z lists.

I loved some of the work that the students shared on their A to Z list. For the letter R we had red gummy bears, for D we had donuts (of course), for Z we had zombie in the bathtub, and the amazing ideas went on and on. After the class had time to fill out their A to Z list, they picked one letter that they thought was the most important to the book. Then they wrote about why that idea was so important to the book.

Hope you are having a great week.

Writing In Our Own Words

Today before we started to work on the final drafts of our drought articles, we wanted to think about writing in our own words. I think when we write nonfiction two things that we always seem to need to work on is not making the writing sound like a list of facts and plagiarism. To try and tackle a bit of both problems we looked at some writing by the amazing Seymour Simon.

We marked pages from each of these amazing books. Then the students in their groups got a chance to read the text. This reading exposed them to how Simon writes without making his writing seem so list-ish. Then we talked to the groups about how we turned text from a source into our own words. The groups took off and turned the page they had read into their own writing. The groups did a great job. Tomorrow and the rest of the week they will get a chance to put this practice into action as they create their final draft.

Hope you had a great start to your week.

Pumpkin Drop

It is a fun night to write a post. A game seven. Nothing beats the excitement of a game seven. The only problem with this game seven is we will have a long time until baseball comes back. Still though the excitement of tonight is worth having to wait a long time.

Today both our classes got to protect our pumpkins for the Pumpkin Drop. If you are not familiar with the Pumpkin Drop, it is a lot of fun. Each homeroom in the school will protect a pumpkin. On Friday we will take that pumpkin out to the area just behind Donovan. There our amazing gym teacher will use a cherry picker to carry our contraptions high into the sky. From there the pumpkins are dropped (hence the name Pumpkin Drop). We keep track of whose pumpkin survives and whose pumpkin gets turned to pie. Winners are drawn. All and all it is an amazing day. If you want join for the excitement. We will start the dropping this Friday around 9:15. You can find our class (after checking into the office) and join the fun. I promise to post some pictures because the classes did an amazing job of protecting our pumpkin.

Today we also read aloud, worked on our drought articles, looked at some Smack Down claims, looked at an amazing timeline, and sorted some facts about the prehistoric tribes. Even with all that I know what the kids were most excited about so I had to fill you in on our pumpkin. Tomorrow I can explain our Smack Down Claims.

Hope you are having a great week.

A Fun Day

I thought today was fun.

We started by looking at a pair of texts. We first looked at an article about Malala Yousafzai and her Nobel Peace Prize. The second text we looked at was a commercial that has been a big part of this year's World Series.

The students had conversations about what the two texts had in common and what was different about the texts. Then they started to write down some ideas. All this week they will be working on a "one-pager" that will share their thinking about the two texts. The "one-pager" will allow the students to expand their thinking before they share it with me this Friday.

In read aloud we checked in on Albie in Absolutely Almost. 

Albie has been struggling to find friends at his new school. Today it looked like he might have found a new friend but we are all worried that this new friend might have ulterior motives. We still have a long way to go in this book but I am still enjoying finding out about Albie each day.

We also read another article about the drought. This article talked about a new plan from the mayor of Los Angeles. When the students were reading the articles, they worked on the P/C/Q reading strategy. This strategy has the students search for positives, challenges, and questions they have as they read. The students did a great job of finding these ideas in the text. Then we broke apart into five groups. The five groups worked on an A to Z brainstorming list. The idea of this A to Z sheet is to have students share what they know. The groups took all the articles that we had read about the drought. Then they tried to come up with important words that would fit with each letter. The groups did an amazing job and got a lot more letters than I had anticipated.

In writing we are going to take a week away from our Cynthia Rylant projects. During this week we are going to debate an issue. The issue we are going to debate this week is whether or not all children should get a trophy. The article we read today just laid out the debate. Tomorrow we will read two articles that take one side of the debate. Later this week students will share what they think. I love these debates weeks. It is so fun to see what the students think and how they can support their thinking.

Finally in Social Studies the groups divided into groups of five. Each group was assigned one of the prehistoric tribes we have been studying. The groups were told they would write a narrative from the perspective of an imaginary tribe member. The groups started to think about the setting they might need to share and facts that they could hide in the writing. 

In the end the day was busy but I was excited by the energy that filled the room.

Hope you had a great start to the week!

Scavenger Hunt

Today in class we decided to have a little scavenger hunt. We had done this last week when we were thinking about genres. Ms. Cavallaro had asked the class to look through a bunch of scholastic book orders and cut out books that fit into certain genres. It was a fun lesson.

We wanted to get that same energy in the room today so instead of cutting up book orders we cut apart Time For Kids. When the students were cutting apart the magazine, they were looking for text features. The text features that the students included titles, subtitles, charts, maps, fact boxes, and a bunch of others. We made a poster in the front of the room to talk about why these features were important to the reader. I forgot to take a picture of our poster but here are some others I found on the internet tonight.

We really want the students to understand how important these text features can be when they read but we also want the students to understand that they can use these features when they write. Soon we will be dividing into five groups and writing articles about the drought. We have been researching and researching the drought this week. We are hoping now that we are talking about text features students will start to think about how they could use a map or a picture with a caption to make that piece of writing even stronger. 

If you are reading a magazine at home and you see some of these text features, ask to see if the students can recognize the features. Talk about why the author may have included that feature or how that feature would help you to better understand the text. These conversations will just reinforce the importance of these features when students read nonfiction.

Hope you are having a great week!

A Big Thank You

Today I had a special delivery...a ton of books. The PTO allowed us to make a wish list of books we would love to add to our classroom library. Today that wish list became a reality. I love new books. I was so excited but it was also great to see students eyes popping out as they saw the stack of new reads. Here are just a few of the new titles that I cannot wait to share with the students:

I could post picture after picture of all the amazing books that we know get to share and read in my class but I think you get the idea.

Thank you PTO. Thank you to all the parents who buy the cookies and the magazines and the pies during our PTO sales. All that help hopefully just paid off in helping a student find a book that they love!

Hope you are having a great week.

Reading Like a Writer

Today we continued to work more on our Cynthia Rylant-ish writing project. We worked on reading like a writer. We have actually done this before but I wanted the students to work on naming some other techniques in Rylant's writing. Below are some of the sentences that we looked at the first time we worked on reading like a writer.

• The earth has rained and snowed and blossomed and wilted and yellowed and greened and vined itself all around him.

• Then the skies break open into blue and white and yellow and pink, and it like one great long breath of freedom and air.

• His hat is borrowed, his suit is borrowed, his hands are borrowed, even his head is borrowed. 

• He has been with the owls in the evening and the rabbits at dawn. He has watched a spider work for hours making a web like lace. He has seen the sun tremble and the moon lie still.

I still find it amazing what the students are able to notice and figure out when they look at great writing. They can easily figure out what Rylant is doing, why she is doing it, what they might name it, if they have done it themselves, and finally if they have seen other authors use the technique. You can find the two Reading Like a Writer worksheets in the writing folder to see all of this great work.

Students are finally getting the chance to pick the one idea from their writer's notebook they are going to turn into their next writing project. They are working on adding those final little pieces of Rylant-ish writing that are going to make their projects shine. This might be a great time to look through the writer's notebook at home. You could ask to see what Rylant techniques they have decided to try in their writing and how they are planning to create their next piece of writing.

I hope you had a great start to your week.

A Gallery Walk

Today we went on a gallery walk. The students walked around the room in pairs looking at pictures on the wall. At each picture the students would whisper and write down some of their thinking. We had 14 pictures in all but here are just a few.

It was amazing to hear the students thinking. Students quickly were able to figure out that the pictures came from the California drought. I heard students talking about what this might do to trees, animals and even tourism. When the gallery walk was over, the students went back to their seat and talked about what they saw. Many students talked about how the pictures really helped them to understand the drought more than the article we read yesterday.

To end the lesson we had the students think about the text structures that we had introduced yesterday. Many of the pictures that we looked at fit nicely into a text structure. For example if you look at the first two pictures you can see cause and effect. The students did a great job of finding a category for all the pictures.

Hope you are having a great week.