Getting my Game On ~ The Meek Moose Rears Her Tired Head

As per usual,  I get really crappy at maintaining the blog during the school year. But it doesn't mean that I've been hiding under my covers- though some days I wish I were able to... blah.

So how did everyone's Thanksgiving break go? I ended up with an extra day, as we received about five inches of snow Wednesday morning.

Ain't it grand?  Don't get me wrong, I liked the extra day off.  It's just that this Alaskan girl can't get excited about snow.  Like- I've done that, ya know?  Kids beyond excited though.  So, yay, Winter!

Today, being the thirtieth of November, I am aware that I completely missed doing the November currently. And I will not dare to link up today, I will wait and do the December one when it comes out (in theory- you never know with me)  But I did go ahead and fill out November's just so you could see what I'd been up to in the last month:

click to go to Farley's post last month

Most of these don't need a lot of further explanation.  I will say that as far as the song goes, my favorite part is when Nicki Minaj is rapping B to the A to the N to the G to the "heyyyyyyy".  I can do that part super duper dorky, yo!

I plan to do another post about Code.org this month in honor of The Hour of Code, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

Career direction.  Always a hot topic.  Stay in the classroom, become a specialist, change grade levels- you know, all the normal thoughts you start to have after parent teacher conferences when you have that mini-breakdown about the direction your life is headed.  Today I hope to pursue a career as a full time gamer playing Sims 4 24/7.  Because there's a life I can completely control....

I got a nasty cold just before my birthday.  Nasty enough, in fact, to put me in bed on my birthday, and obnoxiously near death for my entire birthday week.  I missed all of the planned celebrations.  All of which being two.  But for me, that is quite a full social calendar.  I recovered enough the following week to go out to eat with two of my best local girls and we had Mexican food and I wore the birthday sombrero.  I would not allow the staff to come out and clap and sing for me.  That would have been too much.  But I hammed it up for the camera enough to make a random man stop and take my picture.  What he plans to do with that photo- I don't want to know.

Apparently, this thing I am doing is called Duck lips.  I THOUGHT I was just puckering up for the camera.  Since my lips are so lovely. Ha.  But whatevs.  I was not intending duck lips.  I was intending to show off my true dorkiness in the middle picture though- as I'm sure that is much more like my normal face than the other two.  Either way, all three make fantastic profile pictures for my newest experiment and #epicfail of on-line dating.

I came to the obvious conclusion that one cannot marry an outrageously rich organic strawberry farmer, regardless of how ridiculously adorable one is, by sitting around doing nothing.  So I foolishly signed up for this virtual meat market gig.

Kittens...as socially awkward as I am...as out of practice as I am...as destined to be single for all eternity as I am.... on-line dating does little more than confirm for me the death of the English language in our culture.  And how irresitible I am to the AARP crowd.  Seriously- old men LOVE me.  I get winked at eighty times a day by 65+ guys wearing cowboy hats.  And they do not know the difference between womEN and womAN.  And I'm sorry if that sounds snobby, but this English major can't handle it.  #butI'mnotsorry  I will say that I recently received an ice breaker message from someone my age, however it began with "Sup" (no, really, it started with Sup) and ended with "Bitches stay back i have no room for drama" (and the i wasn't capitalized. And this line was preceeded by an announcement that he was passionate for all things science, including vaping and hikking.)  So, if you don't mind, I will be hiding under my bed from my phone for the next three decades...

To distract myself from this travesty, I shall throw myself into my work.

Did you know there was a TpT cyber sale tomorrow and Tuesday?  Of course you did.  Here's the ad that's been blasted across your eyeballs as of late:

click to go to my store

I have put the entire store on to the maximum discount for ya'll, and even added in something new- which my children have been LOVING.

Click to go to the product

The product description sums it up for you:

Cute owls and Superheroes?!?! Get outta town!

I have a lot of students this year struggling with sight words. The words on the Dolch lists comprise 80% of everything we read – if I can help my students master these words, then I can concentrate on multi-syllabic decoding, comprehension and other reading strategies. And so can you!

To play this sight word game, students draw a card from a face down pile and read the word aloud to the group. If correct, they keep the card If incorrect, the card goes back into the pile. Bonus cards drawn either entitle the player to draw more cards or lose cards. Bonus cards are not returned to the pile after being drawn. Player with the most cards at the end of the game is the winner.

I have all five sets of Dolch words in separate games, if you want to just zero in on one needy group of students.  I have two videos here for you to see my kids playing the Pre-Primer words game with me.  I only have a couple of kids with trouble on the pre-primer list, but my class is also 80% ESOL this year- so I added in a variation to the basic game where we practiced making up sentences to go along with the words.  You'll see that in the second video.  I've found this variation of the game to be excellent practice for oral language skills with my kids.

When the game is over, you can also have your kids write down the words that they "won" and create sentences using them if you'd like to add some extra accountability to the game.

And I reallllly need to work on my positive affirmations, as I say the same thing over and over in the videos.  Maybe I'm just nervous when I film.  Or just a huge dork. As always, there is at least one kid completely off task in the background.  Just keeping it real, yo!

Enjoy the sale, kittens!  

Reading Comprehension salad

Sometimes, I find myself hating buddy reading.  GASP!  But it's because a lot of the time, well, they aren't reading.  Or if they are reading, they aren't you know, really reading.  Or one of them is reading and the other isn't paying attention.  Or they aren't really talking about the book.  Or a million other things.  And when I thought about it, I think it has a lot to do with that they really aren't sure what to say.  Even when we do give them prompts and sentence stems.  They just don't get it.

Now, I do truly love and adore the book Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor.  She has a great activity called reading salad in her book.  In the activity, you show kids how real reading is thinking, and that as we put in our lettuce pieces for thinking and our red tomatoes for the text we read, we end up with salad that is big on greens.  Meaning- we think more than we read.  I love making reading salad with the kids.  But then I got to thinking that it really shouldn't be a one time deal.  So I started doing it for every book I read aloud.  And then I was thinking about putting the other comprehension strategies into the bowl in the form of other vegetable mnemonics.  And why not train the kids to make salad for themselves?  Giving them this task as they buddy read will help me to get a quick visual on who is on task and who isn't.  Also, giving them their own salad pieces to take home in my universal homework folder gives them a way to make reading more concrete at home with their parents.

 

So here are some kids using the pieces in a wicker basket I had on their tables.  But the basket is not necessary.  You can easily just make a pile of pieces in front of you as you read.  The green is for thinking, "lettuce think" about what we're reading.  Anytime they have any thought or use any comprehension strategy as they read, they put a piece of lettuce down.  They only put down one tomato if they had a thought on a particular page of text.

 

 

It also works well when you have to make a triad in buddy reading. It gives the third person an active role.  No one is passively listening, they all add pieces in to the salad.

 

The white pieces are onions.  I still have to draw circles into them.  I decided on onions being for connections, after doing a lesson out of Tanny's book called "Concentric Circles of Connection".  The kids agreed that a sliced open onion looked like our chart.  At the moment, we are concentrating on text to self connections. Any time we have one, we discuss it and add it to the salad along with a green piece of lettuce, since it's a type of thinking.  We also have talked about making our connections return to the text.  I showed them this picture I saw on pinterest:

So when we are making a connection to the book, I start my finger at the top of the book, and as I say or they say their connection I make a big loop outward and then bring it back around.  So they've started making that gesture too when they make a connection.

I made orange carrots for Questioning.  And honestly, it was just for the "k" sound.  Questioning Carrots.  I liked the sound of it.  Any time we think of a question about the story, or about a character, we put in a carrot and a piece of lettuce to go along with the text tomato.  I've had to talk to them a lot about words that begin questions- because they weren't sure.  They were actually more likely to make a prediction- "Maybe...such and such will happen" rather than a question-- so it's a continued work.

 

Making the pieces is not exactly easy.  I will come up with a better way for next year- but for now I've been cutting 280 pieces of each veg out of construction paper.  I have had to create an assembly line of forced labor.  Here we're making the cucumbers for visualization.  We also had to draw on the outer ring of green and seeds.  I picked the cucumber for this strategy because of how you put cucumber slices on your eyes at a spa.  They kids get it, and when we visualize we put the pieces up to our eyes when we talk about it.  When teaching this though, it takes a lot of modeling.  I've had to keep the book nearly shut when I read so they can't see the picture and guide them through a visualization before I show a picture.  They aren't doing this independently yet- but we will get there.

Next up for the assembly line is cutting out yellow bell pepper rings.  I've decided to go with Peppers of Prediction/Prior Knowledge for the inference piece.  We'll be hitting that by the end of the week.  What I have left to get to in the next weeks are Main Idea (summarizing), Synthesizing, and Monitoring for Meaning.  I know I want to do salad dressing, originally I thought for synthesizing, but now I'm thinking it would be better for main idea (summarizing).  I want to do croutons.  And I was thinking this morning of doing mushrooms for Monitor for Meaning, but maybe I should do mushroom for Main idea, and salad dressing for synthesizing, and croutons for Monitoring...decisions, decisions....

I will try to take a video of a read aloud where we use the pieces so you can see it in action.  Ideally, I'd like to do a parent tutorial video and have my ESOL co-teacher Mr. Morales do it in Spanish so I can post it on my school web page.

What do you think? Something worth giving a go?

Reading Ideas Linky

The next installment of the Ten Pin Linky from Ashley at Just Reed:

 

 

 

Confession: I like finding a good linky because it helps me come up with blog posts during times when I can't think of anything else to post.  I'm really sort of hoping I'm not the only one that feels that way...

 

 

 

1.  I'm wanting to do a forest theme this coming year, and this idea for a reading reward for building stamina would be cool as a "camping out" reward.

 

 

2.  I've tried many many ways to get kids to put books back where they found them.  At this point, I am most successful with numbered books in numbered baskets.  Kids are more likely to match up a number than with words- is what I've discovered.  But I like this pin for it's simplicity.  And I think it's very doable and worth a try.

 

 

3. I adore these ornaments.  I had this idea to use an artificial Christmas tree in the room this year for kids to hang these connection ornaments on as well as other reading recommendations.

 

 

4. Julie at MakeTakeTeach is an awesome resource for sight word materials.  This being one of the many goodies she suggests.  This past year in second grade, I ended the year with five little poppets below grade level.  Where was their struggle?  Right here with sight words.  You can't force a parent to help practice at home, but you can make it easier for them by creating these bags and sending them home with the kids.  And having them available to hand to the random volunteer that strolls in wanting to help.

 

 

5. Saw this one the other day and fell in love instantly!  What an excellent tool for practicing tone change with punctuation.

 

 

6. Here's an excellent video showing off some whole brain teaching with language arts skills.    I love all these whole brain teaching videos.  Super inspiring.

 

 

7.  There is a section of blank wall I have behind my classroom door that is probably a good three or four feet wide.  I never really put anything there, because it was hidden behind the door.  But looking a this pin, I was considering making one of these story telling roads out of felt pieces and hanging it there when not in use.  Practical when needed, and room décor when not.

 

 

8.  Loved teaching non-fiction text features this past year.  This spinner would make for a great whole group game or even a small group center.

 

 

9. Marsha over at Differentiated Kindergarten is always full of excellent ideas.  Here's one from a recent post where she used this road for nonsense word fluency.  Completely doable with anything else as well though, from sight words to whole sentences.

 

 

10.  When I had my stuffed animal fair measurement day this past year- at one point for twenty minutes of relative quiet I told the kids to read a book to their stuffed animal.  I had not expected such quick compliance!  And maybe the magic would wear off if done everyday- but what a cute idea for special occasions!  Could even make it a reward and offer different buddies each month.

 



Gads, kittens- I am not designed for 90 degree humid weather.  The rest of my day will be spent hiding indoors trying to draw clouds.