PB 10 for 10 Kindergarten Favorites

     Next year I am taking on a new adventure....Kindergarten! I will be the LIFT teacher in my district. This stands for Literacy Initiative Focused Teaching. I will be teaching literacy to Kindergartners in the morning and afternoon that will be in addition to their regular K class. I couldn't be more excited!!

I feel like I've been in Kindergarten boot camp this summer. I've been reading everything I can to prepare for my new journey. I hit the PD book jackpot when Mandy Robek graciously lent me her fantastic professional reads. But along with PD reads I read lots of new to me picture books to find some great titles to share with my readers. I had the perfect reading partners this summer, my own almost Kindergartner (1 more week!) and my 3 year old.

I want my beginning of the year read alouds to engage students. I want them to laugh, giggle, shriek, and TALK! I want books that are simple in format, but also lend themselves to big ideas and good discussion. I want to find books with a great beat, music for the ear. I want to find books that lend themselves to drama and storytelling re-enactments. I want books that make kids come home and talk about them. Finally, the best books are ones that my K readers will ask for again and again and again. They will have characters that will remembered and celebrated in our classroom.

Thank you for organizing the event Cathy and Mandy! I love reading about everyone's posts about great books. 

1. The Watermelon Seed by Greg Pizzoli

I LOVE this book. It will remind you of I Want My Hat Back, Simple in format, but leads to great conversation and laughter. It is an engaging story about an alligator who worries after he eats too many watermelon seeds. He finally solves his problem by burping up the seeds. What Kindergartener wouldn't love this plot solution? This book is great for teaching fiction story structure, inferring feelings of the main character, and retelling through drama. I am hoping my K readers want to re-enact this story with each other. It also has great sound words to notice if you are reading for author's craft. It's one I think you could read again and again.

2.  The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires is a great story for any grade level. It shows themes of perseverance, grit, hard work, and creativity. It is the perfect beginning of the year read aloud to guide discussions about the struggle that occurs when trying something new.

3. Almost by Richard Torrey is one I will share with my Kindergarteners to build confidence about the many things we can almost do. We will talk about how if we something is hard, we may just not feel strong at it YET. I see us turning some of our almost statements into I Can statements.

4. Alligator Baby by Robert Munsch is my 3 year old's favorite book. It will make kids laugh. I read it to her preschool class last week and kids loved interacting with the story. We shrieked together each time a new animal baby was brought home. This is a good story for making predictions and inferring character's feelings.i 

 

5. Garbage Trucks by Terri DeGezelle is a great nonfiction book for our classroom library. It is simple in format and one that we can read together to collect facts about the monster trucks. 

6. A great fiction book to pair with Garbage Trucks is I Stink! by Kate & Jim McMullan. I love this voice in this story. It is told from the point of view of a garbage truck who eats trash while we are all asleep.

7. National Geographic's Book of Animal Poetry is full of amazing poems and extraordinary photographs. I love using these poems to explore language and vocabulary while also learning facts about animals.

8. Another great non fiction find is Little Kids First Big Book of Animals by Catherine D. Hughes. The photographs are excellent and the animals are separated by habitat. We can begin learning how to read the pictures by observing these animals in their habitats. It will also help us learn about features of non fiction.

9. I LOVE Elephant and Piggie books by Mo Willems! I bought a 20 book set for our library. I think they will be great shared reads. I love the themes of jealousy, friendship, sharing to name a few. I think they will be a great books to practice beginning reading skills. We can also use these books as mentors for our own writing. We will study Mo Willems' to see how he uses author's craft and how his illustrations help tell the story.

10. Bear's Loose Tooth by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman is one in a series of picture books about Bear and his friends. I plan to read all of these to my K students. The books use rhyme and tell stories of friendship and teamwork. They focus on topics kids can connect with and share thinking about. I'm hoping these books help us develop our thinking voices about stories, and build discussion skills as a reading community.

11. I had to edit this post and add just one more I had forgotten I wanted to add....

I LOVE Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses! This is a perfect beginning of the year read for any age. The message is all about looking at things in a whole new way with a positive attitude. When Pete puts on his sunglasses his mood begins to change as he looks at situations. I hope our communit can work together to focus on the good in a day!

Adventures in Kid Blogging

   

     I love kidblog.org. I love blogging, and even more than that, I love watching small bloggers get excited about writing for a real audience. Kidblog is a free site where teachers can create class blogs. Every student can have their own blog, their own special place to write, to publish, and to share. Kidblog gives kids a voice, and a place of their own to WRITE. 

     We began blogging slowly. On my welcome to school letter before school began, I gave out the blog address and passwords and invited students to leave three comments about themselves.

    When school began, I taught students what a blog is and what bloggers do to participate effectively in an online community. I sent parents home letters explaining what blogging is with a list of suggestions for good blog posts. (Narratives, book reviews, information about a topic they are learning, poems..etc.)I shared about my life as a reader, a writer and how blogging fits into my world in both of these areas.

      I'm reviewing constantly that bloggers write for the public, for EVERYONE in our class to read. With this thought in mind, writers have to be aware of the content they are sharing. We've reviewed what makes a good comment several times this year already. I love that each comment and each post is emailed to me through this site. We've had to discuss how a blog isn't the place to publish a "stair" comment on improvements a writer can make. A blog is a public place to have good conversations about writing, books, and our lives. This is a place to celebrate authors and their venture into digital writing. 

     Right now blogging is a choice. It's something kids can choose to do at home and sometimes in the classroom. Everyone has had the opportunity to publish one piece, and I'm sure we'll do more together. I do however, like that it remains a choice, because I think that's what keeps it motivating. And that's the big goal... motivation to write, to read, to connect as a community.  

     I share my enthusiasm for blogging. I love reading others' thoughts on blogs. I get most of my book recommendations through blogs. Many bloggers inspire me as a teacher, a mom, and as a writer myself.   

Here are the ways I've used Kidblog this year.

• I post book reviews for kids to see models of quality reviews and to create a buzz in our classroom about great books they can try. I try to end with a good question so students can respond by leaving comments, sharing about their own lives as readers.

• I post small moment stories and pictures of myself as mentor texts for kids. I'm trying to show kids how writers share their lives, their stories.

• Kids have started posting small moment narratives to our blog.

• Kids post book reviews of books they want others to read.

• One student posted about her Egyptian culture and shared what language she can speak. This post inspired another student to post about her African culture and how to say hello in her family's native language.

• During our class read aloud, The Tiger Rising I have been ending with a thick question that I post to the blog. Students are able to go home and answer the question, to start a discussion and deepen understanding of this read aloud.

• Everyone wrote a descriptive paragraph about a haunted house for Halloween. We brought in the laptops and all students got to publish their writing on Kidblog. My email has been busy every night since with comments. Students are reading the pieces and leaving comments that celebrate the authors. 

     My kid bloggers are getting their feet wet with technology and learning how to build an online community. We still have some work to do. Wednesday when we return, we need to talk about how you don't need  three strings of exclamation points in a comment!!!!!!!!!!! :)

     Have you used blogging in your classroom? Let me know if you have any tips for our class.  

Top 10 School Year Reflections...What Worked

     I realize that I haven't blogged in awhile. Life gets crazy is all I can say:) I appreciate my colleagues who blog regularly because they stretch my thinking and give me new ideas which I appreciate so much! The next school year brings lots of changes. I'm moving to a new school district in an effort to bring more home/school balance into my life. Luckily I am staying in third grade. My drive will be cut down by 30 minutes each way. I want to be a great teacher but I'm hoping a closer distance will help me also be a better mom. This was a hard decision, as I had helped open my school just three years ago, but I'm really excited for a new adventure!

   Now that the year is over I was thinking about what worked. I have a very long list as usual about what didn't work but I'll choose to focus on what I think did go ok!

1. This year I had a better overview, or plan in place for reading units. I liked the flow, it just seemed to work. In reading I taught in genre units for the second year in a row and really liked it. As we tackled each new genre together, the main focus was always focused on how we could use the text structure to help us determine what is important in this book. We also thought about how we could think about what was happening, putting the details together to understand, to build meaning. Within each genre we thought about the big picture. We asked ourselves, why do the details matter? So what?

Here was our sequence

1. We are readers! Building a community of readers that read, talk, write, reflect and THINK!
2. Fiction texts - plot, characters, theme, series books, compare and contrast characters and plots
3. Nonfiction texts - looking at each text structure to save and think, learning how to make important thinking "sticky" by taking notes.
4. Biographies (My favorite unit - so many great PB texts! Great way to review character traits and theme while continuing on nonfiction)
5. Traditional Literature (myths, fables, folktales, tall tales)
6. Historical fiction - I loved having this at the end to mesh fiction and non fiction reading strategies

2. In writing following the common core and using Lucy Calkins as a resource kids we focused on three genres for a long amount of time. Staying within narrative, informational, and persuasive units for extended amounts of time seemed to work well. Within each unit for the first time I pushed kids to write with lots of volume, creating many new pieces. In the past I used to focus on one good piece for a long time. By having students write many smaller pieces within each genre, I think this helped developed their final piece. I also think it pushed them as writers to write more.

3. We wrote informational books about a topic kids knew about before writing about a research topic they didn't know anything about. I had never done this and I loved the project. Kids are all experts on something and this was one of my favorite projects. My struggling writers were motivated to share what they knew and kids had fun trying out different text structures within their books.

4. Morning meeting. I love it - can't start a day without it. Stopping each morning to come together and say hello to everyone is a great way to start the day. Everyone feels valued and welcomed. This year I began having a short time after the greeting for students to envision their day and to goal set. I asked them to close their eyes each morning and to picture themselves having the best day possible. I asked each of them every morning to think about how they might feel at the end of the day if they had given their very best and treated all others around them with kindness.  I asked them to picture what it would look like to work hard to reach learning goals even when it was hard. This small routine in my opinion, gave a great shared vision and goal to each new day.

5. Beginning the year with picture books that focus on a theme of endurance and perseverance (idea stolen from Patrick Allen). I love starting out with great picture books that get kids thinking and talking while also motivating them with these important themes.

6. YET. After last summers Cyper PD on Peter Johnston's book, I emphasized the word yet. We learned how to have growth mindsets believing that things we struggle with are things that we are not good at YET. I tried to instill a belief that hard work and a goal oriented mindset would help kids over come struggles. I tried to break down as many fixed mindsets, or the "I'm just not good at... as possible".

7. My team. I love them. We worked so well together. We all did things a little differently but we shared some great ideas and collaborating with them made me a better teacher. Last year our principal made us put together a sequence for teaching reading and writing using the common core. We complained at the time, but having everyone teach the same standards at the same time allowed for great collaboration. We were able to laugh together and we may have had a 5 hour happy hour the Friday after the OAA:)

8. Pushing kids to annotate. I love using readers' notebooks to have kids record important thinking and pushing kids to jot thinking on articles, as they read through them a second time. I didn't push everyone to jot all the time as I have in the past. Some kids need to be left alone to read! They were required to write sometimes but I loosened up my expectations because I wanted the goal to be the reading and for some kids stopping to write too much took the joy out I felt.

9. Read Alouds. We shared lots of picture books and articles together. As for longer books we read, Lulu and the Brontosaurus, The One and Only Ivan, and Little House in the Big Woods together. It was to my amazement that the kids LOVED Little House in the Big Woods. (I knew they'd love the other two!) I have some boys continuing the read the series this summer. BOYS! They loved the history in the story and we had some great conversations that tied into our social studies curriculum.

10. Techie Tools

Blogging. I love using kidblog with my third graders. I love that they write for real audiences.

Planbook.com let me access my lesson plans from any computer. I loved being able to add in common core standards. It saved SO. MUCH. TIME. You can bump and extend lessons you've already typed out. No more erasing and rewriting.

Evernote...I love this app. It let me record student observations and conference notes in an organized way. I took pictures of student work to save in each child's digital notebook.

This was long, I guess I needed to get writing again. Like I said there are MANY things that didn't work and have room for improvement.... (Notice math was nowhere in the what worked list! Tried a new program this year and it was definitely a work in progress. Going to try another new program next year!)

I'm excited for lots of summer reading and putting a new classroom together, as well as lots of time with my two girls at the pool! They were playing nicely and did not fight the whole time I was writing this post and that in itself is a miracle:) Really...it never happens!

10 for 10 Nonfiction Picture Books

The last two years I have been trying to find new non fiction titles to share with my third grade class. Nic Bishop is my favorite non fiction author. All of his books lend themselves to deep comprehension work. The fascinating facts mixed with important information make all my students love them. His photography is amazing!

This is a great book about homes around the world. We had great discussion about cultural differences using this book. 

I love biographies. These biographies got my class discussing theories about the "characters" and inspired us as well!

The two titles below are great pairs for non fiction information.

These two titles are also great pairs for history on life out on the west.

Launching a Biography Study

Today I launched our biography study with a new biography find. I read Noah Webster & His Words. Next year I  will introduce spelling and word study with this book. It is the tale Noah Webster, the man who wrote the first American speller, many of the first American schoolbooks, and most importantly wrote our first American dictionary. We learned that Noah had a big motivation behind writing these books. He wanted to unite American with a shared language, and with shared spellings. Realizing the dictionary was written and created to unite a country of citizens was a powerful lesson for third graders!

Some talking points we discussed...

Thinking within the text
Chunk up main ideas and key details about Noah's childhood.
What was Noah's biggest accomplishment? 
Discuss the key details of his biggest accomplishment using who? what? where? when? why? how? to guide your thinking
Find a cause and effect relationship between two events in Noah's life. 

Thinking beyond the text
Develop a theory about Noah. What kind of person was he?
What motivated Noah?
Infer how Noah's job of writing the dictionary might be different in this time period, or setting than the work of an author today?
What was a big idea or lesson learned? 

Thinking about the text
Why did the author use dictionary definitions and parts of speech within this text?
Why did the author use a giant head to illustrate Noah Webster?

I'm excited to begin our journey with biographies. I'm always inspired when reading about influential people, and I'm hoping my students will be able to gain big ideas from the texts we share. 

Do you have a biography you love to read to students? 

Non fiction Anchor Charts

Here are some anchor charts we've created to guide our journey into non fiction.  

Should say steps!

Informational Writing and Choice

     A shift I've seen in writer's workshop this year is the volume of writing from students. Using Lucy Calkins' third grade writing resource for common core as a tool, I began the year having students set volume goals for their writing. We wrote "fast and furious" trying to create a new narrative everyday during our personal narrative unit. We talked about having stamina, the concentration to say more, and to have the endurance to stay focused. We learned together that every writing piece doesn't have to be great, but writers have to get in the habit of letting their words and ideas out, they had to practice writing everyday to get better.

     This brings us to our non fiction writing unit. Students were ready to write once again with a purpose in mind. To teach, to inform. Fully equipped, (well some are anyway:) with some background on writing a quality paragraph, jotting a plan for main ideas and details using boxes and bullets, writers got to choose a non fiction topic to write about that they were interested in and felt that they were already experts on. I told them about the project three weeks before they got to choose their topic. I wanted to create a "buzz" for finding the perfect topic. I knew the writing would only be good if students had a topic they felt passionate and excited about. As Lucy says, "writers can only engage readers if they themselves are engaged in the topic."
 
     Fast forward, the kids seem to be loving this project. They seem to be loving the freedom to choose the structure of how each page will go. They were excited to create a table of contents of their own based on the main idea of each subtopic. As we learn about text structures in non fiction we discuss how pages in our informational books might mirror those of authors and books we enjoy. We looked at several good introductions. We learned that an introduction is like a movie preview, getting a reader excited to read the entire book. Students wrote their own introductions. They are creating their own headings and crafting their own designs for how they will present the information on each subtopic. We are trying out descriptive paragraphs, sequence charts, labeled diagrams, and finding words that should go in a glossary.

     I love seeing kids take risks in their writing by trying out sequence charts or lists. They are dabbling in using companion sentences to tell readers what the important, or new words in their pieces mean. The power of our workshop seems to lie in the sharing. As we look at chapters from writers' drafts, we are noticing what they do well as a writer and giving each other next steps to take. My hope is that through the sharing conversations they are lifting strategies they will try out in their own writing.

    My next steps as a teacher are to work on organizing the conferencing. I feel like an overstretched octopus during writing, a crazy ping pong ball, stepping to help, one child, the next, the next. My next goal is to model for students how to rely on buddy coaches to help to get feedback on their writing:) Or maybe some group conferencing on kids who are working towards the same goal?

    I am excited to see how students will choose to teach our class about baseball, having an older brother, Christmas traditions in their home, taking care of triplets, martial arts, swim team, and fishing to name a few topics. I love to hear the buzz in the room as writers try out new text structures, decide where to put a diagram, or decide on the best way to organize their descriptive paragraphs. The enthusiasm, I believe, lies in the choice, the freedom to make their writing their own.

Here is the rubric I created for this project using the common core standards. It's a work in progress, but a starting point for goals we are working towards:)