Writing Anchor Charts

My class this year is by far my most advanced academically and best behaved, but their writing is a weakness. I would say one of my weaknesses was teaching paragraphing. I kept saying that students needed to change paragraphs when introducting a new character, having a change in setting, when an important event occurred, and when using dialogue between different "speakers." I kept pointing out how the authors of stories in our reading anthology changed paragraphs,  and asked students what the purpose of the paragraph change was.

Our CRT (Curriculum Resource Teacher - we're so lucky to have her, especially with the economy) also let me borrow her copy of Scholastic's Paragraph Power: 50 Engaging Mini-Lessons, Activities, and Student Checklists for Teaching Paragraphing Skills. My students slowly began to learn the difference between descriptive, expository, and narrative writing. They even began to include main idea beginning sentences and closing sentences, but they weren't really carrying the skill over from day to day...

I have realized why students are so poor at writing paragraphs now, and I think a big part of it is that we often use picture books or short stories in reading textbooks. You will often see that some books have one or two lines of text and no indention...essentially no paragraphs! We teachers also let their imaginations run wild and we don't want to overcorrect them because they finally write beyond a simple sentence in second grade...but they tend to feel that quantity is better than quality! Who hasn't experienced a student asking, "How long does it have to be? Is this enough?!" 

I also bought Teaching with Intention by Debbie Miller. Between that, Pinterest, and the Anchor Chart Linky Party I came across, my solution has been to create anchor charts and post them in the room. It's just not enough to put them on the Promethean Board and refer back to them occasionally! Our writing is slowly but surely improving. I am still having to force my students to pre-write though....hopefully it will  be less of a task in the near future!

Here are some writing anchor charts we have created as a class over the last few weeks.

Ideas for Beginning / Ending of a Story

Sorry it's so dark and messy!

Focus Trait: Organization

Paragraphing

How to Revise

Oops...I'll have to add some black to that yellow ink!

The Kamishibai Man

Our Journeys reading story next week is called the Kamishibai Man. This book is excellent to use as a mentor text (a book used to enchance writing instruction) to teach children about writing a cliffhanger ending. It is a story about the Japanese art of storytelling, and it explains how storytellers used to travel from village to village telling stories before books, libraries, television, and computers became popular and easy to access. If you teach using the Journeys program, it is excellent to compare to What Do Illustrators Do?

Here is author Allen Say with his Kamishibai Man presentation at Duke University.

Video of the past and present history of Kamishibai - stop at 1:32 for younger readers and writers

Video of Author Rebecca Kool reading and explaining her Kamishibai book The Fly Catcher Boy

Check out this excellent website with a compilation of mentor texts!

see my class website for more Kamishibai Man and other Journeys materials

Balance Scale Equalities and Inequalities

I know it sounds absurd, but no matter what age your child or student is (if they are old enough to be in school and doing math), you should be using the words "equality" and "inequality" to describe numbers that are equal or not equal. One simple way of doing this is to use a pan balance. You can differentiate these activities to use with students in K-8!

My students are regrouping when adding or subtracting 2 and 3-digit numbers. In order to help them understand that regrouping is not taking away or adding any numbers, but simply putting them in another place and form, I do something like this:

If you counted, you'd see ten cubes on one side and a rod (made of ten connected cubes) on the other side. The arrow points to the middle because the scale is balanced! 

To show greater than and less than, all you have to do is have the children count out the number of cubes and / or rods (or flats if you're working with hundreds) and see which side is heavier (goes down).

You can also do this with "missing number" or pre-algebra problems. Using the above picture, I would write a missing number sentence: 5 + __ = 10. Students would add cubes to the higher side (meaning that side of the scale is lighter, and thus represents a smaller number) until the balance showed both pans being equal. They would be able to find that 5+5=10. No more frustration, and no need to show students that they can use the inverse (10-5=___) to find the answer!

You can try this without having a pan balance or base-ten blocks / place value blocks at home...because I have found the websites for you! 

This site is called the Illuminations Pan Balance and it was created by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. You can start out by showing students how different shapes (instead of numbers) can have different masses. Therefore, the square is greater than / heavier than the triangle. I have used this with kindergarteners and they understand it! I used to have a worksheet that was made specifically for this site, but can't find it at the moment.

Next, you can show them that they have to add to the side that weighs less to balance it.

Students can reset the balance or complete different "sets" where the shapes have different masses OR you can have them try it with numbers.

As you can see, we just demonstrated the commutative property of addition - the order of the addends doesn't change the sum. We created an equality!

Now we've used the associative property of addition! 

Download some practice sheets here! This document is a pdf that includes harder problems and blank scales for students to create their own equalities.

Check out my other Making Math Memorable Posts!

Baby It's Cold Outside!

...not really! It's been about 65 degrees or warmer the last few days, which is about 20 or more degrees than our average -not your typical NJ November!

On to the topic of this post: teaching about warm and cold bloodedness!

This is another one of those science topics that I always got frustrated with because all I could really do was have my students make predictions and then have them do research or tell them which animal groups were cold-blooded and which were warm-blooded. There really wasn't anything past the knowledge part of Bloom's Taxonomy, and certainly no inquiry. I wanted my students to at least be able to explain how scientists prove how they know which animals have body temperatures that remain constant or change temperature according to their environment.

First I read The Magic School Bus Gets Cold Feet  to my students. They began to form a definition of what the two terms meant, which animals were cold-blooded, and which were warm-blooded. We used the Scholastic lesson plan and lab sheet that went along with the book. Click here to download it.

Then I came across The Infared Zoo at Cool Cosmos, a website created by the California Institute of Technology. It shows students infared images of different animals taken at a teaching zoo. These pictures show a lizard - and how its body temperature has changed over time. Students use the color key to determine an estimate of the body temperature of the animal and discuss why they think each part would be warmer or colder, or what could cause an animal's temperature to drop or rise rather than staying constant.

Click the logo to visit the site!

Check out lesson plans that go with the site!

Check out my animal classification post here.

Animal Classification

Most of the time, when we teach children how to classify animals, we talk about their body coverings. But there's so much more to it than that! I found this great site that teaches students how to tell the difference between animal classes (resist the urge to say "Groups") and also gives them a fun computer game to play. It's also interactive board-friendly so I put it up on my Promethean Board. Please note that the site only covers animals that are vertebrates. Enjoy! 

Click here or on the picture to play the Animal Classification Game!

Check out other animal websites that I have compiled.

Check out my post on classifying animals as vertebrates and invertebrates!