Rounding Rollercoaster Freebie!

Hey Y'all! I hope everyone had a fantabulous Thanksgiving. Our day was wonderful, we hosted our first ever Thanksgiving at our house for my family, which was more like a lunch around noon. Then, we headed to Brandon's family's house for another meal around 5 for dinner. I definitely took in a lot of family and a lot of food today; you count on me hitting the gym tomorrow. We got home around 10:00, I put the little one to bed, took a shower, sat down at the computer, and realized that I have a whole new reason to be thankful:

I have 991 TPT followers!

I know to some of you phenomenal sellers out there, that is peanuts, but I am stoked! So, I decided a big THANK YOU freebie was the way to go. As soon as I get 9 more followers (come on, peeps!) I will post a brand new freebie. I have received a lot of feedback and questions about my Rounding Rollercoaster Interactive Math Notebook activity I posted on my blog a while ago, but I have been dragging my feet with adding it to my store. I keep trying to find a math bundle to include it in, but I am also in the midst of creating like 5 new products.

Sidebar: Are any other TPT sellers as fickle as I am? I get a new idea and it's like, I HAVE to start creating that now! I drop what I was working on to get started and before I know it, I have a bazillion unfinished products.

Anyway, thank you so much for following me. It is definitely an honor. Hopefully, you will be hearing from me soon with an email about a brand new freebie.

Sweet Dreams, Bloggyland!

My TPT Store: Adrienne Wiggins

UPDATE: You can find the FREE download here!

Anchor Charts Away!

Ahoy! I am finally back on the scene to share some anchor charts I have made so far this year. It's actually kind of embarrassing how long I have been neglecting blogging. This start to the school year has been one of the most stressful for me and my team. However, the dust is finally beginning to settle, we have got team planning underway (more to come on that later), and I am back!

Pinterest has definitely spoiled anchor charts for me. I am not yet one of those cutesy teacher that spends hours designing and decorating beautiful anchor charts, but I do feel completely unsatisfied with plain anchors. Blah! Below are some of the charts that my class and I have made so far this year, minus much of the artistry you can find on Pinterest. 

I am a huge believer that anchor charts are useless unless they are created during instruction, with the learners, which is one reason why I don't spend too much time making charts pretty beforehand. During student teaching, my mentor teacher told me that charts created and/or placed on the wall without being used during instruction are just wallpaper. The students won't pay attention to them or devote enough time to them to make meaning. 

Ok, now on to the charts!

I keep my current anchor charts on the front board and on my easel. As I need room, I retire my charts to the back bulletin board which is separated by subject. I staple new charts on top of the old so students can flip through to get to old charts when they need to.

Asking & Answering Questions

 

I use "The Stranger" by Chris VanAlsburg every year for teaching students how to question and they love this book! This anchor is actually unfinished, we go through and add answers to our questions as we read.

Author's Purpose

I layer my anchor charts on top of each other on my back wall so students can refer to them, this one was under the most recent chart. This anchor chart was completed over 3 days. The first day we talked about how authors think (the sentence in blue) and I introduced the 3 reasons author's write. Many of them remembered this from second grade, so I just wrote down the categories as we discussed. On day two, we defined each category, I wrote them on the chart, and we did a group activity. One day three, we sorted the examples I had pulled from magazines and the students glued them on the chart.

Fiction Story Elements

We learned about each of these one at a time and read a book to zoom in on the characteristic. I photocopied and posted the covers of the books for students to anchor their learning to and refer back to.

Analyzing Character

For this anchor, we read "A Bad Case of the Stripes" by David Shannon. The students have a list of character traits in their reading interactive notebook and we used that to stop throughout the story and analayze Camilla's character. I actually used this book as a two-fer with visualization. I didn't show them the pictures as I read and I had them create their own pictures along the way. They couldn't wait to compare their illustrations to the book. The awesome daily five posters to the right are from the awesome A Year of Many Firsts.

Prefixes

My county specifically lists the 7 prefixes that third graders as responsible for knowing. I per taught each prefix and glued the definition on the anchor chart throughout the week as we learned. Once we covered all of the prefixes, I assigned each student a prefix, gave them an apple, and told them they had to think of a word to add to the chart. The super cute prefix signs are from Rachel Parlett and they come in so many cute themes!

The rest of my charts don't need as much explanation, enjoy!

Making Change

Number Sense

Data and Graphing

Animal Adaptations

Famous Americans

School Expectations

Class Expectations

Data Wall

Behavioropoly

Thanks for stopping by!

Introducing Yourself to Your Students

Do you introduce yourself to your students before meeting them? Every year, I send a letter telling the students (and parents) about myself and reminding them about our Meet the Teacher Day. I love sending a letter and every year I get fantastic results. I have found that it makes students feel less anxious about meeting me because they already know what I look like and some facts about me. I have also found that parents tend to use what I wrote as an icebreaker to start a conversation with me.

Below is the letter I will be sending this year to my students. We don't start until September 2nd, but I like to get this out of the way so that once my school opens, I can spend my time setting up my room.

*I am currently doing 5 things at once, so please let me know if there is a typo in the letter. Thanks!

 I also made my letter into a FREE editable template for grades K-6. You can download it at my TPT Store.

I would love to hear how you acquaint yourself with your students at the beginning of the year.

UPDATE: Due to some requests, I recently updated my homework post with an editable template as well! Click here to view the post.

Five for Friday - August 8th

This week was awesome! Here's why:

We returned from our vacation to Myrtle Beach. It was our first time taking our little one (15 mo.) on vacation and we were worn out. Next time, we are taking the grandparents. Thank God for the peaceful car trip both ways! It was almost 7 hours and SG slept at least 5 hours both ways! My Toddler Travel Basket helped keep her calm during the time she was awake.

I finished my Homework Packet Cover for the year. Whew! I have spent so much time thinking about homework this summer. I'm glad I finally got it out of the way. Click here to read more about how it works in my classroom.

I have been hitting the gym more and more lately. I am actually starting to enjoy working out and I look forward to it! Now, If I could only get my eating habits under control, I would really start sheding the pounds!

This week was the last full week I have to myself. Next week I go in 2 days for meetings, the week after that I am able to start setting up my room, and the following week is our "work week", so I need to start getting prepared. While I was at the beach I picked up a brand new teacher bag, yay! My old teacher bag was a tote from Old Navy that I got free with a purchase. Not cute, but useful and durable. I walked into a little, empty, dusty store and found this baby on sale for $25! I love it, it's huge and has pockets!

I went to the only teacher supply store in my town this week. It was lovely. I found so many cute things, including this border. I asked my Instagram friends if I should get chevron or moroccan and most thought moroccan. When I got home I realized the moroccan is turning out to be my thing this year, I had already bought contact paper and Washi tape with the same pattern!

Don't forgot to stop by Doodle Bugs Teaching to see what everyone else has been up to this week!

Have a great weekend!

Quick Tips: Morning & Afternoon Routine Reminders

As teachers, we know that students need routines and a certain degree of predictability in order to feel safe in a new classroom and learn what you expect of them. One of the most important things we do to help with this is establish morning and afternoon routines. Not only will students feel less anxiety by knowing exactly what they will do while transitioning to and from school, but teachers will be able to use their time more productively.

Thanks to Pinterest, we are given a variety of ways to display our morning and afternoon routines to help our kiddos remember what to do. Check out some of the awesome examples below:

Mrs. Wills' Kindergarten

I Love Labels

Life is Better Messy Anyway

What I have found works best for me, is to display our routines on PowerPoint slides on the board. 

I love this because:

1. It frees up wall space- I don't know about you, but that is prime real-estate in my room. I don't have a lot of free space and I need every square inch I can get.

2. It's flexible- If our routine calls for something different, like turning in a permission slip or reading instead of morning work, I can change it up quickly without having to repeat myself a billion times.

3. I can personalize- My students love when I personalize the morning routine PPT. They argue over who will be first to enter the room and read the board. 

Some ways I personalize the morning routine are:

   *Add pictures of students or field trips

   *Add pictures of topics we are studying

   *Ask questions or give surveys that require them to write their answer and place it on my desk

   *Tell them what the special of the day will be 

   *Include pictures or stories about my life

Here are some examples of personalized slides from last year. I switched from a to-do list to a letter after they got the main morning "to-do's" down. This helped my student's work on their reading skills. I would usually hide something at the bottom to let me know if they read (ex. put a red crayon on your name tag, quietly write what you would like to do for Fun Friday and place it on my desk). Students who didn't read it were easy to spot and didn't get a vote if there was a survey.

Here are what my basic slides look like at the beginning of the year, before I start getting fancy!

 ...and my afternoon routine

More Quick Tips:

Tackling Unfinished Work

Managing Student Interruptions

Homework, Homework, Homework

I have had a love-hate relationship with homework throughout the years. I have done weekly homework, nightly homework (which I often forgot to send), just reading, the list goes on and on. Last year I was forced to reformulate my homework yet again because our county revised their regulation. The new rule stated that third graders should have approx. 30-50 minutes of homework on Monday-Thursday and no homework on the weekends. The weekend-free homework was a relief because I never assigned weekend homework anyway. With the exceptions, of course, of telling my students that they need to read every day. In third grade, our expectation is that the kids read 20 minutes a night, so that takes up a good chunk of our mandatory time. We also do word study, which requires the students to study nightly, but if I'm trying to fit homework in order of importance, I definitely can't forget math! This has been my train of thought this summer as I have spent WAY too much time thinking about homework .

I knew I needed to create something that works for me and these are the things I had to keep in mind:

1. It had to be weekly. I don't do well with nightly homework, I forget to pass it out and I never want to go over it the next day. I know, I know, I'm as bad as the kids, but we have more important things to do when we are together.

2. Reading for at least 20 minutes was non-negotiable. Reading is my favorite subject to teach and definitely one of the things I feel most passionate about. I dedicate a lot of time helping students find series, genres, and books they love so that they will want to read.

3. They needed to be practicing nightly. One of the most important reasons I give homework is not only so the students can practice, but so the parents can see what we are learning. I'm not naive, I know there are some parents who never look at homework, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop giving them the opportunity to take part. I want my parents to know what their students are struggling with, especially in reading and math, so that we can have more informed discussions...and so that they are not "shocked" if their struggling student fails a test. I believe it empowers parents and forces them to take responsibility for the child's learning. This past year, I had so many parents reference homework when talking about their child's needs and initiate discussions about their child's progress.

So, I decided to give options. I will return to giving weekly homework packets that are due on either Friday or Monday. Each packet will have a calendar with suggested times/activities on the front.

Here's what is included in my homework:

-Reading: Students just jot down the title and author on a log.

-Math: 2 days of Daily Math Practice (Evan-Moor book, 5 questions a day), 2 days of Daily Word Problems (Evan-Moor book, 1 word problem a day) - I use these books for morning work as well. Students will do Mon/Tue of Daily Math for morning work and Wed/Thur of Daily Math for homework. They will do the opposite for the Daily Word Problems. I like these because they are spiral, take less than 5 minutes, and because we will be consistently doing and reviewing them in school so students will always know how to complete them.

                 

-Writing: I recently saw Mary's (Teaching With a Mountain View) blog post on Corkboard Connections about the weekly letters she writes her class. Every week, they have to respond by writing a letter back. I thought this was perfect! This year I want to focus more on building community and I just know this will help. My kids are in third, so we will start with responding in a couple sentences and then move along to paragraphs throughout the year. Click here to see Mary's free resource on TPT.

-Word Study: BOOOOO!!! I am not a word study fan. In fact, I hate it. We don't have time to teach it properly because of how we are mandated to chunk our time, so it is pretty much a waste. However, this year we adopted a brand new word study program so I am hopeful. I just went through a class on language development and I learned that many people use vocabulary activities to practice spelling words and spelling activities to practice vocabulary words. I have never really paid attention to the difference between the two, but it is definitely a reason that students don't retain words or word patterns. I will be refreshing my activities to make sure my students are practicing their words with spelling-based activities.

-Studying: I have students fail unit tests all the time and when I asked them if they studied, their response is "What?...." 8-year-olds don't know how to study and many parents don't or can't help. I figure if I give them an option to study one of their guides for 5 minutes nightly, they will at least think about it.

So all this is a total of 40+ minutes a night, depending on if they need to spend more time on something. I figure that, aside from the reading, as long as they spend at least some time on each area a night, they can build skills and get used to practicing.

How will I be reinforcing homework? Homeworkopoly. Actually, I created behavioropoly because that has been more of a focus for our group of kids. If they get a behavior sticker every day, they get to play at the end of the week. I plan on giving them an extra chance to play if they complete their homework.

Here is the homework calendar/cover sheet I created:

At the beginning of the year, the calendar doesn't look quite like this. I start the first night of school with reading homework and add every week. The second week they will start math, then writing, and so on. I like to have all of the categories listed, so parents and students know what's coming.

I also created this quick sheet for word study because I hate getting 4 papers on Friday with all of their studying from the week.

Font by Kimberly Geswein

Apple by Krista Wallden

UPDATE: Due to requests, I have created an editable template for FREE download.

Click here to access the product.

I love reading posts about how others do homework. Link your post below if you've written about this!