Sophie and Sadie's Scholarly Site

That phrase keeps coming to me, “That’s where the rubber hits the road.” The weeks of summer vacation are quickly passing by, and in a month, I will have students again.

It’s been fun the past several days pinning photos of bulletin boards, displays, classroom arrangements, and  social studies projects on my classroom board at Pinterest, but the reality is that I need to get into my  real room and get some of these things off my to-do list.

There are some people who mistakenly believe that the 4-5  day week before school starts for students is when teachers can get those tasks done, but the truth is you can’t. Those in-service days aren’t designed to all be  “teacher workdays,” and so chances are you will only have a good full day to get the room set-up. It can be done, but it is probably not the best decision.

I am not one who believes every  single spare space of the wall needs a chart or  teacher-made or store- bought decoration. I believe in anchor charts, but I also believe in my students creating  writing, art work and projects that will become part of our room’s décor.

I do believe in putting around  my own personal touches in my classroom especially with older students. I do believe that I need to  personalize this space because that personalized space can be an invitation to get to know me. In my case, I put pictures around of the “fourth grade Fran” that you see here along with several  other pictures of my parents and me . My boys often pick up the picture of my father being carried off the field by his football team, and they ask about that  person and who he is, and that is exactly why I do it: I want my kids to ask questions and have conversations with me.I put those things around my room so the kids see I am a real person and that my life has been enriched by the people around me and the experiences we shared.

Several years ago there was a push to remove all the personal touches from our classrooms. Someone who was “our special friend” from our state department told several of us that she worked with on a weekly basis to “remove any personal objects that have no real educational purpose.”  (I suppose seeming more business-like  and impersonal would improve test scores).  Reluctantly I did put away several class pictures, handmade crafts from kids, and personal photographs. My room didn’t have much of me left when it was done. At the time, I didn’t argue or question, but now I know better: My kids need to be reminded every day of what is important to me by what is included in my classroom.

And what is important to me should be a reflection of what I want  for my students. Anyone coming into my room should be able to tell what is important  immediately from what they see in that classroom. Looking around my room, there are reminders of what I want for my students. I want my students to have the support of loving adults-teachers, coaches, and parents. I want my students to value education not just as a ticket to better paying job, but as a personal lifelong journey. I want my students to understand the importance of teamwork. I want my students to understand what it means to give your best effort and personal best. I also want my students to begin to learn that some lessons require much hard work and sacrifice in order to excel. I want my students to see the love of books, history, and life that fills that room.

I would say to everyone who teaches young or old that before the first chair or desk or bookshelf is  moved or placed to do this: Sit down and write down what you want your class to know about you in your own classroom. Can your class see what you value by looking around your room? Let you answers to these questions drive your decisions in planning and set your purpose for the upcoming year. Let those words be your mission statement.

Somewhere in my many travels across blogs and teaching websites and professional reading these past several weeks, I  saw a mission statement posted. I don’t mean the one that your  principal or your school or  your district tells you that you have to post: I am talking about your personal mission statement. Write  those beliefs down on a piece of paper, put those beliefs where you can see them, and let  those words  guide you as up set up  your classroom and plan for this school year.

 

I am a firm believer that to be a good teacher, you truly have to be creative. To keep students interested you have to keep them ACTIVELY  PARTICIPATING, and often, that takes a great deal of creativity and thought. In previous posts, I have already written about how many authors and teachers suggest this  simple strategy as a way to manage a classroom and prevent discipline problems.  The longer  a kid sits passively, the less engaged the brain is, and the mind will wander after about 10-15 minutes, and often the body follows!
Carol Glynn offers some simple ways to get the class up and moving in her book and video, Carol Out of The Box.

Here’s a creative  and simple way to keep students engaged  that  is easy and very do-able even for content areas as well as older learners and can be used in any subject area including reading and math.


Rae Pica, a movement and learning author, teacher and speaker, states on her website the reason why this type of movement and learning link should occur:

Eric Jensen labels this kind of hands-on learning implicit – like learning to ride a bike.  At the opposite end of the spectrum is explicit learning – like being told the capital of Peru.  He asks, if you hadn’t ridden a bike in five years, would you still be able to do it?  And if you hadn’t heard the capital of Peru for five years, would you still remember what it was?  Extrinsic learning may be quicker than learning through exploration and discovery, but the latter has greater meaning for children and stays with them longer.  There are plenty of reasons for this, but one of them just may be that intrinsic learning creates more neural networks in the brain.  And it’s more fun!
from Rae Pica’s website Moving and Learning.

Creating  MORE Neural Networks IS THE KEY!
Who wouldn’t want to be part of the classes in Carol’s video?  Moving, singing, writing,talking are all ways to keep kids engaged, and if  you  watched Carol in action at the workshop with the adults, you can see it's very EASY. You ,too, can have the same results.
In my classroom after watching the video, I was convinced it was worth a try.  I took a boring textbook reading lesson about the parts of a New England village and assigned each student a role. There was a field of wheat, a  waterwheel,  a stone mill, a cobbler,  a blacksmith, the stocks, a meeting house- yes I had to assign multiple roles, but everyone was up and participating. It was loud, it was fun, and months later, the kids remembered who was the waterwheel  ( I can still see the poor kid spinning in circles ), and that mills were important in New England’s economy!

Out of the box thinking can be done- simply in any subject, any grade, and in literacy and reading classes,too.  Some examples could be the solar system, the parts of a circuit, the parts of a cell, order of operations in math, story elements in literary fiction, genres, and the list goes on.

Challenge your self: Think of what you teach that you can try some of these “out of the box”  experiences with your class this year.

In my last post, Brain Breaks and FMAP: What Do They Have in Common?, I talked about ways that author and teacher Angela Watson uses active teaching methods to manage a classroom.  Whole Brain Teaching is also active, engaging, and brain-based. But be prepared: The kids aren’t sitting in rows  quietly doing workbook pages. It is at times LOUD and to some, it will look chaotic, but it’s not. And like most things in education, there is  at least one thing  that most of us who are teachers can learn from this method if nothing but to “jazz it up” a bit.

If you aren’t familiar with the idea of “whole Brain Teaching”, sometimes a picture  ( or a video) does indeed speak a thousand words! These sixth graders are awe-inspiring!

 

The reasons WHY we need these brain-based, whole brain, and active learning strategies is explained by these fourth graders.

And here’s the thing about Chris Biffle and Whole Brain Teaching: IT’S FREE. Go to WHOLE BRAIN TEACHING and you will see resources for all grade levels and abilities, and did I mention :It’s FREE!   Go to the website to get the details, and right now, there is an e-book on setting up a Whole Brain Teaching model classroom so please give them a look. It will get you thinking about how any grade or age can use some of these techniques. Even young learners respond well to these strategies.

Here’s a kindergarten class using Whole Brain Teaching.

And first graders using the same methods of learning through movement and brain-based activities.

And finally, third graders in a class using Whole Brain Teaching in a reading class.

How could you use more brain-based learning in your classroom this year?

Over at the Organized Classroom Blog page on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/TheOrganizedClassroomBlog 

and other pages such as http://www.facebook.com/teachingresourcesbyshelleygray,

they ‘re discussing “brain breaks.”

I first really thought about “brain breaks” after seeing something similar on mspowell.com ( now http://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/). Angela Watson calls these breaks  FMAP for  “Fifteen Minute, Active Participation” when being pro-active in both your teaching and in managing your classroom.

What do “brain breaks” have in common with FMAP? Besides just being a best practice in learning, keeping students actively engaged by moving, talking, and writing helps manage BEHAVIOR!  Active students are not off-task. Active students are interested, and active students are LEARNING which should be what we want our kids to do.

Here’s a real gem if you’re interested: Angela’s blog actually offers a webinar on her ideas.

Other videos in her Cornerstone series may be found at her channel, also:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Cornerstone4Teachers

These webinars are based on the information from her book and blog, The Cornerstone. You may read more about FMAP in  a sample from that book here:

http://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/free-resources/behavior-management/off-task

Check out the resources at her site and start thinking of what you can do as teachers to keep your students actively participating, their bodies moving, and their learning sticking by add more –brain-based tasks and breaks to your lessons.

I just finished reading another chapter of Igniting A Passion for Reading by Steve Layne which prompted me to think about a part of reading that seems to be ignored often by  both schools and parents. By the time kids get into the intermediate grades ( grades 3-5)  and surely by middle school- the practice of a well-delivered read loud is  sadly very often gone. But this chapter also put me in mind of a heart-warming story that inspired and touched  me that was recently in the news:

Meet Alice Ozma!







Here is Alice’s website: Make A Reading Promise
http://www.makeareadingpromise.com/
And the CBS story featuring Alice’s  awesome dad, Jim Brozina…

Some people are not  as comfortable reading aloud as Jim Brozina. Parents often don’t feel they can read well to their own children, and likewise,  there are  many teachers  who often don’t feel that they do a good job reading aloud to their students. This is in evidence from a quote from author Mem Fox:
First of all, a good starting place then is to check out Mem Fox's Ten Read Aloud Commandments for the “how to” of delivering a good read aloud experience.




Second, there are so many great examples of read alouds online. Storyline has Screen Actor Guild members reading aloud like James Earl Jones, Melissa Gilbert, and Betty White although I will remind you: You don’t have to be a professional to do a great job!


http://www.storylineonline.net/
Finally, I would advise parents and teachers alike to HAVE FUN with your read alouds. When I read aloud to my  class, I am like a Shakespearean actor on the London stage. I am a little bit of a “Ms. Pricklepants” ( with a nod to my inspiration in Toy Story 3). I change my voices, act a little, and ham it up to send it over the top sometimes. Just enjoy yourself!


Thanks for reading my blog, and “Happy Reading” to you!

 

“I thought of you.”

I read those words two nights ago in Steve Layne’s Igniting A Passion for Reading, and that just sealed the deal that I am a fan of this man and his beliefs. The chapter that I just finished was “Coaches Know Their Players,” and that title alone should have suggested to me that this guy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to teaching and how students best learn. Being raised by a coach, I know very well that for someone to succeed, you must know your players strengths and weaknesses. You have to watch carefully, study, and make notes not only of what was well-executed but what failed. The best of coaches  help  their players succeed in LIFE, and those words “I thought of you” conveys that feeling in four little words.

Teaching has to be a reflective process if we are going to succeed with those hard to reach students.

Another thing that impressed me is what Layne said about setting goals: The best goals are  the ones we set for ourselves. I think of teachers I know who are successful, and that is their attitude. They do not wait for someone to set a goal for them, they set goals for themselves.They have a personal best that they reach for and achieve, and  that winning attitude reaches their students who in turn are successful.

I am at the halfway point of my summer, and it’s getting time to set some goals for myself for this upcoming school year and to think about how I will meet the needs of the students who will join me this year. I challenge you if you teach to do the same.

Powerful words…

http://www.stevelayne.com/

 

 

http://www.stenhouse.com/shop/pc/viewprd.asp?idProduct=9180&r=eu10010

I saw this at one of Rick Wormeli’s   workshops a few year ago and was thrilled I found it online.
See if you have what it takes to be one of the GREATEST TEACHERS like this world-renowned teacher!


The Greatest Teacher


http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/the-greatest-teacher/rNeNukLW7sUe9O6wuWWPUg

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines a cornerstone as

• the basis
• a bedrock
• a foundation
• the groundwork
• the root
• the underpinning
• the keystone

The keystone in old days was set to give support and LOCK OTHER THINGS INTO PLACE.

This book and Angela Watson’s website are being exactly what is needed to do that in a classroom. To me, it’s the manual that should be passed out before student teaching or at least by graduation from any early childhood or elementary teaching program. Why? It’s the common sense but nobody told you stuff that everybody needs!Practical, set-by-step, but never in a talking down tone, these resources help set up procedures and routines such as working together, sharpening pencils, and paperwork. ( If you think you don’t need a procedure for doing these things, you are in for a HUGE surprise! I’m just sayin’…)

It’s worth your while to get these “how we do things here in my room” procedures in your mind before the kids arrive, or as we say around here “The wheels are gonna come off that bus.”

Look here for some  great ideas  for all those small details, organizing,and classroom set-up:

http://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/

 

 

 

It's International Blog Hopping Day, and I haven't blogged or  hopped anywhere really. However,  I have been making some new graphics and art for school and experimenting with my Flip video by adding effects from befunky.com. I've spent most of a sometimes dreary day creating collages with objects that I have photographed, and I've become inspired enough to realize that this would be a great activity for the kids to get to know me and make some inferences  about me based on what I include in my collage. Sometimes the right amount of coffee just helps things CLICK!

I'm keeping up with my professional reading for the summer, I  also started reading Igniting A Passion for Reading by Steven Layne, and it has already moved me as much The Book Whisperer did two years ago. I'm not trying to sound like something from a nursery rhyme calling "The sky is falling!" about the lack of reading that goes on with both adults and children, but we are in the midst of a crisis,  folks, and I guess I'm glad to see that there are some folks who have a plan on getting us out of the mess we are in. When Layne shuddered about what may happen if we continue to get our news "from other sources," I nearly cheered because I also think it is scary that some ADULTS never read any news but rely on word of mouth from a talking head on TV. I don't want this for the kids I teach. I am going to enjoy reading this book.

Because it is a day to blog and hop, I will share some of the A+ Blogs over at Teaching Blog Addict. I will make it easy and share a link:
Teaching Blog Addict: A-Plus Blogs

Enjoy!

I told myself that I needed to take it easy on the professional books this summer ( after all I  still have to buy groceries, pet food and keep that AC hummin’ hear in good ole SC) so I’ve indulged my thirst for professional knowledge by mostly following several blogs.

HOWEVER, because I do feel like I need to feed my mind in many different ways,  I decided I would allow myself one or two professional books during my summer vacation, and with only a few days left of June, I made one  of  my first choices:

"I believe that classroom environments are most effective when they are literate and purposeful, organized and accessible, and most of all, authentic."

Debbie Miller,
Teaching With Intention

from http://www.literacy-builders.com/free-resources/quotes-we-love

If you are not familiar with Debbie Miller and her work with reading comprehension, you may want to view these videos to get a better idea of the authentic, literate, and purposeful classroom environments that she is speaking of.
These were a few videos of her teaching style in action on You Tube which were posted by Stenhouse Publishers:







As you think about what you want  to go on inside your classroom, you may want to check  out Reading With Meaning which is definitely one of my  teaching “anchor texts” for teaching reading comprehension. My  hard copy is now about ten years old, and I have a backup copy on my Kindle.



TEACHING INTENTIONALLY: Why Do We Do What We Do?

If  your interest is piqued, you may preview several chapters of Teaching With Intention at the Stenhouse site like I did:

http://www.stenhouse.com/html/millerpreview.htm?r=n144


In reading reviews of this book on Amazon, one or two reviewers said the book was “ a good summer read.” That  kinda sounds like “fluff”  to me, but after reading the first few pages, I understood what the reviewers intended: Summer is a good time to reflect on our classrooms not just the decorations and furniture arrangements, but our reflections should focus on what goes on inside those classroom walls. Everything we do, think, say, and believe as teachers should be reflected in our classroom: the  arrangement, the overall environment, our lessons, our words- all create an atmosphere of who were are as teachers and what we believe in.

This idea spoke to me so strongly because it reminded me of the words that were spoken about what was important  to my family as evidenced in my home.

Gary Smallen , an assistant football coach at Coastal University in Conway, SC, has for all intents and purposes been a big brother to me. He was a player for my father Don at  Dentsville High School in the 1960’s. The two remained lifelong  friends, mentor and student, player and coach, father and son until my Daddy passed away in 2005.I asked Gary to speak about my mother Iris when she passed away in March 2010.

Gary began his eulogy speaking about how you can tell a lot about people just by going into their homes. He said he had spoken with his son ( and my father’s god-son Jason,  and the two men came to the conclusion that  when a visitor  comes into your home, it is almost like a profiler gathering evidence and information. And so a speech was born! 
Gary said that anyone could tell a lot about my mother and me by the home I created that we shared for the past several years. ( I moved three years ago to  the small town where I have now taught for almost 20 years, and bought my dream house- a nearly 100 year old farm house). Gary spoke of the  old family photographs, the old sports memorabilia, the Biblical quotes, the  old handmade   objects like quilts and churns, the many books in almost every room, and how each object included and displayed in this home was something precious that held a story and was of some importance. But these objects in my home also reflected what my family held dear: our love of family and our past, our love of sports, our strong faith, and our love of knowledge. I cherished the words he spoke that day because now as I look around my home, I remember that each and every place I look- I see and feel LOVE.

When I read Debbie Miller’s first chapters, I felt like her words were speaking to in the same way that Gqry’s words did that day. They were powerful, strong, and thought-provoking. That’s what I want my kids to feel when they look around my room this year. My plans for this year must be done intentionally.

Some of the challenges and questions I had  on my mind were:

• What do people see when  they come into my room?
• Is what I value about learning evident?
• Does what I have displayed reflect my own beliefs about learning?

Thinking about the answers to these questions is empowering and  can also somewhat sobering.

So as I am preparing for my new school year, I need to be careful, selective, and thoughtful  not only in how the room looks ( and Lord knows, we teachers LOVE to plan  and decorate our rooms) but what goes on when my class arrives MUST BE DONE WITH INTENTION.

As I am picturing my room filled with children, I have to think “How am I going to get them to that place that is my ideal, my dream classroom?”

These questions have given me what I need to start.

Today I am going to focus on something that inspired me  last year and  gave me an “A-ha!” moment: the teaching strategy of reciprocal teaching. I am a fan of this strategy because of this woman:
Lori Ozckus!



http://lorioczkus.com/index.php


Thanks to her work in reading comprehension,  I changed how I approached  my small-groups and guided reading in my fourth grade  social studies classroom.I had been searching for  years for new ways to make reading a more interactive, hands-on experience-one that involves  movement and manipulatives and yet “kept it real” for fourth graders.  Hers was the first book I encountered that  does just that!

First,  an example of Lori Oczkus’  in action teaching a reading lesson from You Tube:





Lori Ozckus takes  reading comprehension and makes it interactive with the use of  both hand signals and puppetry in her book Interactive Think-Aloud Lessons. One of my fellow teachers who is a kindergarten teacher also had  interest in the use of hand signals and movement with her kindergarten students to enhance learning. When we talked about this book, she grew excited and confirmed to me that she had seen firsthand in her own classroom how this strategy could work. I was ready to try these strategies of adding a movement and interaction to  help readers in my  fourth grade classroom.




http://lorioczkus.com/books-fabulous-four.php



http://www.primaryconcepts.com/rdgcomp/Comprehension-Puppets.asp



While I really loved the idea of the hand signals for read-alouds, in the intermediate grades, our focus in reading  shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”  because more reading is done in content-areas. While I still do read-alouds,  I teach social studies so the reading strategies I address need to scaffold readers who are beginning to delve into the complexities of informational texts and nonfiction content-area reading. When we read in my class whether it is a shared reading, guided reading, or a read-aloud, I also have to address content, and my time is limited so I need lessons that can pull double-duty.







I went on a search again for interactive strategies and found that lo and behold: Lori Ozckus  also has a book on this as well- reciprocal teaching!



But I have to admit that at that time, I REALLY wasn’t sure if I knew what reciprocal teaching even meant.

Another Google search took me to seeing how this strategy could  be used in the content-areas and in any upper grade classroom where reading takes place in some form nearly every day.


Here is reciprocal teaching in action in an intermediate classroom:










I was convinced just by what I  saw that this strategy could work for me. Lucky for me, I found a chapter sample from her book online here:

http://www.reading.org/Libraries/Inspire/03-507_Chapter02.pdf




Please visit  Lori Oczkus’ website, you can see more of her work in using reciprocal teaching in action along with some additional handouts such as a viewing guide.

http://lorioczkus.com/index.php


http://www.reading.org/downloads/publications/videos/500-VideoGuide.pdf



In my next several blogs, I am going to show how I took some ideas from the work of  Lori Ockzus along with several other online resources to adapt and create my own reciprocal teaching style along with some lessons and resources to help in your classroom.

I’ve spent the past few mornings working on some things in preparation for the upcoming school year, and these past few days I’ve just been overwhelmed at the amount of great websites and blogs and classrooms that I’ve visited all while sitting here on my comfy little couch. In case, you didn’t already know it:There are some amazing teachers out there in the world who are just a click away!
Despite all the negative news that teachers seem to attract these days, the majority of us go to work each day and close the doors to our classrooms and teach! It’s sad then that most of us will never make the six o’clock news unless we retire at age 100 having taught five generations in the same school. Teaching can sometimes be thankless but also very isolated.
That is all the more reason that we as teachers need to come together collaborate and support each other even across long distances, and visiting and sharing and ENCOURAGING via classroom websites and blogs is a great way to do just that.

I feel enthusiastic,renewed, and encouraged in my beliefs about both education and what I do as a teacher, but I’ve also discovered better ways of doing some things that I already believe work well in my classroom.

For several years, I’ve been a fan of Ms. Powell ( Angela Watson) of mspowell.com. As someone who is organizationally-challenged, I admire her skill in lesson planning and storing her materials, but she also has some instructional practices that are worth checking out. I believe that her book The Cornerstone should be a gift for all first year teachers in the primary and elementary grades. It’s THAT good in helping to set up a classroom, set procedures, communicate with parents- everything.
Her website is the first place where I saw the idea of a content-based bulletin board that would serve as a visual review for students.
http://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/


My district supports a literacy-based model of reading that encourages the use of anchor charts. Having used Strategies That Work for a decade, I am familiar with that idea. I found many good examples at readinglady.com.:


The Reading Lady
http://www.readinglady.com/mosaic/tools/AnchorChartPhotographsfromKellyandGinger/

The Mosaic Listserv
http://www.readinglady.com/mosaic/tools/tools.htm
Another teacher that I am a HUGE fan of is Angela Bunyi who blogs for Scholastic. Her use of anchor charts and bulletin board incorporate several great ideas from the  Daily 5  and CAFÉ books and Tanny MacGregor’s book on comprehension.


http://blogs.scholastic.com/3_5/2008/08/combining-readi.html
Last year before my job description was  social studies teacher, I hung up a “chart wall” as described in Denise Leograndis’ book, Launching The Writing Workshop which I LOVE because there are plenty of colorful pictures of the classroom and examples of the charts. However, once I became a social studies teacher, it was difficult to adapt that idea to a content-area. I was really bummed!





So now I have found something that seems to take the best of all of these ideas: FOCUS WALLS!

Take a look at the Power Points by a third grade teacher in California

http://schools.cajonvalley.net/webpages/tlee/hm_reading.cfm?subpage=262015
My imagination is just running wild for FOCUS WALLS!





I imagine my focus wall as a content-area chart wall that is very LITERACY-BASED.   I imagine my wall being a place that includes something along the lines of Michael Gravois (who has so many wonderful hands-on ways for children to create study tools and manipulatives in  his many books such as the one below about publishing research). The class mural or quilt would be ideal in my social studies classroom.




Using my imagination and some online examples, I’ve come up with my own focus wall based on what’s expected with my district’s literacy model and also what I believe is best for my own classroom such as reciprocal teaching during my  small group/ guided reading block. Here are my headings for my  new focus wall.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLgXZ05cnBsXipFd1E-oMWvppmc9IvqsuKSqWYC8-Qk/edit?hl=en_US


I am looking forward  to later   posting some pictures of my very own content-area, literacy-based focus wall.



I hope you’re WOW’ed by focus walls, too!:)

I had never heard of the Flipped Classroom until today so I’ve learned something new after reading a  blog and seeing the model. Because I am a very visual learner, I was WOWED by this video and excited that classrooms in the very near future could become like this in a mix of technology and data-based instruction with hands-on learning and better teaching time.


.

Here is the blog that started my interest in the Flipped Classroom Model:
http://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/the-flipped-classroom-model-a-full-picture/

And some other video resources:

http://teachingwithted.pbworks.com/w/page/37315118/Flipping-the-Classroom