Lovin' me some clip charts!

You might think I’m crazy for starting a new behavior system this far into the year, but that’s just what I did.  See, I had a student teacher, so I wanted to just keep it simple and do what I’ve always done instead of figure out how to do something new.   I recently took my class back (which was wonderful!) and decided it was time to try a clip chart out.

I’ve seen clip charts all over Pinterest and I actually accidentally bought one when I was buying some cute table signs to go with my classroom color scheme.  And now my class (which is admittedly a pretty dang good class already) is acting like a bunch of angels!

Click {HERE} to check out the pack I got the clip chart from.

Click {HERE} to read an explanation of how to use this.

I do use this in conjunction of BIST, if you’re familiar with that.

Spiders + Native Americans = Fun!

There is something to be said about getting the scissors and creating things when you’re talking about 8 year olds.  The engagement level goes right up.  Today we made a few things that I was pretty excited about.

First I did one of Amy Lemon’s (Step into 2nd Grade) super cute and, as a bonus, free, activities.  We created spiders and wrote poems about them. This was perfect because we’ve been learning parts of speech, well, all year, it seems and these poems involve using verbs and adjectives.  Here are a few examples of my students’ work:

If you want to snatch this up, head to Amy’s TPT store {HERE}.

The thing we did later in the day wasn’t quite as cute but it was fun for my kids.  I whipped up a flipbook Venn diagram for Woodland and Plains Indians to go along with our Native American unit.  We’ve watched a few United Streaming videos about the Woodland Indians and the Plains Indians, created an anchor chart (I gotta say, that anchor chart is ugly as sin.) and discussed the characteristics at length, so I thought I’d see what the kids could do as far as comparisons. 

If you do a unit over Native Americans my unit on TPT might be helpful to you.  You can check it out {HERE}.  

If any of you want the Venn diagram flipbook for free, please just leave a comment and I’ll link it to this blog post so you can download it. 

Conferences

Today was the first day of conferences. It went very well, but I. Am. Exhausted.

The end.

Stars and Stairs

In the last post I shared this reflection page from Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning by Jan Chappuis.    

I thought I’d share a little bit about stars and stairs.  It’s a really simple idea (from Jan Chappuis) but I think it seems like it has the potential to be really effective.  That’s why I introduced it to my students to this concept Monday. (I went on an Assessment Training Institute recently.  Can you tell?)

This is the anchor chart I made while I explained stars and stairs to my kids. 

Today I used this while I graded assessments.  For example, one of my students got a star for knowing why we need rules but stairs for understanding majority rules.   I just drew both the star and the stairs and wrote the notes next to them.

Do you have any fun tricks for encouraging learning?

Adjectives and Place Value

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You ever have those days that feel as if you’ll never be able to accomplish anything of importance?  Well, today felt a lot like that to me.  But then, low and behold, we got things done.  We buckled down and pounded out some good work.

We had an assembly for Red Ribbon Week (do you celebrate Red Ribbon Week?), then we made cards for my principal who had an awful motorcycle accident (prayers would be very appreciated) and then I had kids complete this reflection page for conferences:

This reflection page is from Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning by Jan Chappuis.  I just made it a little cuter. :)

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Click the picture if you want to grab this (for free!).

Anyways, once we finally got to real work, we had some fun.  During ELA we’ve been focusing on adjectives.  Pinterest inspired me to try out this little guy:

 

My kids really enjoyed this activity.  First I had them complete a web about themselves, with adjectives.  Then they created the adjective guys using those adjectives.

In math we’re learning about place value so today we used playing cards to create numbers.  They drew three numbers and made both the biggest and the smallest numbers they could with those numbers.  It’s funny how “in” to math kids get when you add cards to the mix.  Call it a game and it’s like magic.

 

If you’d like this and other fun place value activities, click {HERE} for my place value activities pack.  It’s got a ton of fun ideas.

Visualizing and Fables

This quarter we're focusing on both visualizing and fables (among many other things, as English Language Arts so often goes).  So today I introduced both of these and made a cute anchor chart for each.  I don't have a lot to share, but I did take pictures of both anchor charts and decided to share because I'm just a little bit proud of the writing.  I saw this style on someone else's chart that I can't remember, so sorry that I can't give proper credit.  Anyway, without further ado, here they are:

The spacing isn't perfect on the visualizing and the wording isn't exactly top notch on the fables one as the kids helped me create that one, but oh, well.  :)

I'm throwing a sale!

Tomorrow I'm starting my Native American unit that I blogged about {HERE}.  I'm really excited about this unit, so I'm going to throw a sale.  Today and tomorrow my Native American pack will be on sale for 20% off!  Click on the picture to take advantage of the sale!

 

While I'm at it, I'll go ahead and put everything on sale.  Here are a few things you can snatch up.  Click on the pictures you're interested in.