Math is Real Life { August }

It's the first Wednesday of August (though I wish it was still July!) which means I am linking up with four amazing blogs ( The Teacher Studio, 4mula Fun, Teaching to Inspire in 5th  , and Miss Math Dork ). 

Though this project started MONTHS ago (okay fine, almost a year ago) it's finally coming around to being completed. Last October, I started to write grants to get a learning garden at my school. To do this, I not only needed to be an excellent writer (I'm kidding... kind of) but I also had to do tons of estimation. Both of the grants that I applied for needed a budget, this meant thinking of every single thing that our garden would possibly need, deciding on they size of raised beds we would build, determining the volume of the beds and how many cubic feet of soil we would need, the list goes on and on. We got the beds built...

and then hit some snags when it came to doing the rest of it. But I can FINALLY say, that next week we are getting back in there and getting it all finished! Benches will be built, a shed will be installed, soil and compost will be ordered. I'm so excited to have this done so that all of the students can use this garden to help make their learning real and let them know that math is real life!

Monday Made It: {August 4th} and a Freebie!

So this was an extremely busy weekend. My little sister from my sorority got married! I wish I had actually gotten some pictures this weekend, but somehow I didn't seem to have my phone with me. Thankfully I was in the bridal party, so I'll have some great pictures soon. Now that I feel a bit more like myself (there was a lot of sleep and recovery that needed to happen) it's time to link up for Monday Made It!

On Sunday, I had to recover from the long days before and I conveniently received The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller in the mail. I was exhausted and planned to read a chapter or two and then take a nap, but I couldn't put it down! I read the entire thing on the spot, what a great read. It definitely inspired me to look at how I was teaching reading. I immediately got on Amazon and ordered Reading in the Wild. Thanks to Amazon Prime, anything that I had planned to accomplish tomorrow will no longer happen since I will be spending the whole evening reading. This year, I plan to do the 40 book challenge with my students. I had read about it on a few other people's blogs, but now after reading about it I know that it is my plan this summer. This challenge inspired my Monday Made It for the week!

I had talked to a colleague in another building about doing the 40 book challenge with her class and our classes keeping in touch. If you don't know about the challenge, students are required to read 40 books during the school year that come from different genres. Students will track their books as they read throughout the year and will complete the different genres. I want to do as much celebrating as possible with this, so I plan to have a display in my hallway with each of my students names, a place for them to share what they are currently reading, and a place for their badges. Each time they complete the number of books for a genre, I will give them their badge to hang outside. You could also use them on their notebooks. Click on over to my TPT store to grab the freebie here! 

Our school does not have a color printer, so although I plan to print them in color, I did not want to have badges that were too heavy on the color since I will be the one printing them all. 

My colleague and I also talked about how we want our students from our separate schools to share book recommendations with each other. We will be using Padlet with our classes. Have you heard of it? If not, stop on by the blog tomorrow to check out my Tech Tuesday on using it! It's so easy and you are going to LOVE it! 

Tomorrow also starts a three day math professional development for me on the Expressions series. Does anyone use it? Thoughts? 

Wordless Wednesdays {July 30th}

Today is a busy day! It is day 3 of our TCRWP Homegrown Writing Workshop. I am so excited to share everything that I have learned, but now it's time to link up for Wordless Wednesday!

Sorry in advance for anyone who doesn't like feet....

I sprained my ankle last weekend and I'm in my little sister's wedding this weekend. Thankfully, we are wearing long gowns, but you know how brides can be in the days before their wedding. She looks sweet (on the right below), but when she finds out tonight she might not be too happy with me. 

Has anyone else had a similar situation with something funny happening at the worst possible time? :)

Finally Getting Around to a Monday Made It

This summer has been jam packed with so many different things and this week is no different! Today starts my first day of our districts Teacher College Reading and Writing Project Homegrown Writing Institute (Whew!What a mouthful!). I'm so excited to hopefully get to put everything that I have learned into practice this year. Even though things have been really busy, I finally got around to a Monday Made It! 

I'm so excited that I FINALLY got around to this one. Especially seeing as I intended to do this TWO years ago. 

I made a teacher organizer!

Okay fine, as you can see it's not completely done and I need to print out a few more labels... but it's cute so far right? :)

Aren't the labels so cute? I actually used two different pack from Teachers Pay Teachers to do this. You can tell that they are a bit different, but when they are all mixed together I don't think that it is too noticeable.
The first one that I used is by Ladybug Teacher Files and it is the Student Toolbox Labels (Consistent Colors) . I ABSOLUTELY LOVE  her consistent colors collection and am planning to buy a few other items from her store before the start of the year. The other pack that I used are these Teacher Toolbox Labels. I believe that they are both able to be edited.

So it may not be a completely finished project, but better than nothing right? Fortunately for me I still have three more weeks until I'm back at school!

Five for Friday... I mean Saturday :)

Well, Friday got away from me, but I didn't want to miss linking  up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for a Five for Saturday. 

First of all, yesterday was the last day of Young Scholars. What an amazing experience for the kids and for us! There will be more to come about this amazing program and how I believe it will positively affect our students. This week we got to go on a field trip to Dyke's Marsh in Alexandria. The kids got go out in paddle boats. So many of them have never been on a boat before. They also got to see a real wetland. 

On Thursday, we went to Kenilworth Gardens in Washington, D.C. Who would have thought this gem was located right inside of the city?

It was absolutely beautiful! The pictures from my phone just don't do it justice. 

My favorite picture of the day is the one that I snapped of one of my kids. I love his safari hat and how he brought his sketch pad with him on the trip so that he could sketch everything that he was seeing! 

Yesterday was our very last day of Young Scholars. I mentioned last week that the students created presentations with Haiku Deck. Yesterday they got to share them with the class. They all created one on Wetlands, but my resident dino expert made his on prehistoric wetlands. I'm so proud of how they turned out!

Fourth, today is my birthday! I'm happy to say that my apartment is full of my best friends and that I am ringing in 25 with a bang! I'm so blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life. 

Especially this girl who I have been blessed to spend 12 birthdays with!

Finally, I'm excited to be participating in our Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project home grown workshop this week. I was our school's writing chairperson last year and was able to go to monthly workshops for TCRWP, it's going to be four days full of writing workshop. I'm so incredibly excited! 

How is the end of your summer turning out? Doing any exciting professional development? 

Wordless Wednesday

Linking up with for another Wordless Wednesday with Sugar and Spice!  

Target got the best of me, as always! I would ask if this happens to you too, but I have a feeling that it can't just be me. It's just all so cute! 

Wordless Wednesdays: Haiku Deck

This summer has been off to a crazy start! More to come about this in a post later this week. For now, I'm linking up with Sugar and Spice for Wordless Wednesdays:

Today we are using an app called Haiku Deck in class! More to come about this later...

What technology have you found to incorporate into your classrooms?

Five For Friday: Young Scholars Edition

Happy Friday Y'all!

Hope everyone has had a great week and start to their summer! The end of the school year and start of the summer was a blur for me. I had been doing so well with actually updating the blog (as opposed to my first year teaching) and then it got away from me!  Hoping to get better throughout the summer which is already half way over for us. :( Can you believe it?

This summer I've been fortunate enough to be working with our new programs summer kickoff, Young Scholars. We all know that traditionally, students who come from culturally and economically diverse backgrounds are generally less represented in our populations of gifted students. Young Scholars aims to find these students, immerse them in different learning opportunities that make them really think outside of the box, and to then hopefully change the statistic. (My words, not theirs). 

In honor of surviving the first two weeks (out of three!) of Young Scholars, i'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

Here goes nothing!

The summer curriculum we are using for Young Scholars focuses on Systems, specifically on Wetlands. We have talked about all sorts of systems from families, to life cycles, to our classroom, and finally to wetlands.  On our first day we decided how we would experiment with our seeds and also made "Gardens in a Glove" to watch as the program progressed.

It's really easy if you haven't done it before, but here is a Link with directions for Garden in a Glove from the Kansas Farm Bureau. There are lots of different ones online, but this is what we used. 

One of the systems that we looked at in depth was the water cycle. We played an awesome water cycle game and made bracelets to track where we went as a "drop of water". 

In the picture  you can see the station signs that I used for each of the stations, the station specific dice, and an example of one of the bracelets that the students created. I paired the students up and sent them to start at the stations. They took the specific color bead for their station  (see the bottom of the sign) and then rolled the dice. The dice told them what station they should go to next. They then grabbed a bead for their new station and rolled again. Each time they rolled the dice, it explained what process they were going through (as a water droplet) and where they needed to go next or if they were staying. Each time they rolled, they got a new bead for their bracelet. 

There are a lot of different places with directions for this activity, but I used the one from the National Park Service. I printed out a blank die template onto pieces of cardstock and wrote it all out. I used a different color of Sharpie to coordinate with the bead used for each station. At the bottom of each station sign, I taped the colors of beads that they would potentially use at that station. 

The kids (even the boys) LOVED this activity and their new bracelets. Even one of my most reluctant boys said, "this looked like a lot of work, but it was actually a ton of fun!". Music to my ears! :)

Another thing that we played around with this week was an app called Haiku Deck. We love it! The students that I am working with are rising fourth and fifth graders and they have been doing so great with this App. They researched Wetlands by looking through some books and then are presenting their information in a Haiku Deck. It's a really simple app to use and their presentations are beautiful! I will be sharing some next week. 

The app gives them different layouts for each slide and has a search tool so they can find images that go with their pictures.

 It also lets them do a bit of customization from deciding on white or black font and then also choosing one of six different fonts for the whole Haiku Deck. This is a huge  relief to teachers who get frustrated with students taking the most time on trying to figure out which font and color they like best out of the 100 different options. 

We also went ahead and created a class mural about everything that we have learned so far! It was great to actually have some time not focusing on tests to be able to let the kids get creative! We have a dinosaur expert in here so our mural is similar to a timeline. We started in the prehistoric times with the dinosaurs that lived in the wetlands and continued to get closer to present day eventually showing our wetland as a Walmart and parking lot. It was great to see the kids all working together on this! 

Last but not least is our field trips next week! Because of the "Arctic Vortex" that was supposed to come last week, we had to reschedule but next week we are taking two awesome field trips!  The first is to a place called Dyke's Marsh in Alexandria, VA. The students will get to have a boating experience, test water quality, learn about boating, and go on a hike. The next field trip will be to Kenilworth Gardens in Washington, D.C. So excited to see what the students get out of these trips! 

I also have to share this super cute bulletin board that is in my friend Lauren's classroom. Love the interactive wheels on the board! 

What have you all been up to this summer? Any one else doing summer school and trying to find ways to make it fun?

Five for Friday!

WOW. This week has been really long. Welcome to SOL testing. Haven't been on here all week. But I didn't want to miss out on Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching, so here goes nothing!

We are an Success for All school. There are certainly some great things about the program, but at this time of year, myself and the kids are starting to get a bit frustrated with the same thing every day. On Wednesday, all of my fourth graders were at Jamestown and this meant that the best plan for SFA would be to do an alternative project with my fifth graders! 

Since we are reading a Wrinkle in Time right now, we are creating our own planet and then writing about it. Figuring out how to show the reader our planet in our writing instead of telling about it is certainly going to be exciting! I can't wait to see how they turn out! Here is some of our planning:

Students have to answer a bunch of questions about their planet and then have a few other things to do to complete their projects. I think the writing is really going to push them. If you want to check out the project, head on over to the TPT store and see my Wrinkle in Time Planet Creation Project!

It has really been a LONG week of SOL testing. So far this week I have tested third, fifth, and sixth grade math. Being a specialist at this time of the year is hard! I miss seeing my math kids! :( Although we can't read during testing, we can read after! During the past two days week I have managed to read two great ones! 

Today's book of choice was Wonder by R.J. Palacio

What a read! I couldn't put it down and was crying at my desk. Our county uses this as one of the fifth grade reading titles and I see why! We don't use the reading curriculum since we are an SFA school but I will definitely be assigning this as reading with my students next year. It teaches you so much!

Yesterday's choice was Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. 

This was another excellent book! A colleague had a class set in her classroom that she had never read. Our library just got it in and I couldn't put it down! What an excellent book. I read for four hours last night and stayed up way later than I should have because I had to see what Isabel's fate was. I highly recommend it and I will be getting the second book in the series, Forge from my library this weekend, AMAZING!

I am also proud of myself for getting so much done this week! At the beginning of the year I made SOL checklists to help me make sure that I covered everything with my kids. I teach 4th and 6th grade math at the same time and sometimes needing an at a glance way to make sure I was getting everything done. I wanted to go ahead and make this for the other subjects as well, but this year got away from me. I finally motivated myself this week and realized that one of my buyers on TPT is one of my sorority sisters from Radford, what a small world!

Finally, I am so very excited for this weekend! I get to enjoy some relaxation but also will be going to my Little's Bridal Shower on Sunday. I am so excited to see her and give her a gift that I believe will be quite entertaining. More about that next week! 

Now it's time for me to get back to that relaxing thing. Hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! 

Happy teaching y'all!