Creating 5th Graders Who LOVE to Read!!

My last post was about how I HOPE to instill a love of reading in my kids paired with my new look into Book Clubs or Lit Circles. You can read that post HERE.

My kids were so excited after completing our last round of book clubs that they BEGGED me to do it again. I was standing in front of them explaining how we won't have time to do Book Clubs again until January, because we have a week off for Thanksgiving and then only 9 days of school after that. (Yes, I am at a private school on a college campus. We follow their schedule. I get a MONTH off for Christmas. It makes this mommy's heart VERY VERY happy!) So in the midst of explaining to them that we don't have enough time they were seriously BUMMED. I then informed them that if they really REALLY wanted to do Book Clubs again that I would LOVE to do! It only meant that they would have to completely finish the book in 10 class days. This would assure that they had time to complete the book before having an entire week off of school.

I thought I would hear a definite silence or OH MAN from them at this point. WRONG!! I heard nothing, but LETS DO IT!! So I geared up and headed into my full Book Club bookshelves and picked 5 new books. They chose their picks and away we went.

One of the book I selected ended up being such a hit that over 90% of the class wanted to read it. I had to scrounge to even have 6 of this book. SO I will be adding this one to Book Clubs again until it has run out of interest from the class.

What is THE book? The Compound by SA Bodeen.

I had not read the book myself, but heard great things about it. I knew I would struggle to get through it in time and that I did not have an extra copy for myself. I lucked into an audio book copy of it at the public library and my librarian retrieved it for me! I listened to it on my long commute to and from school each day and within a day I was HOOKED! I would find a reason to be in the car or take it with me to listen to during my planning time. It is a serious page turner!!

I would not recommend this book for students younger than 5th grade. It does use some vulgar language in my opinion, but there are not any words that are out of the realm of typical. It does say He** and Pi**ed several times. BUT it is completely unpredictable and keeps you wondering and reading throughout the entire book. The suspense is just amazing!! Even my girl readers are loving it.

There is a sequel to it. I am looking for ways to order this for my kids or at least a copy for my classroom. The only copy our library has is missing!

I am still smiling from the unreal reaction my AMAZING READERS gave me!! Tune in next for an amazing and SUPER exciting service project that we will be embarking on! I am working hard to make this a student-led life-changing movement in my 5th graders lives. More to come soon!

Book Clubs- 5th Grade Version

We just finished up our first successful round of Book Clubs (AKA Literature Circles, Lit Clubs, Book Circles, Book Studies, etc.). It can always seem like a three-ring-circus trying to keep it all organized, but my kids always LOVE these clubs!!

So here is what it looks like in my room...I select 4 books that I hope to draw student INTEREST in!! NO, I do not base my book clubs on READING LEVEL. {Disclaimer- I do have a group of HIGH readers and I do choose books that ALL of my students are capable of reading. I DO understand that this is not always the case and will not work for everyone!}

I have spent lots of time reading and researching on reading instruction. I have struggled with book reports and my love-hate (more like I only love to hate them) relationship with them. I read the book The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller and decided that the best thing for me to do is to "break-up" with book reports in my class. To me they were busy-work take home projects that your creative students put a lot of attention in to and end up with the same grade as the students who scrape by and put only the required minimum in to them. Also, I am not fooled into thinking that my students read their book in its entirety. I have tech-savvy 5th graders who have the same online resources that I did when I was a student who didn't want to read the entire book. OK so enough about my book report thoughts....I came to the conclusion that I NEED my students to LOVE reading! And so that is what I set out to do in my classroom this year. We set out to spend many more minutes READING for the love of READING in my classroom. MORE ABOUT THOSE THOUGHTS TO COME LATER....

Here is the book I was referring to...

Moral of that LONG paragraph was that in my classroom, students are not bound by their reading levels. Therefore, I pick books that I can hook them with. The students rank their picks in order in which they would want to read them. I select groups based on their top picks (with a small behavior consideration of course). Then they get together and READ!!

Last year I feel victim to the endless copies and the JOBS each student needed to complete in books clubs. I get it...it creates a grade and holds each student accountable. BUT it does not encourage reading or comprehension. Instead I focus in on a skill every couple of days and allow the students to demonstrate their knowledge of that skill.

For instance, one skill we focused on was character! About 1/4 of the way into the book, I asked the students to analyze their character. I asked them to use character traits for the inside and outside to tell me about the character. I asked them to tell me about problems the character was facing and to look for solutions that may come along. I asked them to look for ways that they character has changed as a person. This took them two to three reading sessions to complete and they could add and change it as they please. The assignment took them about 5 minutes each day, but I KNEW that they were actively reading and THINKING about the character in the story.

Another skill we have focused on is DISCUSSION. I challenged my students to come up with a THICK and open-ended discussion question to share with their group. We went over good vs. bad questions and I set them on their way. They got it! It clicked! I was so proud of the effort they put into thinking this through...but the fact that I modeled until I couldn't model anymore might have had a little to do with it.

Currently they are working on SUMMARIZING and PREDICTING with this quick recording sheet.

This was meant to be a short post to share TWO books that I read with my students and fell in LOVE with...my apologies on the short novel that led me to these points:

1. Make Book Clubs MEANINGFUL!! Don't give lengthy assignments each time that require lots of WORK from you as the teacher. Focus on allowing the students to READ!
2. Skip "follow up" assignments that resemble boring book reports. Again, make it meaningful!
3. Throw out the BOOK TESTS!!! (see #4)
4. Read THE BOOK WHISPERER by Donalyn Miller- it will change your reading instruction for the best! And for the best I mean for the students and their LOVE of reading!

Here are the two books I fell in love with:

This is a super CUTE and FUNNY read for pre-teens! It was a story that kept me and my students laughing and wondering what they outcome would be.

I am a SUCKER for Mike Lupica books. He had me hooked when I was in college and buying books for my classroom all the time. His books have a wonderful story line and are one-day readers for those with the time! This one was no exception. I had boys and girls in this group and they all LOVED this one. It talks about families in hard times and I think all of my students were able to relate to this at some point in their lives. Even my off the charts high reader (who had already read this book) told the whole group that they would not be disappointed. His books are perfect for your sports enthused boys and girls! I am considering reading this one again already...

My kids LOVED being able to pick their reading groups so much that they BEGGED me to start another round of Book Clubs even if it meant that they would have only two weeks to finish the book clubs before our Thanksgiving Break! I firmly believe that my knowledge and research from Miller's book is helping my kids grow their own LOVE for reading!

Graphic from HERE

TEACHnology in the Classroom!!

I attended a local conference here on campus (Missouri State University) for RCET and gained SOOO many new technology resources for my classroom!! Let me introduce you to a few of these gems!!

The first one is called "Lino"  (find it HERE)

Lino is an online sticky-note board that your students can post to. I posted "Name a positive personality trait" and the kids all added their traits to the board. These are updated live and can be moved around on the board! I just gave my students the web link to my sticky-note board and they posted away!! I know the options on this one are endless and that you can even create student accounts, but this is as far in it as I have gotten! It is VERY easy to use and is FREE!!

Another one I have used is called Literably!

This is a website that you can upload your students names to and helps with Running Records. You input your students names, select their reading level, assign a passage to them, and then they read the assigned passage, answer comprehension questions, give a re-tell, and POOF!! POOF means you submit it to the site (or use the APP that is WAY easy for your kids to use) and they complete the running record for you!!! Yes, you heard me...they analyze the running record and comprehension FOR YOU!!!!!!!  You can only submit 10 a month or else you have to write the small company and work out a small fee, but BAM within 24 hours they return the record to you ANALYZED!!! Talk about a time saver!!

Doceri is an APP that will allow you to navigate your computer screen FROM YOUR IPAD! It is also FREE!! This app can be downloaded on your IPad and your desktop computer in order to be able to access both! So for those of us who want to teach from around the room without being tied to the computer, this is perfect!! I have not been able to put this one into action yet, but I have heard AMAZING things about it!!

Diigo is another APP that is wonderful for adding to your browser! It can be downloaded on a desktop computer or IPad. Diigo is an annotation app that will allow your students to capture what they are reading, highlight from a website, collect and store information from websites, share information from sites, and sooo much more. This is geared towards an upper ele or middle/high school audience. When you create an account you can highlight something on a webpage using the Diigo browser tool bar and it will save it to your Diigo account! This would be PERFECT for students who are emerging into research papers! Check it out!!

Finally, my FAVORITE and my kids ABSOLUTE FAVORITE...KAHOOT!!!

Kahoot is a "Game Based Class Response System." You create a multiple choice "quiz" through Kahoot and then launch it for your students. The students can use ANY device to access kahoot.it and then enter the "Game Pin" to sign in to your quiz. Once students are signed in you begin the quiz. It presents the question on the board and they select their answer on their device. It gives them points based on how fast they respond and if they are correct or not. It displays the score after each questions which is fun for the kids! At the end it displays the top 5 and allows you to download all of the kids' scores. You can then look at it in an excel sheet and see exactly what questions each student missed. There are also THOUSANDS of quizzes that you can use that other people have created! We use this for inside recess too! There are random quizzes for logos and Disney movies as well as every educational topic imaginable. This is a BIG WINNER in my class! (*Note each student must have a device of some kind to do this. My class is 1:1 laptops, but I allow them to use any device when playing. Some choose to use an IPad, Tablet, or even phone.) 

What are your TEACHnology favorites??? 

Fraction Action and Character Types

My last post was a long one about our Character Study Unit! We are almost finished with our book and have been getting into how to write a character analysis essay. I am forcing them to really dig deep with this one! Here is one last Character "Thing" that we have done...

I made this page for them to fill out on their own and paste it into their Reading Interactive Notebooks. (This will be added to my Character Analysis packet on TPT-See previous post) We fill it out together and talk about specific examples. There is also a good flat/round character YouTube Video that we watched that can be found HERE.

We made an anchor chart similar to this one found on Pinterest with nothing other than the image:












We are going to begin our Characterization Foldable Friday and being with Thesis statements and the Analysis on Monday!

We have been studying fractions this week and I found these awesome FREE Fraction Task Cards! They are from HERE. There were only 3 in this set, but it worked great for my classroom. The task cards are designed for students to create fractions based on pattern blocks. Then they have to justify how they know their design represents the fraction that they were given. Explaining or justifying is not a strong point for most. BUT some of them just amazed me with this!!

 Here they were tracing their design. Next they had to color it to match the blocks they had used.

Finally they had to explain or "Convince Me" as the Task Card says how they know it is an accurate representation. 

Here is some of their work:

Yesterday we did this Fraction Smarties activity:

FOUND HERE - Click on the Image to go to the ORIGINAL BLOGGERS POST WITH DOWNLOAD LINK :) 

What are your favorite upper level fraction activities?? 

Character Changes

We have been working on studying characters. We read both Amazing Grace and Boundless Grace this past week to work on inside/outside character traits and changes in character traits. I will post more on that tomorrow! BUT for now...I took a lesson/foldable idea from HERE about using a Patricia Polacco book to teach character changes. I think P.P. by far has the best selection of upper elementary read alouds! Here is the foldable we made (picture from HERE) THIS IS NOT MY PICTURE!!! SEE THE LINK ABOVE FOR THE SITE IT CAME FROM!! I WILL POST MY PICTURES TOMORROW!!



I used a newer Patricia Polacco book titled Bully. And it was absolutely PERFECT for my group of kids!! I could not have randomly picked a better selection for my 5th graders! This hit the reality of social media on the head! Not to mention it show character changes perfectly!! I will even use this when we dive into character conflict later this week!



An upper elementary read aloud MUST in every classroom!!!!!!!

Main Idea

I RESOLVE to post my more in 2015!! ;)

We have only been back to school for 4 days (I am soooo lucky to have an entire month off for Winter Break)!!! In those 4 days we have been hitting it hard with Main Idea!! I have always found myself frustrated with teaching main idea, but this year it seems like 2nd time is the charm!

We started with this anchor chart:

It was short and simple. We can re-use it each time we read something that is Main Idea worthy! It will stay hanging in our room. We read an article on teaching Computer Science (coding) in classrooms from our Time 4 Kids magazine. Then we worked together to pick out the main idea and supporting details. We also threw in some close reading as we re-read the article each time looking for more and with a different purpose.

We followed that up with a worksheet for practice from this packet (click on the picture to go to the item):

This was a success! They did very well with it and I was able to see which students are still looking for a main topic vs a main idea! 

So the next day I broke out some more T4K magazines (I obviously don't get to them on a regular basis and have a stock pile. BUT they are great for Non-Fiction units!). We followed our close reading process and I read it aloud first. Then we picked apart the main idea and added it to our foldable. Then the students dug in to look for TEXT BASED EVIDENCE to support the main idea. Here is the foldables that we made! They did an excellent job and are really getting good with TBE. 

The article we used. Notice all the N-F Text Features :) 

My model

Again the model

Student sample (Main Idea in the middle- TBE on the flaps) Notice this student even references the line number!! Points on the TBE graph :) 

The finished product!

What is up next: More Main Idea Practice! I am going to have to dig even deeper to come up with more practice passages and activities, but I am sure I will come up with something. We are moving on next week to a project that ties together with our biography study and our NF Text Feature "review."

ONE day away from a three day weekend! Woo!

Point of View

I am not falling off the blog wagon! I want to share my 5th grade activities with others out there :) (Maybe I was talking to myself a little this morning:)

We have been working on Point of View so far this week. We are studying it during our writing time, but have been applying it to both reading and writing. I found some really great ideas HERE and have been moving right along. I started Day 1 with introducing the 3 P.O.V. and talking about them. Then we watched the Toy Story video clip that is at the link above. The students loved watching this and were able to really look and retell the story from each characters POV.

Then we created a poster together using a picture as a prompt. I followed both of the lessons from Teaching With a Mountain View and they worked GREAT!!

Here is our class poster:

Here is the group posters: (Disclaimer- I really can't wait to get my classroom digital camera in! My phone just doesn't cut it! Sorry for the blur!)

I also made these wonderful posters and a black and white copy that the students pasted in their Language Arts Journals. Here is the link to the FREE Black and White Posters. Purchase the Glittery Posters HERE.

My next plan for POV...bring it into writing with this writing prompt (found here):

One final closing thought...My baby boy turned ONE on Sunday! Isn't he just adorable :)

Narrative Writing Unit

Let us talk about Narrative Writing...

I have found a new website that I have come to LOVE! It is called The Curriculum Corner! It has awesome lessons, units, ideas, organizers, check-lists...and so on. AND best of all: they are FREE!

That is where I found the basis for my own Narrative Writing Unit. We have been focusing on writing our own personal narrative picture books. We are still in the drafting phase, but have been reading and inspecting elements each day.

Go HERE to see the Whole Unit! (Note this is recommended as a 2nd grade aligned unit, but the read alouds are wonderful! I find it fitting for my kiddos as well!)

It has also been very convenient to tie all of this into my reading block as well. We have been covering story structure, main idea, close reading strategy (on-going in my room), character analysis, and will be moving into theme next week.

We have been tracking the Story Structure on an anchor chart like this (mine isn't as pretty so go to her site and take a look at Mrs. Jump's version-pictured below):


WE have been seriously practicing using Text Based Evidence and have been graphing our use of such evidence. I bought this from TPT, because I was sooo in love with it! Check out this TBE graph and what it does. I honestly think my 5th graders are really into it and have become much better at using TBE to support their thinking. This what the graph looks like...

(***NOTE***THIS IS NOT MY PRODUCT! GO TO HELLO LITERACY LINKED ABOVE AND CHECK OUT HER AMAZING POST ON HOW TO USE THIS GRAPH.)
I seriously encourage you to RUN over to her blog and check out this product from Hello Literacy!!

Ok...I am going to stop there for now! I can't imagine life without Pinterest and TPT!! Maybe I will get around to adding more of my own products soon.

Life in 5th Grade...and Inference!

I am back in the blogging world! I have decided that I need to become more active and blog about my teaching! I am now teaching 5th Grade in a Laboratory School. My kids have their own laptops which they are required to bring every day.

With that said...last week we talked about inference. (We previously and very briefly as it was a review covered Non-Fiction Text Features and Genres)

I found on the internet inferring using the text The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg. I honestly had never read this book, but fell in love with it as I read it with my kids. A good reference I found after the lesson was from Teaching With Blonde Ambition. We read the text together and made our inferences together as a class.

The following day we dove into The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Can Allsburg. My kids love these as well! I gave them a table with 4 columns. The columns were Picture Title- What I Observed, What I Wonder, What I Infer. They had to fill it out on their computer and submit it to me online. HERE is a copy of the recording sheet I used.

Up next for inferring...Inference Detectives from my TPT store. To be followed by inferring with direct quotes from the text. I see the direct quoting part taking me all week. Wish me luck! What do you use for teaching inference??  I also can't wait to use Harris Burdick for writing mysteries!!

Punch Cards and 2 Posts in 1 Day- GIVEAWAY!!

Wooo Hoo! 2 successful posts in 1 day!! A serious record in this household! I have been crossing things off the To-Do list today (which is better than just adding to it like most days)! 

I have decided to use incentive punch cards this year for Spelling and thought while I was at it I would make several other incentive cards. I have made 8 different punch cards.

Spelling Test Punch Card (5 punches)
Homework Punch Card per assignment (12 punches)
Homework Punch Card per week (5 punches)
Whooo's Got Good Behavior? Punch Card (Owl Theme 22 punches)
Roundin' Up Good Behavior (with girl clip art 22 punches)
Roundin' Up Good Behavior (with boy clip art 22 punches)
Reading Punch Card (1 punch = 10 minutes; 10 punches)
All Star Behavior (20 punches)

Here is a preview of a few of them...

Click HERE for the product in my TPT Store!!

While I am at it...I will GIVE AWAY a set of either the Punch Cards or Post Cards to the first two people who comment on this post with one of their Back to School Goodie plans or ideas! Please leave your email address so I can send them your way!