Striving for Creativity in the Common Core

I love foldables.  There.  I said it.  Last year my students called me The Foldable Queen and even referred to me as Your Majesty. I sure do miss that group of kids!  I had math down pat with foldables, ISNs, etc.  This year, we have a new program for math.  I'm excited about it because it addresses the new CCSS, but it doesn't leave much time for foldables or other engaging activities. My foldables aren't a daily thing anymore, but more as a way to kick off a chapter and/or to wrap up a chapter. We do refer back to them frequently and I allow students to use them during quizzes or tests. It's a great way to ensure they take good notes! The pictures are from the notes we took at the beginning of the chapter.  The foldable is part of a math pack I got from Jennifer Runde that has been a God-send!!

     

Sometimes one can get a class that can't work in groups if their lives depended on it.  This year I have such a group.One of the standards/practices that "they" want kids to do now is to work collaboratively. The only way I can do this with this group of kids is to have them on a very short time limit when I place them in pairs or triads. Today we were multiplying with money. They were asked to identify what they had to solve, then the information they needed to get that solution.  Then they had to set up the problem using a diagram. We did one together and I had them do one in a triad.  I gave them 7 minutes.

It was rather successful.  Today.  I miss doing a foldable or graphic every day in math.  The new math program, Go Math by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has everything all laid out and is on two double-sided pages for each lesson.  But I miss drawing and coloring and cutting and gluing in math.  I'm working on getting back to that comfortable place.  During the first year of an adoption, it's hard to know when to stay and when to stray.

Making the Common Core fit with pre-CCSS curriculum: Literature

Making the CCSS fit with seriously outdated curriculum can be incredibly challenging!  I read a lot, follow teacher blogs, and get great ideas from fantastic educators on Pinterest.  My district has fully embraced the CCSS and has provided a lot of professional development opportunities.  My principal has also provided us with PD hours to do book studies using books that are fresh and current in education. Having said that though, our ELA curriculum is 14 years old.  Yikes!!! There are some great stories in there, but... It takes some time to create lessons using the CCSS.  

I mostly teach novels, but sometimes I use our old Open Court anthology selections.  Two weeks ago I used Love as Strong as Ginger.  It's a cute story about a girl who spends Saturdays with her Grandmother.  There is a LOT of figurative language!!  I made flip books for figurative language notes which were glued into our ELA journals. I printed out two poems by William Carlos Williams to use to introduce the topics of mood, tone, and imagery.  We read only two-three pages each day and practiced close-reading strategies, using ou journals to take notes. It was a smash hit with the students.  To have them so excited about an anthology story is rather rare!  

We highlighted words that helped us with tone, mood, and imagery.  Then we drew what image came to mind.  
















 I really wanted the students to feel comfortable using words like tone, mood, and imagery.  I provided sentence frames for the students to glue into their journals in addition to the 8.5x11 size I put up on the wall. We used them over and over and over that week.  As part of the frame, I had them citing evidence each and every time they made a claim about any of those literary elements.  I hear "I know this because..." a lot now, no matter what we are reading.

The students were able to pick out a lot of figurative language on their own.  They were like language detectives!  

We hit four standards with one story.  I did not teach it the "Open Court" way, but planned my lessons the "CCSS" way and used an Open Court story.  

Key Ideas and Details

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.1 Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.

Craft and Structure

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.

Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.7 Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).

Making the Common Core fit with pre-CCSS curriculum: Informational Text

I've been reading about so many people who absolutely hate the new Common Core standards. It makes me wonder what are they seeing that I am not.  Is it a lack of training from the district/administrative level?  Is it a lack of materials that match the standards?  Perhaps I am in a district with an abundance of support.  I have enjoyed learning the new standards.  It's been fun for me to find new ways to deliver the same old curriculum. 

Below are some pictures from a lesson I did on water directly from our Science text.  The students enjoyed the "coloring" and recreating the graphics the authors used while taking notes in our foldable.  Note, the graphics are directly from the text books.  

Our Science chapter was called The Water Cycle.  I took a 12x18 sheet of white paper and did the shutter fold, then cut the "windows" so that I would have four. We labeled them for each subsection in the lesson.

From the Common Core State Standards:

Key Ideas and Details

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.1 Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.2 Determine two or more main ideas of a text and explain how they are supported by key details; summarize the text.

• Craft and Structure

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.4 Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases in a text relevant to a grade 5 topic or subject area.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.5 Compare and contrast the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.

We quoted from the text, we determined the main ideas of each subsection, and we summarized.  In addition, we worked with domain-specific words and worked with the structures the authors used to deliver the information to us.  I used the CCSS when planning the delivery of this lesson.  Science is pretty easy to fit into the new standards.  I'll do the same in the next post with our very outdated Open Court story.  

 I LOVED this idea from Runde's Room using this block number to limit the students to the number of words used in the summary.  We did this for the first subsection of The Water Cycle lesson.  It really held them down to key details and they could not include too many details.