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Making the CCSS fit with seriously outdated curriculum can be incredibly challenging!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.  

GCF, LCM, eieio!

Oh fractions.  Who doesn't love teaching them?!  It is probably one of the most difficult units in Math.  A teacher used a block letter F to show GCF and a block letter M to show LCM.  So simple, so absolutely fantastic!  These two lessons were not confusing at all.

I used Microsoft Word and typed (in 250 font) an F and then went to "font" and clicked on "outline" to get a block letter.  I made them large enough that I got 4 on a page.  I ran them off back to back so that the students had 8.  I did the same for the letter M.

GCF:
I started off my lesson with a quick reminder that factor + factor = product.  Then we looked at the multiplication chart on the wall and just called out factors of a given number.  Then I passed out the page with the block letters. At the bottom of the F, write down a number.  Then in the upper parts of the F, write out the factors.  The teacher who originally did this used an arrow to link the two lines.  The class and I did the front side together, they did the back side in partners.  We did the guided practice problems in our book together. When it came time for independent practice, they were ready.

LCM:
I did Jennifer Runde's math journal page with the "egg-cellent multiples" and reminded the students that multiples are skip counting.  We discussed how the GCF is finding factors that numbers have in common, and the LCM is finding the products that numbers have in common.  Our next activity was to take term LCM and do the Frayer Model and really get what the term means and what it looks like. I also lifted this from another teacher (not sure who it was though, will come back and tag when I locate). Then we did the block M page.  Again, 4 on the front, 4 on the back, 4 together, 4 in partners.  As with the GCF lesson, the LCM lesson took a couple of days and lots of practice. Using the block letters and all the journaling really helped the students understand each term and they could apply it without mixing the two.

Snowflakes and Decimals

We are on a modified traditional schedule.  This means that I am off from the Friday before Thanksgiving to the first regular day after New Year's Day.  I no longer do any holiday art.  I am also in California which means we don't know the first thing about the snow aspect of winter.  Because I sort of miss creating holiday art, I consoled myself with snowflakes yesterday.  I saw the snowflakes from Mor at A Teacher's Treasure and loved them!  My students enjoyed them yesterday too.  Because they were a bit more involved than I gave them time for, we'll be enjoying them on Tuesday morning as well!

 So, on to decimals.  This is totally a thank you post to Jennifer Runde.  Her awesome interactive math journal is well worth the investment.  The more I use foldables and journaling in math, the better my students get at producing and understanding.  We're finishing up with multiplying with decimals and heading to dividing with decimals.  Usually this worries me, and sets me up to be frantic during fractions, but I am not anxious at all this year.  We review every day.  We journal every day.  We refer to our foldable every day.  The students know what to do every day.  Easy peasy. 

On Mondays and Wednesday I introduce new lessons.  We do our journals and a foldable (if applicable) or a table or some graphic.  Then we do some practicing together.  After that, my students work independently for awhile, then work together to review their work and discuss mistakes.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we review the previous lesson and do a few more problems together, then the students continue to practice.  

As always, they do Calendar Math from Stephanie Moorman which gives them continued opportunities to practice place value, fractions, decimals, mean/median/mode, and operations.  Again, well worth the small investment.  The returns are priceless. 

Math - Exponents

We did Exponents today and it was a fabulous lesson.  It was one of the those lessons where everything fell into place.  I typed in "exponents" into the search bar on Pinterest and found a foldable with a sentence strip and some candy corn! The sentence strip foldable is from To the Square Inch and it was a huge hit with the students.

I asked them to fold it into 8 parts, then asked them to write two to the 6th power and then had them fill out the rest of the "boxes" created by the folds.  I did not have them fill out the last one, the answer.  I had them go back and write out the standard and then we wrote the objective and highlighted the appropriate words: repeated multiplication.  Then I asked them to figure out the answer to the sentence strip problem.

Sorry it is sideways.  I cannot figure out how some pictures turn over and some stay upright. 

After we glued our sentence strips into our journals, I handed out the candy corn blacklines to the students.  I found this on TpT via Pinterest (Stacy DiNello).  I made the definition fit my needs, but it was a great idea!

I walked the students through the definition.  Then we labeled the parts (base, exponents), reviewed the key idea: *repeated multiplication* and I asked the students to solve 4 to the 3rd power.  A few of my math whiz kids got this immediately.

Then we paused to color.  Coloring is important.  *I* find it incredibly relaxing!  The students appreciate the brain break. Please excuse my messy coloring!  I did some guided practice.  Under some of the problems, I wrote in words what the numbers were saying so the students could more easily follow along.  It was at this time that I reminded them that 4 to the 3rd power could also be identified as 4 cubed.  I showed them the 10s trick that the number of zeros was the same as the exponent number.  After we walked through 8 guided practice problems, I gave them my ticket out the door paper and had them solve two exponent problems. It was very enlightening! 19 students did this easily.  Five students were able to write the exponents, but did not do repeated multiplication.  Instead they multiplied the base by the exponent. Two students were just completely lost.  So, tomorrow, I have two small groups to work with while my other students do the independent practice on their own.  I was very pleased with the lesson outcome today.

And then do you know what happened later this morning?  My district blocked Pinterest!  Hmphf.  Now I have to email our Tech Support and ask them to unblock it. 

Class Elections and Cootie Catchers

CLASS ELECTION

We have not had a Student Council in a few years.  This year we've got one again.  Our election in our class was so awesome for me.  This past week was not one of the best.  Lots of deadlines all in the same week.  Such fun! I squeezed in nominations, campaigning, and the election into an already crammed week.  As you know, when you cram things in, they are not done with justice.  Except this time, these children stepped up on their own.  It was a sweet thing to watch.  I walked through the the nomination process of nominating, seconding, etc.  We got ten candidates.  I allowed the ones who did not want to run to bow out of the race.  We ended up with six candidates.

On their own, they made posters and campaigned.  It was so cute!!  I was amazed.  The candidates made their promises and told why they'd be the best representatives for the class.  One girl (one of the two eventually elected) said she would make a great representative because she had a lot of school spirit and showed it.  Yes she does.  Our election coincided with mustache day and she was sporting a walrus mustache while wearing a school t-shirt.

When it was time for elections, I was just going to pass out ballots.  The students were having none of that.  They wanted voting booths.  They wanted pomp and circumstance!  I dug out my homemade privacy shields, got a box for dropping in ballots, and started calling students back to the voting area. They had a blast.  I had a blast watching them.  Then I tallied up the votes and we had two new representatives!

COOTIE CATCHERS

I was reading on Runde's Room about how she uses cootie catchers.  I love cootie catchers!  I marked off the lines, added in the information I wanted them to focus on, and used them for a math review for the chapter test.  The kids were really engaged in the review!  I gave them a sheet for figuring and writing down answers, and they used a clipboard--but not text books or math journals.  I told them they had to answer all eight questions.  They moved around the room and worked with a partner.  I think I will use them as a review for Science as well.  The possibilities are endless.  As a result of the math journals and the review, for the first time ever, my students did well on the Place Value chapter!  Yay!!