Tag: teaching

Jalapeno Bagels

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions.

Jalapeno Bagels. By Natasha Wing

You can find a copy of this book in the red Multicultural Fiction bucket in the bookroom.

No lesson plans are included with the book, but if you visit this site and click “Lesson Overview,” Kathryn Felten shares her ideas.

Learn more about the author at her Web site. You can even set up a Skype conversation with her!

If you’d like to see some vocabulary and comprehension PowerPoint presentations related to Jalapeno Bagels, check out this site.

If you’d like to study the vocabulary in this book, a virtual stack of flashcards is available here.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggestions:

Comprehension

  • Use prior knowledge to connect with the text. I have decidedly mixed feelings about this book. I like that it highlights a multiracial family based on an actual family in California. But I don’t know how I feel about some pieces that could be seen as caricatures or stereotypes (Does the Dad really need to wear owlish glasses and have full facial hair?). Wildwood has a pretty significant Hispanic population. I think it’d be interesting to see how our students feel about the portrayal of the Mom. Are they pumped because a Mexican-American family is featured? Or do they find the depth of the characters lacking? What are their experiences?
  • Summarize text, include sequence of main events. This book is short and simple enough that it would be a good resource for a lesson explaining the differences between retelling and summarizing.

Expand Vocabulary

  • Use dictionaries, thesauruses and glossaries as tools. Jalapeno Bagels has a multilingual glossary in the back. Talk with students about the fact that fiction books that contain multicultural or international components often contain supplemental material in the back. This could be particularly useful for intermediate students who have gotten out of the habit of doing picture walks before reading.

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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So, You Want to Start a Math Team?

Part 1: Thinking it Through

Congratulations! Thanks for being a teacher, family member, administrator, or volunteer who loves and values math! Copious amounts of research verify that our kids (and teachers!) need to change their attitudes toward math, particularly as they get older, and particularly if they’re female. An elementary school math team is a terrific venue for improving those perceptions, and they also foster teamwork and school pride.

Math Teams are fantastic for a billion reasons. Wildwood Elementary started its 3rd – 5th grade math team in the fall of 2008, and the amount the kids (and we adults!) have learned in three years is remarkable. In this series, I’ll detail some of the ideas and resources we found to be the most useful.

Before you get overwhelmed or get ahead of yourself (or both), ponder these logistical questions:

Who’s going to run this thing? If it’s you, sweet! You don’t need to have calculus under your belt in order to be an effective math team coach. If you want to help but you think you need someone else to take the lead, contact existing math teams at your district’s middle and high school levels. Often, coaches will have suggestions for you, or they might even volunteer to help you get started! Of course, your elementary school principal, math facilitator, or other interested teachers are great resources too. Personally, e-mail is the best way for a family member to reach out to me. If you’re more of a phone person, calling after school is best. Before school, my brain is filled with the day ahead of me.

Where can we meet? How often? If you haven’t already contacted an administrator or classroom teacher, talk with your school’s office manager about securing a space and a time. Wildwood meets on Tuesday afternoons for an hour after school. During competition season, we also have an optional Thursday practice. We started our practices in the library, but it wasn’t always available. Now, we meet in my classroom, but my students always grab a few extra chairs before the end of the day so everyone will have a seat for Math Team.

What paperwork do we need to fill out? For our math team, we needed to send out the district’s blanket Activity Permission Form. (we had to explain to a lot of families that it was just a generic form, as it included statements relinquishing liability for “bodily harm.” “Is this a contact sport?” one parent asked us) We had to fill out a facility use request for our meetings. We also needed to file field trip requests and collect permission slips for every competition, even if students were responsible for their transportation.

How many people do we anticipate? How many can we handle? We had a TON more people our first year than we anticipated. Part of that was because many parents believed Math Team was a tutoring assistance program rather than a challenging enrichment experience. Clarity in your initial conversations with interested families will help your program run smoothly regardless of the number of students. Our first year, we were able to handle 50 students with two teachers. We enlisted the help of high school math team members, and meetings this year seem significantly less draining.

What does transportation look like? When Wildwood had an after school program, we spoke with transportation, and on Tuesdays our Math Team kids were able to hop on the after school bus. Now that that program has been scaled back, we give our kids a carpool form at the beginning of the year to link kids who aren’t able to secure a ride with nearby teammates.

How will we reach all our eligible students? We translated our math team flyer into several languages and we had an information table open at Open House and at conferences. We talked with teachers about personally encouraging their exceptional students to join. I talked up math team in my daily class meetings.

How will we communicate with students and families? We send home flyers in students’ weekly Thursday folders. We use the district’s automated call-out system for reminder messages. Next year, we’re going to request families’ e-mails on our beginning-of-the-year permission slip.

Come back and visit us on Tuesday, and we’ll help you plan the year ahead of you. Be there or be the rectangle with the largest area!

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Classroom Library: Adding to Your Collection

JUST DISCOVERED: This AMAZING classroom library. From Troy, Michigan! My socks! They have been knocked off!

Who wouldn't want to select a good-fit book from this collection?

To view previous posts in this series, click below.

Classroom Library Part 1: Supplies
Classroom Library Part 2: Getting Started
Classroom Library Part 3: Filling the Shelves
Classroom Library Part 4: Library Upkeep

Your classroom library is awesome. Your kids are taking great care of it. How can you add new books without having the whole system fall apart?

Keep your supplies ready and nearby. I have a bucket (and you KNOW by now that it’s a Sterilite Ultra basket) that I keep filled with extra pockets, index cards, labels, and pens. The only extra step I need to make outside of the classroom when adding books is steal down to the library to borrow some AR tape.

Lolrus knows the value of a bucket.
Lolrus knows the value of a bucket.

Add quality books. Chances are, you have a lot of books. Unless you’re a brand new teacher, in which case you should get thee with all possible haste to a library book sale! So now that you’re past just filling the shelves, make sure you’re adding quality books. New books, unusual books, books you don’t have at the school library. Non-fiction books. Almanacs and books of facts. The vast number of children’s literature blogs is truly insane, so I just started reading Betsy Bird’s fantastic Fuse #8 Production and added from there.

Talk with your students about new additions. We’ve been reading a lot of recently published books checked out from the Seattle Public Library this year. The day before the ALA Awards are announced, we’ll hold a Mock Caldecott and I’ll buy the top three books to add to our classroom library.

Don’t be afraid to edit. Even with the best treatment, books get worn. Series become less popular. Non-fiction books become dated. You start to realize that the books you snapped up for crazy-cheap your first year of teaching haven’t been checked out since… your first year of teaching, if ever. Pass them on! If I pull a book from our classroom library, I cross out my name from the inside (but keep the pocket and card, of course) and put it in our staff room. If it doesn’t find a new home in a month, I take the books to Goodwill or the Seattle Public Library. Yes, I probably could sell the books on Craigslist or Amazon Marketplace, but I’d rather support the aforementioned nonprofits.

Please feel free to share and use this information as you see fit. If you’re able to take a moment to leave a comment, though, it completely makes my day and my students usually squeal with delight.

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Book of the Week: My Grandma, Major League Slugger

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions.

My Grandma, Major League Slugger. By Dan Greenburg

You can find a teacher copy of this book and the Targeted Treasure Hunt for it in the red Silly Book mentor text bucket in the bookroom. We have a complete set of lesson plans left over from our SFA book set, which might be useful for comprehension questions and vocabulary lessons. We also have 29 student copies, separated into book sets of six each and filed under Guided Reading level M.

The SFA suggested instructional goal is “questioning II,” which involves asking questions that can be proven in the text as well as asking higher level questions. There isn’t a CAFE menu in the bag yet, as I am writing this post during Snowpocalypse 2010 and I don’t have access to the copy machine.

If you’re using this in a unit on families, we also have book sets on grandmas for Fountas and Pinnell levels D and E (DRA 5 and 8), and a billion books on families. I’m sure there are many others that would fit into the category — I’ve only searched for books with grandma or families in the title or subject tags.

Additionally, you might also want to take the unit in the direction of women  making breakthroughs in baseball.

There was an all-women’s minor league baseball team that played in the 1990’s? They were neat.

Finally, Jim Trelease has some great sports read-aloud suggestions at his Web site (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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My Grandma, Major League Slugger

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions.

My Grandma, Major League Slugger. By Dan Greenburg

You can find a teacher copy of this book and the Targeted Treasure Hunt for it in the red Silly Book mentor text bucket in the bookroom. We have a complete set of lesson plans left over from our SFA book set, which might be useful for comprehension questions and vocabulary lessons. We also have 29 student copies, separated into book sets of six each and filed under Guided Reading level M.

The SFA suggested instructional goal is “questioning II,” which involves asking questions that can be proven in the text as well as asking higher level questions. There isn’t a CAFE menu in the bag yet, as I am writing this post during Snowpocalypse 2010 and I don’t have access to the copy machine.

If you’re using this in a unit on families, we also have book sets on grandmas for Fountas and Pinnell levels D and E (DRA 5 and 8), and a billion books on families. I’m sure there are many others that would fit into the category — I’ve only searched for books with grandma or families in the title or subject tags.

Additionally, you might also want to take the unit in the direction of women  making breakthroughs in baseball.

There was an all-women’s minor league baseball team that played in the 1990’s? They were neat.

Finally, Jim Trelease has some great sports read-aloud suggestions at his Web site (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Library book sales

In a few days, I’ll be sharing some of the best ways to add new books to your classroom library.

Hands down one of the cheapest (and most charitable) options is to pay a visit to your local Friends of the Public Library book sale. Some public library systems sell books by weight, some have a flat rate, and some even have a “Better Books” section where you can find brand new or nearly-new titles.

Here, I’ll share the step-by-step process I go through in preparing for a trip to a library book sale. If you live in the Seattle area, you can find out more about the SPL’s epic book sales here.

Last winter, Seattle was named the most literate city in the country, and despite suffering from the abysmal funding of its library system, it has some amazing things to offer.

Things like bags of books for crazy cheap. You must go.

One other tip, and I’m not really sure if this is totally legit. Last year, we went on the Friends’ preview night, where you’re limited to 25 books. We, of course, couldn’t limit ourselves to 25 books. But when another patron heard of our plight and saw we were from a school, she gave us her voucher, because she hadn’t bought all 25. Score! I obviously wanted to stay the rest of the evening and poach more voucher cards, but I was denied.

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Classroom Library: Library Upkeep

To view previous posts in this series, click below.

Classroom Library Part 1: Supplies
Classroom Library Part 2: Getting Started
Classroom Library Part 3: Filling the Shelves

Hopefully this hasn’t been a terribly painful process, but we can probably all agree that it has been a pretty significant amount of work. So I think we can also agree that after having invested the time and energy into setting up a fantastic classroom library, you probably want it to stay that way. Here are some ideas that have worked for our class.

Love your library. At the beginning of the year, all my bookshelves are covered with butcher paper or fabric. After we discuss classroom library expectations (I think there’s a primary literacy book for teachers that talks about a “proper treatment of books” lesson), we unveil one bookshelf at a time, talking about the books students will find there.

Let your students try out new books. Even if you know they’re way above their level. Even if you’ve done the “pick a just-right book” lesson a dozen times. Let them try out new books, BUT make sure you confer with them pretty quickly afterward and help steer them to a better fit book. You don’t want to stifle their interest in discovering new books!

Maintain high expectations. Wildcat Leaders (self-managers) are allowed to check out two books, and students who bring back their homework regularly are allowed to put a sticky-note in the check out book and bring their book home overnight. One of the reasons why I catalog my books is because my students know

Don’t let checking out descend into chaos. My students know they can check out a classroom library book on Monday morning as soon as they come into the room. If they’d like to check out a book before the following Monday, they can do so at the start of their recess. No exceptions. This might sound strict until you’ve seen 25 children trying to fit into a library corner. Other teachers in our building have students check out new books on the days when they turn in their reading response journal, and still others don’t have a firm policy, although I’m not sure how they manage to stay sane and not lose a million books.

Have a system for repair. My students know that if a book is damaged, they need to check it back in, put a sticky note on the cover explaining what’s wrong, then put it in the Ms. Houghton basket.

Show them the process. My students were flabbergasted when they discovered I bought most of our books with my own money. Their eyes nearly popped out of their heads when they went to the book fair and discovered that a new copy of Steve Jenkin’s Bones cost nearly $20 in hardcover. Just make sure you tell them in a tone meant to inform them, not as a threat to them or a complaint about the hardships of teaching.

Involve your class. Although my class is younger this year, I still have a librarian whose job is to daily comb through the library on his or her way to second recess to make sure books aren’t sticking out in crazy directions. About once a month, or whenever it’s awful outside and a bunch of kids beg to stay in at recess, I have them turn the book buckets around to look at the book bucket numbers to make sure everything’s in its correct bucket.

Keep it fresh. Find out how to expand your library without going insane by viewing our next installment in this series, Adding to Your Collection.

Please feel free to share and use this information as you see fit. If you’re able to take a moment to leave a comment, though, it completely makes my day and my students usually squeal with delight.

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Classroom Library: Filling the Shelves

To view previous posts in this series, click below.

Classroom Library Part 1: Supplies
Classroom Library Part 2: Getting Started

Hopefully, you haven’t agonized too much over the last two steps because I don’t want you to have lost steam. THIS is the important part — having plenty of texts at many different levels accessible to all students at all times. So let’s get started!

1. Figure out some kind of sorting system. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Remember how I asked you before how you were going to catalog your books and sort them? If you haven’t decided already, do it now. My books are sorted by genre/series (for fiction), and Dewey decimal number (for non-fiction). I have a few partner reading buckets that are sorted by reading level. Our school also uses Accelerated Reader, so my books are labeled with the schoolwide leveling system as well.

All our math books are in bucket 510. We talk in class about the fact that the Dewey Decimal uses at least three digits, so bucket 030 (books of facts) is different from bucket 30 (Judy Moody books).

2. Decide how you want to process and add your books. For me, this meant starting fresh — pulling every single book off my shelf and reintroducing them into the library as I processed them. It’s not the most efficient (I still have six boxes of books to catalog), but it helped keep my brain clear (a daunting challenge). You might want to sort your books into different bins first, or you might want to label them first.

3a. If you’re leveling books and/or cataloging books, open several tabs in your browser. Open your cataloging site in one tab, your leveling site (Renaissance Learning, Scholastic, Fountas & Pinnell, probably) in another. Open Pandora in a third so you don’t go crazy.

3b. Get your books in check-out condition. For me, this meant putting a book pocket on the inside title page (many people use the inside front cover because then you don’t block the inside title page, but I find that paperback books are easier to keep open if you put them on the title page). I then wrote the title on an index card and inserted it into the book. I looked up the AR level of my book, entered the book into LibraryThing, and put the book in a stack ready for AR tape and bucket number.

Leveled and ready for check-out!

4. Sort your books. I put AR tape on the top of the spine of the book so the color can be seen when it’s sitting inside a book bucket. I stick a mailing seal to the upper left corner of the back cover of the book, and I write the book bucket number on the back.

AR Tape.

5. Add books to your library. Put your book buckets on your shelves, add your books to them, and admire your handiwork.

6. A word on templates. When I first organized my classroom library, I saved a ton of time by printing my book bucket labels and check-out cards in Microsoft Word (otherwise I would have had to hand-letter cards for my entire classroom set of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle). This also saves time if you have a lot of guided reading book sets. Now, if your printer is fussy or you’re a bit of a technophobe, templates will probably cause you more frustration than joy. If despite this you’re still finicky enough to want ALL your materials typed out, then you’ll want to see the templates I’ll be posting tomorrow in Library Upkeep.

Please feel free to share and use this information as you see fit. If you’re able to take a moment to leave a comment, though, it completely makes my day and my students usually squeal with delight.

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Book Talk

Here’s this week’s book talk!

Additionally, I spoke about Dinosaur National Monument at the end of the video. Here are a few pictures of what the area actually looks like. It’s amazing!

Dinosaur National Monument and Green River
In front of the fossil wall.

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