Monday Made It

Happy Monday!

It's Parent-Teacher Conference day for us, so I'll be wading through-although we have Tuesday off!

My first made it is my new blog design!

I went from this...

To what you see now!

It was partially inspired by the blanket I'm working on,

and it took quite some time to do (Thanks Google Search!). I'm not 100% in love with it, but I don't know enough html to fix it, and I'm too cheap to pay for a professional. I like it enough :)

For my next made it-I finally finished my tree paintings!

 I thought about hanging them this way ^, but decided they would look better this way!

This way, you can see the continuing cycle of the tree better :)

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn

Descriptive Writing~Show, Not Tell

We've been working lately on making our writing more descriptive-and using show, not tell to help us with that.

I took some inspiration from last year, and the year before.

The basis of this lesson came from here.

We started out by talking about how to do descriptive writing, and what makes for a more interesting story.

Which led to the creation of an anchor chart :)

 I then wrote sad on the board, and we brainstormed different ways sad looked like.

We then wrote a 'tell' and a 'show' and I asked the students which one they would like to read. Hands down, the 'show' won!

We then did the same thing for happy.

I then used my brainstorm to draw a picture to 'show' what it looked like, and to give them an example of how to over-exaggerate it to 'show' while writing.

They then got a sticky of an emotion that they needed to draw.

After they spent some time thinking and drawing their emotion, we did a gallery walk.

This was for the others to see what their peers where doing, to see if they could guess what emotion was being shown (and if they didn't guess correctly or close, that friend needed to go back and make adjustments to their picture), and offer any suggestions.

 I made it clear that they did not have to take the suggestions, although they might want to think about how they could make it better.

They used sticky notes to share their thoughts.

After I gave them a few minutes to adjust or finish their pictures, I gave everyone an index card.

Using their picture, I had them write a 'tell' sentence and a 'show' paragraph. They were able to use the chart to help them-since it gave the perfect examples! ;)

I love how they turned out! I only hope they remember to incorporate into their writing :)

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn

Currently

Happy November!

This month, I reached buying over 800 Kindle books (in less than 4 years!!)(currently 814 with many more preorders to come in the coming weeks-I've had new books delivered every week since the beginning of September to the beginning of December!)-and they are all romance! I'm a huge romance fan-it's all I read other than kids books and professional books! :)

I need some advice! I'm working on my seasonal tree series, and I need some opinions of which set to go with.

Set One-

or Set Two-?

I *think* I have a preference, but would like some double-checking! Thank you!

Enjoy 'falling' back!

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn

Five for Friday

Happy Halloween!



We did Multiplication Monsters last week with a sub :)

They turned out so cute!
Our Mentor Sentence book is I Need My Monster, which we have been doing some cool visualizing with.

I love this book-you should definitely get it if you don't have it!

We did Diane's Candy Corn Math-they worked so well together! (And were super disappointed when I said I didn't have enough for them to eat-made for a little bit of a happier teacher-no off the wall bouncing!)

Funnily enough, when I put the totals on the board, I was pleasantly surprise...

I don't think I could have planned that better! I just grabbed handfuls and put them into bags-how cool is that! :)


We'll be starting our Rocks and Minerals lessons soon. We have someone come in from a local naturalist center to teach it.

To start it off, we talk about cookies! I had the kids make a list of ingredients that you find in a chocolate chip cookie.

Then we came together and we shared our ingredients.

We talked about how you can't see all the ingredients in the cookie. I explained that cookies are like rocks, and you can't see all the ingredients in them. So if the cookie is the rock, the ingredients are the minerals!

They'll be learned a lot more about minerals and how to classify them and study them. This was a good intro to a really fun set of lessons!

I need some advice! I'm working on my seasonal tree series, and I need some opinions of which set to go with.

Set One-

or Set Two-?

I *think* I have a preference, but would like some double-checking! Thank you!

Have a scary one!

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn

Mind Movies

We've been working this week on visualizing while we are reading.

Of course, we started with an anchor chart. :)

Then we started by doing one of my very favorite visualizing activities (which I'll be using for my formal observation soon!).

I gave each student a piece of paper, and had them divide it into fours.

Then, I covered the the cover of the book, and read it to them without showing any pictures.

The book I choose for this....

Our Mentor Sentence book for the week!

I had the kids draw each of the monsters (with Gabe on the back).

This is a GREAT book! If you haven't heard of it before, it's pretty darn cool (and Jivey has a packet based on it) and you can find YouTube videos on it before you commit. :)


Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of their very cool monsters :(. 

After we finished, we shared all our pictures, and talked about how even though we all had the same words, our mind movies were all different (because we all had different schema :)

Then, we moved onto their practice-using Teaching With a Mountain View's FREE Visualizing Task Cards.

They're doing a pretty good job! 

I love teaching them this skill-it's an easier one for them to get! (And, boy, would my class yell at me-I used the 'e' word! ;)

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn

Five for Friday

Happy Friday!

After a few years of teaching social studies, I finally wised up enough to explicitly teach physical and human features.

My district paid for a subscription to TeachScape, which is based on the Danielson evaluation model. It takes you through the domains and gives examples for each level. It takes a couple of hours per domain, but it's been cool so far!

We have been making inferences again!

Video Here

I had a half day webinar this morning on Math in Focus.

It was pretty good-a lot of justification of what I'm already doing, and I got some info on timing for the lesson.

Since I was out, I needed to plan for a sub! We are doing double-digit multiplication, but I couldn't leave that for a sub.


Searching through my files, I found this Multiplication Monster (which I searched for the link and found for FREE!)

My kids loved it and it gave them some fun practice!

Have a great weekend!

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn