Apples Week

Wow, I now know why so many teacher blogs tend to disappear! With all the work of actually running a classroom, it is hard to find time to blog! I've been working sun up to sun down every single day, and still don't quite feel like I have a handle on things. But at least it is getting better... we're falling into some sort of a routine.

I like to do weekly themes, and during the first week of school I asked the kids to give me some ideas for future themes. But for the sake of being able to plan a little bit in advance, I had already chosen the first two themes. Last week we did Pete the Cat, and this week we did apples. Last week I was so rushed that I forgot to take any pictures and I barely even remember what we did. But this week was a little better, and I did get some pics to share.

Lets see... first of all, the ever important sensory bin. This week I poured in uncooked oatmeal, and added some apple pie spice to make it smell like apple pie! I had also bought these little apple erasers to use for a math game, and I added the extras to the sensory bin, Many of the kids love it! They get five minutes of free time at the end of our groups, and many of them choose to play with the sensory box.

For one of my math groups that is working on identifying numbers, I made a game called "Wormy Apple." It is played just like the game "Old Maid," but with a worm instead of an Old Maid. In case you've never played, players take turns blindly choosing a card from the hand of the person next to them, in hopes of getting a card that makes a match with one they already have. If they get a match, they set it aside. The Wormy Apple will exchange hands many times, and while the "winner" is the one who gets rid of all of their cards first, the good sport is the person who is left with the Wormy Apple when all of the other cards are gone. I made this with construction paper, but I might make a version for TPT if I get a minute. 

For my writing groups, I brought in a few actual apples, I made categories for each of the five senses on the white board. We went through and brainstormed words to describe the apples by sight, touch, sound, smell, and, finally, taste! This was harder than it sounds. They have a lot of trouble coming up with adjectives. Of course they all started off by saying "red" for the sight category, but then they couldn't get off the idea of color and kept naming random colors, such as blue. I had to really try to get them to look more closely at the apple. I was also trying to get them to veer away from using words like "good" as adjectives. But really, coming up with unique words to describe an apple is pretty tricky! Try it... we had a lot of trouble coming up with more than two or three words for each category.

Their favorite part of that activity was eating the slices of apples. Especially the golden apple, which they were convinced would give them extra energy. I think this is connected to Minecraft or something.

They then each chose a word from each category to describe the apple. We glued them onto apple shapes. At least they're supposed to look like apples. Some of the kids told me they didn't.

(This one says: My apple looks red. My apple feels light. My apple sounds loud. My apple smells flowery. My apple tastes sweet.)

On Fridays we always do a cooking project (and by always, I mean for the last two weeks, since that is how long we've been in school!) Last week we made Pete The Cat's Banana Pudding to go with the book Pete The Cat And The Bad Banana. It was basically just layering Nilla Wafers, vanilla pudding and banana slices in a cup, with a dollop of whip cream on top. This week we made mini apple pies. I found some packages of tiny graham cracker pie crusts at Safeway. The recipe was so simple, it was almost too quick... we just added a few scoops of apple pie filling to our pie crusts, sprinkled on some cinnamon and apple pie spice, and added our dollop of whip cream. (I enjoyed teaching them the word "dollop," because they like to add their own whip cream, and I didn't want them going crazy with it. I'm not sure dollop is an official unit of measurement, but it is a fun word, isn't it?)

Lets see... what else did we do?

I printed out this game from Kaylee's Education Studio. This is a game where you draw a card with an addition problem on it, and cover the answer on your worksheet. I colored the worksheets because I am a nerd like that, and I laminated them because I learned how to use the laminating machine and now I just need to laminate stuff all the time. We used the little erasers to cover our answers. I was actually afraid this game would go by too quickly for my short-attention-spanned math group. But it actually took us three days to play. THREE DAYS! Granted, each group session is just a half hour long, plus they always get there late and by the time I get them settled down we only have about twenty minutes left. But still... for three days, my math boys practiced addition happily. The reason we continued the game for three days is because they wanted to... they couldn't bear to leave the game unfinished. In fact, I'm pretty sure we're still not finished and we have to play it for at least ten minutes on Monday. 

With my 3td grade reading group, we read the book Apples, by Gail Gibbons. I love Gail Gibbons's books. They are so colorful and present such interesting information. Before reading it, we started a KWL chart, and then as we read we stopped so the kids could tell me facts they'd learned from each page. After we finished the book, I copied each fact down on a sentence strip. We sorted the strips into three categories: history, trees, and apples. I put magnet tape on the backs of the strips, so we could arrange them on the board in a sensible order. Then, for the next few days, the kids worked on copying the sentences and illustrating them. It was a lot of hard work for them, and I heard a lot of groans and grumbles, so I want them to see that their work created something pretty cool! 

Okay. I'm exhausted. I need to sleep. 

KABOOM! Game Variation

Hi everyone! Planning reading, writing and math lessons for six different groups with varying skill levels is a challenge. I like to have activities that engage the kids and let them have fun while learning and practicing, but sometimes all that thinking and making things is exhausting! Here is a game I sort of made up. It is actually a variation of the KABOOM! game that many teachers have used before (also sometimes known as BANG! and other loud noises)

The original KABOOM game goes like this: There are a bunch of craft sticks in a can. On most of the sticks, a number, letter, sight word, math problem, etc (whatever you want the students to practice) is written on the end of the stick that is at the bottom of the can and can't be seen. On a few of the sticks, the word KABOOM! is written, but also can't be seen. Without seeing what is on the sticks, players take turns drawing a stick. If they can say the letter or number, read the word, solve the problem, etc, they keep the stick. But if they get a KABOOM stick, they have to put back all of the sticks they've collected so far!

I actually first invented a variation of KABOOM while working with a first grader who would have gotten very upset and possibly violent if he had to put all his craft sticks back in the cup when he got a KABOOM stick. In my variation, the KABOOM sticks also say either -1, -2, -3, or -4, and that is how many sticks the player must put back if he draws the stick.

More recently, I added some more variations for some of my math groups.
For my first graders who are practicing number identification, tall players draw at the same time, and whoever has the highest number gets to keep all of the sticks... but if a player has KABOOM, he has to put back some of his sticks instead.

For my first graders who are starting addition, each player draws two sticks, and add the two numbers together, Whichever player has the highest sum gets all the sticks. Again, if a player has KABOOM, he has to put back some of his sticks. To help the kids who are struggling with addition, I added dots on the other side of the stick, so that they can count if they have to.

Just wanted to share that with you, in case anyone is looking for a last minute activity to throw together for a group!

A Sea Of White

As the first week of school comes to an end, here is something interesting to think about.
In the past, I have usually worked in school districts in low-income communities. The school I worked at in the state where I'm from had probably 75% of their students on free breakfasts and lunches. I've also had a lot of experience working with children who have been through trauma. So, when I first got hired, I asked the principal if the school had many children who were dealing with trauma.

The principal shook his head. He told me, "On the first day of school, what you will see is a sea of white. We are a very high income community."

I silently noted that I had not asked about race or income, but I didn't ask any more questions

Now that I've started getting familiar with the children on my caseload, I've heard about...

Three siblings who come to school dirty, tired and hungry each day and are often too listless to participate in class.
A student who comes to school tired because his family lost their home and he's been sleeping on the floor of his parents' friend's living room.
Two separate students who have witnessed domestic violence in their families.
Several students who are either in foster care or living with relatives because of a parent's drug addiction.
Several students who were adopted and experienced significant trauma as young children before their adoption.

The lesson I've seen here is that it may be easy to look into a "sea of white" and assume that every child there comes from a privileged background. But we really have no idea what any kid experiences once the school day ended, or what they went through before they came to us. One of my goals is to learn more about trauma sensitive teaching, so that I can be prepared to help any of my students who may have gone through these types of things.

What do you do in your classroom to help students who've experienced poverty, abuse, or other trauma?

Easy DIY Light Up Hanging Cloud Decorations

Hi everyone! You may or may not know that I love to do crafts. But I am not Martha Stewart by any stretch of the imagination. The crafts I love to do are simple and fun. They don't come out looking perfect, and may not be Pinterest-worthy, but they do tend to be pretty cool.

A while ago I decided to make my classroom have a sky theme. I love looking at the sky because there are always cool things up there, like rainbows and clouds and stars. Plus, so many inspirational quotes are based on the sky, like "The sky is the limit," and "Reach for the sky." Wait, no. I think that is what Woody from Toy Story says. "Reach for the stars!" That's better!

I was having trouble coming up with cool decorations for a sky themed classroom, and then I saw an idea on how to make hanging light-up cloud lights. I simplified the original idea until it was something even I could do. And now, I will show you! 

Just to let you know, I will mention a few brand names and even post a link to a product, but these are not sponsored links or anything. I'm just sharing what I used. You might know of a product that works better.

What you need: an empty pop bottle, some string, cotton or polyfill, duck tape, spray adhesive, and a string of battery operated lights.

I started by tying a string around an empty pop bottle, like so.

I added a little duck tape to keep the string from sliding around. I only had fireworks duck tape. It doesn't matter what sort of tape you use, because it is going to be covered up anyways.

Now it was time to start gluing the cotton onto the bottle. I experimented a little with this. I started out using regular Elmer's School Glue, by squirting some lines and dots onto the bottle and then sticking the cotton on. But I found that a more effective type of glue is spray adhesive. The kind I had was Elmer's Craft Bond.

I sprayed a small area of the bottle, and then stuck some cotton on.

I kept doing this, little by little, until the entire bottle was covered. I made sure the string was still hanging out, not getting stuck underneath all of the cotton, Then, I sprayed a layer of adhesive over the entire thing. This was to keep wads of cotton from falling off at inoportune times. It still might fall off, but the adhesive layer makes it a little sturdier.

The next step is the lights! I bought a set of Lings Moment Fairy Lights on Amazon. They are tiny white lights on a wire, and they are battery operated. I was able to loosely and randomly wrap the wire of lights around the fluffy cloud shape. I wrapped the battery compartment a few times around one of the wires, to keep it in place. I wanted it to stick out so that I'd be able to turn the light on and off easily, but I didn't want it hanging down too far.

To hang it, I simply put a 3M hook on the ceiling, and tied the other end of the string around it!

There you have it! Not exactly mindblowing, but quick, easy, and fun! I made four of these and I will probably make two more, since I have two more strings of lights.

The rest of my classroom is still a work in progress, but I can show you a few interesting areas, if you'd like. Remember, this is mostly a room where kids will take breaks and come to deescalate when they are upset, so I don't have a lot of academic stuff around.
This is the sensory box area. It will have more eventually, but right now it just has a sensory bin on a table, and some smaller sensory bins on the shelves. There is also a play-doh set and a box of fidgets.

Here is my little reading nook. In the academic room there are tons of leveled readers and stuff, but I wanted this to be just a relaxing area to kick back and  read. I found a bean bag chair, and I made another seat by tying a seat cushion to a milk crate. The big shelf is full of curriculum guides, so I covered it with a bed sheet. I'd like to fill the shelf up with kids' books. But this classroom used to be a storage room, and there is a bunch of junk in there that I have no idea what to do with, so I just cover it up.

Finally, here is what I call "The Cloud," following my sky theme. I bought a white duvet cover, and stuffed it with body pillows and some scrap foam I got for free at an upholstery store. It is just an area where kids can go when they are overwhelmed and need some quiet time.

That is my humble abode, everyone. I hope you like it!

Reach For The Stars

A few weeks ago I was having trouble even believing that l really did have a teaching job. Now it is becoming more real... I've gotten to read my kids' IEPs, and have been busy decorating my classroom and planning lessons.

Most of my readers are teachers, but those who aren't teachers might be surprised to learn that we have to use a lot of our own money to buy things we might need. The school supplies the basics... text books and tables and construction paper and stuff... but everything else, from classroom decorations to books to special supplies... we have to get ourselves. There is a finite amount that they will reimburse us for, but we are encouraged to spend that allotment on professional development.

So I was really happy that the people from "Get Childish" sent me a free set of The Glowers 2.0 to review. They are glow in the dark stars and planets that you can stick to your walls and ceiling. The description said that they would glow brighter and longer than other glow in the dark sets. My theme for my classroom is the sky, so stars fit right into my motif.

They came in the mail the other day, in a package that looked like this.

When I opened the box, here is what I found: A bag with tons of stars, and lots of sticky tack!

I started sticking them up on my ceiling right away. I have one of those ceilings with tiles that pop out easily, so I decided to stick the stars to the grid because I was afraid of touching the tiles. The first thing I noticed was that the stars seemed to stick really well. They didn't fall off after I stuck them up there.

After a while I tried shutting all the shades and turning off the lights. Unfortunately, the stars didn't start to glow. I think the main reason was because it was not really dark enough in the room. Even with the shades shut, sunlight was still able to get in through the narrow window on the door, keeping it from getting dark. I think I will bring some of the stars home and try them at night.

But that brings up another good quality. I've bought glow stars before, and usually they are very light colored, so that they cannot be seen at all during the day. I wanted my kids to be able to look up and see the stars, even during the day. I was glad that these stars are brightly colored, and can easily be enjoyed all of the time. I'm thinking of trying to find a way to hang some of them from strings from the ceiling.

I am going to finish decorating my classroom on Monday, just in time for Open House. I will post pictures of the whole thing then. I can't wait!

(#GetchildishGlowinthedarkstars)

You Know That Dream Where You're In School...

Do you ever have a dream where you're back in high school, or maybe elementary school even, and you suddenly realize you can't remember where any of your classes are? Maybe you lost your schedule, or you have it but when you look at it it makes no sense? I've had it a bunch of times, and other people have told me they've had versions of the same dream, so I guess it is not uncommon.

Today I felt like I was stuck in that dream!

Here is what happened. Today was my first day of new school year meetings at the new district I'll be teaching in. I had been sent several emails with the dates, times and locations of different meetings that will take place all this week. Today's meeting was supposed to be at the High School. I made sure to leave home early so I'd get there with plenty of time. I hate being the new person and having to walk in and find a seat in a sea of strangers, so my plan was that if I was one of the first people there, I'd have my choice of empty seats.

Just as planned, I arrived 15 minutes early at the high school, and found the room where the meeting was supposed to take place. But nobody was in there! Thinking I must be really early, I pulled out my phone to check my email in my spare time. I found that one of my new bosses had called me, and emailed me, saying that they hoped I was coming to the meeting. I replied to the email saying, "I'm at the room, but nobody is here. Did I get the info wrong?" I also tried calling her back, but it went to her office voicemail.

When there was no reply, I panicked. The name of the elementary school is similar to the high school, and although the info I had said "HS" pretty clearly, I thought maybe it didn't mean what I assumed it meant! So I left the high school, and drove to the elementary school. The doors were locked and the office was closed. Next, I drove to the district office. (This is a really small town, so all of these places are within about one minute driving distance from each other, luckily!) I went in and asked if the supervisor was around. I was told, "No, she's at a meeting." Trying not to get frustrated, I said that I was supposed to be at the meeting also, but that I'd gone to the room I was supposed to go to, and nobody had been there. The ladies in the district office assured me that the meeting was at the high school but that they did not know what room it was in.

Back to the high school I drove. This time I went into the office and asked someone there if they knew where the meeting was supposed to be. They told me it was in the room that I'd already been to. I walked down there again, just to make sure. Again, it was empty. I walked back to the office, at this point about ready to cry! It was half an hour past the meeting's start time!

The lady in the office spoke to someone else, and then said, "Oh, sorry, they changed the room number." She then walked me to the correct room, on the opposite side of the building, where the meeting was in full swing.

Doesn't it seem like someone would have notified me that the room was going to be different? Or put a sign on the door of the original room? And how did everyone else somehow know where they were supposed to be? My only theory is that, since most of the other people knew each other well already, the news had spread pretty quickly when the room number was changed. I, being out of the loop, didn't get the updates that everyone else did!

It was definitely not the first day I was hoping for. The rest of the meeting went okay, though. All of the people were very nice. But I hope I don't spend the rest of the school year frantically trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be!

8 Quick and SImple Classroom Carnival Games

Hi everyone! Our summer rec program has finally come to an end. I say "finally," but it feels like it went by extremely fast this year! I still can't believe it is over!

We usually go on field trips on Fridays, but for our last day of the program we had a carnival at the building instead. We have done that for the last few years... it is always a really nice, casual, fun day. We have a catered lunch for kids and staff, rent a few bouncy houses, and just party the day away!

I was so busy all summer that I pretty much had to whip up these carnival games at the last minute. I thought I'd show them to you, because a lot of the carnival game ideas I found online were really elaborate, things that looked cool but would take a lot of time, effort and money to put together, even for a backyard carnival party or something. But my carnival games were super simple, yet fun. They'd also be easy to turn into a "Carnival of Learning," which is something I used to do during the week of Independence Day when I taught ESY.

Here's what I had.

1. "Bozo Buckets." I came to the realization that most people who didn't grow up in Chicago don't have any idea what "Bozo Buckets" means. Since I grew up in Chicago but no longer live there, I had to explain this to a lot of people... you've probably played the game but called it something else. "The Bozo Show" was a kids' show that used to be on in the mornings, where they did a bunch of different skits and stuff. One of the things was Bozo Buckets, where two kids from the audience got picked to play. You had to start by throwing a ball into Bucket 1, and then Bucket 2, all the way up to the last bucket. If you missed a bucket, the game was over. For each bucket you got, you'd get a prize, and the prizes got progressively bigger until the "Grand Prize" which was in the last bucket.
My version was simplified. I only had four buckets, and the player could toss the ball into any bucket they wanted to. If the ball went in, the player won the number of tickets that was on the bucket! If you wanted to turn it into a learning game, you could write words or math problems on the ping pong balls and have the player read the word or solve the problem before they threw it.

2. Ring Toss.  I made rings out of glow sticks. I usually use a plunger as a target, but I couldn't find it this year. The one I have was bought new for the purpose of the game, and I decorated it so it looked more like a festive game and less like something meant to unclog toilets. Since I couldn't find it, I just used a roll of cling wrap. It worked quite well! The player threw the four rings, and however many rings they got around the target, that was how many tickets they got.

3. Jokers Are Wild, which was really just a bunch of playing cards taped face-down to a poster board. Players had to take a random card. If it was a Joker, they got 5 tickets. Any other card was 1 ticket.

4. Ball Toss. This just involved tossing balls into holes. The smaller the hole, the more tickets the player won!

5. Airplane Throw. Here we have a fun game, the object of which was to toss a paper airplane through the ring. You could use a hula hoop as a ring, but since our gym equipment had already been packed up, I just twisted a pool noodle into a circle and duct taped the ends together. This game is trickier than you might think. My airplanes kept going over the fence! To win a ticket you had to get it through the hoop.  To make it more fun, you could have the kids make their own paper airplanes to throw through.

6. Pick a Duck. I wrote numbers on the bottoms of the rubber ducks. The players had to randomly choose a duck, and win that number of tickets. Unfortunately the Oriental Trading Co. ducks I had kept tipping over. The Dollar Tree ducks had better luck.

7. Stone Drop. This game involved dropping a stone into a bin of water, with the hope of getting it to land inside a tiny cup at the bottom of the bin. Harder than it sounds!

8. Sucker Tree. This was a popular one! The players would choose a sucker, and if the bottom of the stick was colored green, they got a ticket. But if not, they still got a sucker out of the deal, which was why they enjoyed this game so much!

I was also going to have a water balloon basketball toss, but I ran out of time. I'll have to save that idea for next year.

Anyways, the kids got to turn in their tickets for prizes, just like at the arcade. I only had two categories of prizes... the bigger prizes were 10 tickets, and the smaller prizes were 5. Of course you could make it more complicalted by having more levels of prizes, so kids would have to spend more time figuring out what they could "afford."

Anyway, that is the end of our carnival, and the end of our summer rec program! Next week I start training for my teaching position. I can't wait! I'm still going to try to enjoy whatever is left of the summer, though!