Knowing the Standards

It’s probably a pretty obvious statement, but knowing what’s expected of you helps you make sure you do that expected thing, right? Sure, of course. So why don’t I spend more time chewing on rubrics with my students? Why do they sometimes feel like the expectation for the end of the unit is a surprise to them? Well, the simple answer is that we should spend more time looking at rubrics. Together. Often. Before, during and after learning happens. And it’s my goal (but not my resolution!) to make that happen more this semester.

So fast forward to last week and the beginning of our focus on summarizing and main idea in Readers’ Workshop. We started by checking out the rubric together. I gave kiddos a copy of the rubric to chew on in pairs. Along with the expectations, I also asked some questions, and had them look for certain things in the standards that would help them make sure they were doing what was expected. Together we read, discussed and highlighted. Our board (and their papers) looked like this when we were finished:

I think it was important work that happened here. I kept asking the what and why questions as we chatted. I had them repeat the verbs. We talked about the fact that these are understandings they need to demonstrate more than once. And we focused on the reason behind why you need to know how to do this: to help you better comprehend your text, not because your teacher says you should.

Now we talk about this almost every day. Before we begin anything reading, we review the words in this rubric. We use the words. We reflect on whether we’re identifying, distinguishing, supporting, referring and demonstrating. And this image will hang in our room to help us remember what to do–and for a visual person like me, that’s an important step. So many times things are out of sight, out of mind. This way they will not be.

And so after this work in reading, we did the same thing in math with the beginning of our decimal unit. And during that conversation I had another (saddening) aha moment. As I handed each kiddo at my table the rubric book that is usually reserved for parents and teachers, I wondered why I didn’t give one to each STUDENT to have. To read. To digest. To reference and keep at the front of their minds (and binders!). Why had it never occurred to me–in all of these years of teaching–that my STUDENTS are probably the ones that most need that book?? They are the ones, after all, that are responsible for making those things happen, right? Man. Humbling thought right there.

Moving forward I pledge to do more to make my students aware of their learning. Don’t get me wrong–we talk about these things and I believe I am making them aware of our goals, but there is much I can do to make it more visible for them, so that they can take more of an initiative in their own learning. Nothing here should be a mystery, and the outcome should not be a surprise. And I’m vowing to take steps to unveil some of these things for my kiddos. I only wish I would have done it a long time ago…

What do you do in your classroom to make your students aware of standards and expectations? How do you involve them in the process? What “aha”s have you had regarding these things? I’d love to hear from you!

First Semester in Review

I take pictures of EVERYTHING, with the intent of blogging about it once we’re finished. But then life happens and I end up with a computer full of pictures, lots of stories to be told, but feeling a tug to move on because it’s been so long since the activities happened.

So when that happens (like it did for most of what we did in our classroom in December), I usually just move on and blog about the next big thing, sad that you missed out on the awesomeness that is Rm. 202. But not this time! I figure I am going to give you at least a quick glance at the fabulous things my kiddos did during 2nd quarter. So let’s commence with the show-and-tell. 🙂

Halloween (Man–see, I told you I’m behind!)

We had a great time in our costumes, but it rained and so our school-wide parade went around our building instead of through our neighborhood. Our class parties were done with the whole grade level together, and probably the hit of the day was the photo booth.

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Veterans’ Day

We wrote letters to veterans at Aberdeen Heights. Our whole-school Veterans’ Day celebration was pretty fabulous, too, and we were able to share a great song we’d learned called “The Heart of America” with the rest of the school. Some boys from our class, who are a part of a group called iLead, got to be ambassadors and lead our guests to their seats. Honor choir, which also had many members from our class, started off the whole thing with the national anthem. What a great day!

Honor choir

Mia, Haleigh and Hanna sang the solo at the beginning of our song.

5th grade shared “The Heart of America” with the audience and it was FABULOUS!

Informational Text Writing Celebration

I shared the work that we did with our informational text writing unit, but I didn’t share with you the way we celebrated our hard work! After each kiddo had spent time on their poster, we were ready to share our hard work with each other. Differently than in past units, we decided to have a whole-5th-Grade celebration, so we could see everyone’s amazing writing. As we visited each classroom’s writing samples, kiddos (and teachers!) gave compliments to each writer on a sheet that each kiddo then got to keep. Great job, 5th grade!

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Door Decorating Contest

To celebrate the last week before Winter Break, our school had a door decorating contest. There were some rules that we had to follow, but other than those, the theme was fair game.

While we had a week to work on our door, there really wasn’t alot of time to create during school hours (we did still have things to learn, after all!). We worked at recesses and after school one day to get our ideas together. The plan looked like this:

In case you can’t tell, there was a theme of a night sky, where I would be featured in the moon and kiddos would be showcased on stars. Lots of glitter was to be included, too. Sounded like a great idea, and so we got to work.

Now…I wish I could tell you that we ended up with a great door decoration, and that we won first prize–but actually what happened is we ran out of time and didn’t even end up getting all the stars on the door, or the letters, or the Milky Way…instead they ended up with a sign and a bowl of M&Ms to entice the judges to give our door high marks. Bribery? Maybe. Creative either way.

Beginning Another Informational Writing Unit (this time with research!)

If you haven’t had a chance to read about the AMAZING work that we did with our last on-demand writing sample, you must check it out! It was the beginning of this second informational unit, and after it we were ready to get to work with the next steps. Those steps involved starting an essay about a common topic, one that all of us had some background knowledge about–Westward Expansion. But even before we could start talking about what we’d do with that topic, we had a conversation about what we already know as writers of nonfiction. We used an analogy floating around our school (I’m sure many people use it, but I most remember my friend Mrs. Harris talking about it with her 4th graders last year) about a suitcase that you fill with learning every year. The idea is to get kids to understand that they are expected to be learning things “always and forever” (not just for that moment), packing it in their suitcase, and then carrying that knowledge or skill with them wherever they go in the future. So with this image in our heads, we created one on our chart:

We then began by jotting down as many ideas as we could think of related to Westward Expansion, putting one idea on a different post-it. We organized our post-its by topic (i.e. some were related to Lewis and Clark, some to the Gold Rush, some to the Pony Express, etc.), and put each topic on a different sheet in a booklet we had made together.

Since we were all working on the same topic, and since this is just the beginning of the unit where we’re learning how this whole thing works, we made sure to ~~steal~~ share ideas to make sure we all had enough subtopics for each category (the idea was to have 5 topics, each with at least 3 subtopics underneath). We talked together, got ideas from other writers and added to our own work.

Then, when it was time to draft, we again went to our laptops and iPads. At first when I mentioned that they would flash-draft all 7 paragraphs in one class setting (the 5 topics in their booklet plus an introduction and conclusion), some kiddos were a little freaked out. Once we talked about the benefits of doing the draft this way, and how easy it would become to add, revise and edit their piece along the way, they were ok. This is as far as we got before we left for Winter Break, and we’ll pick up at this point when we return in a few days. What great thinking we started here!

Winter Sing-a-Long

For one of the last hurrahs before we left for Winter Break, we gathered in the gym as a school for a sing-a-long. The kiddos knew that we would sing Winter Wonderland and a few other favorites (because they’d been practicing them in Music with Mrs. Kesler), but they didn’t know that we had prepared a surprise song to perform for THEM! It was The Twelve Days of Winter Break, and each grade level group had prepared a line of the song. The verses were like this:

Can you guess which one we were responsible for writing? One hint: it’s technology related…

Here are some pics of the fun, including Mrs. Sisul as a Roadrunner, and 4 teachers playing 2 pianos simultaneously. That’s talent, people!!

Gotta love a principal who will do crazy things like this for her kiddos! WE LOVE YOU, MRS. SISUL!

Mrs. Bell, Mrs. Kesler, Mrs. Dix and Mrs. Hong tickled the ivories together to accompany our sing-a-long.

Probably the best part was on the last verse–12 inches of snow–when “snow” was tossed on the crowd. Messy, but fun!

So that’s that. I was way behind, but I was able to fill you in on a teeny, weeny bit of the fun we had in 2nd quarter. I will do better in the upcoming months. Maybe. I’ll just promise to do my best, ok? Trust that even if it’s not on the blog, it’s happening in our room anyway!

Thanks for reading, and here’s to a super new year!

(And thanks for staying for such a LONG POST! Just noticed that as I finished it…)

How Did I Not Tell You?

I just realized I’ve keeping something from you….so yep, I’ll spill the beans.

My kids are bloggers! I am not sure what I’ve been doing the last month or so, but I’ve neglected to tell you that my kiddos (and some of yours, too!) have begun a fabulous new blogging journey, and we’d love you to join us on it. 🙂

I started blogging with this group of kiddos the same way that I have the past two years, which I wrote about here. It has been a great thing for us as learners already, and I am so impressed with how so many kiddos have taken the ball and RUN!!

We’d love it if you could jump over to our blogs and have a look–and more importantly LEAVE A COMMENT or two to help continue the conversations we’ve started over there.

Check us out at w ww.kidblog.org/mrsbeardensclass2013 and join in on the fun! See you there! 🙂

On-Demand? Give Yourselves a Hand!

I know, I’ve been talking about on-demand writing a lot lately, haven’t I? Well, we did it again today, as the pre-assessment for our new unit of informational writing.

The directions were pretty much the same as the last time, but I threw in a couple of wrenches. Instead of handwriting their piece, they were expected to use technology–either their iPad or a laptop. Instead of writing about something they knew a lot about, they were to do some research–well as least look for some facts in a book from our classroom.

I also laid down the expectation from this rubric from our writing curriculum:

The part about having to type a “minimum of 2 pages in a single setting” is new for us, and was a BIG STRESSOR for some of my friends. We agreed that today was a try-it–that we would focus on trying to do our best and recognize that there were a lot of things to do (figure out the technology, think of what to write, find the information we’d use in our resources, editing, revising, publishing) and that we’d just give it our best shot. So we chose our topic by deciding what book we’d use from our classroom library:

I put many options of science books (animals, weather, force and motion, etc.) out on the rug and we dug in!

Kiddos also chose from a variety of other nonfiction texts in our room to use as resources for their writing piece.

After we had chosen a seed, decided if they would us an iPad or laptop, we got busy. And it was great! I love how the pictures speak to what was happening–lots of multitasking and hard working kiddos!

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And when we were finished, we breathed a huge sigh of relief and stepped back to see what we had done.

Look at all those words! Do you see all that we accomplished? I’m totally impressed! 🙂

Here are some thoughts on the day:

And like the video suggested, give yourselves a hand, friends for a JOB WELL DONE! YOU ROCK!! I’m so proud and you should be, too!

Info Text Writing Reflections

Ok, friends–here’s the post you needed to work on your blog reflections tonight! Remember, this is the EQ we talked about in class:

Your job is to explain the whole on-demand writing thing (because not everyone that reads your post will know what we’ve been doing!), as well as find as many ways that your writing is different as you can–using evidence from your writing to explain. I hope to finish writing a post all about all the things we’ve learned, but here’s a quick list of things you might mention in your post:

paragraphs
length
use of interesting language or domain-specific vocabulary
how you added subtopics of more information than the first time around
how you used text features (more of them, more thoughtful, how you decided what to use)
if the writing experience was easier/harder for the post assessment than the pre assessment
anything else you notice about how your writing is different!

When I get the other post done, I’ll link to it here, to check back soon! Oh, and if you need a link to your blog, here’s one. 🙂

Can’t wait to see what you figure out! Happy reflecting!

Mrs. Bearden

What an HONOR!

I have SO much to write and am SO back-logged with posts and pictures that I need to share around here, but undoubtedly the most important thing I need to write is a big

to my friend Tam at 5SK in North Queensland, for the AMAZING news she shared with me the other day. I got a tweet from her with a link to her blog. It looked innocent enough, but then I looked and it led me to a nomination for a Edublog Award she’d written for me! WHAT?! How amazing is that? I honestly didn’t know what to say (and still don’t think I have the right words to say thank you!).

It seemed funny how really the words that came to my head first were “it’s an honor just being nominated.” It sounds so cliche’, I know, but when I look at the list of other blogs in my category and see that they’re all blogs I READ too, it’s so cool. We’re all in this together and no matter who wins, it’ll be great!

But…since I have you here reading this amazing news, can I ask you to vote for this blog?? I mean I might as well ask, right? 🙂 It’s super easy, and you can get to the Edublog page by clicking here. I’d really appreciate it!

And I hope I’ve said this before, but if not–THANK YOU for coming and reading what I write here. It really is a work of the heart and it wouldn’t be what it is (even the tiny ‘ole thing it is) with out YOU!!

Fractions with Fosnot and Flex Time

Remember last year when I told you all about Feast Week? Well, it’s that time of year again, for fractions at least, but not–it seems–for Feast Week. Instead, we’ve begun using some AMAZING new resources from Cathy Fosnot, that have helped our mathematicians think of fraction parts in a whole new way.

My favorite part of math right now is the addition of Fraction Flex Time (man, it seems like we need to add a cute name to every thing fraction related…). After we finished the investigations in our Fosnot unit (which included figuring out the Best Buys, Oatmeal Problems and Gas Tank problems), our team sat down to figure out how to divvy up our kiddos between the 7 teachers we have (Yes, I said SEVEN!! Isn’t that FABULOUS!! ??), based on the information we’d gathered during our first few weeks of study. We made the groups small and intentional, and we planned for intense teaching and practice.

Although the pacing and strategies are a little different based on the groups’ need, the goal is the same (based on our district rubric):

Just like I shared in my post about our visit from Kara Imm from Mathematics in the City, number strings have become our new best friend. I mean, honestly, before this year I really didn’t spend much time on them, but now I am not sure I can go a day in math without one–they just have such HUGE bang for their buck. Just the other day we spent 45 minutes doing a number string together. It sounds like a long time, maybe, but in that 45 minutes (during which my small group of friends was TOTALLY ENGAGED!), we were able to touch on the clock model, common denominators, reducing fractions, equivalent fractions, improper fractions and mixed numbers. So cool!

I have heard such positive feedback from my class since we’ve been doing flex time. Most mention that they love the small numbers, the focused nature of the lessons and the time they get to spend with the teacher. I agree, friends, I’m loving all those things, too!

My favorite thing from our lessons lately is all of the “lightbulb moments” that I can actually see happen. It’s so great to see that look of AHA! on a kiddo’s face, and how often these moments even have a sound. All of the “ahs” I’ve heard lately have definitely made my days.

What do you think about fractions? How do you think you would react to Fraction Flex Time? Do you think you’d like it? Please leave your feedback. 🙂

Narrative Writing Lessons

Happy Tuesday, friends! It’s our first it’s-so-dark-and-rainy-we-had-to-turn-on-the-lights days of the fall. Kind of gloomy, but also one of my favorite things about this time of year! Weird, huh?

So..today we’re going to do some thinking together about writing RIGHT HERE ON THE BLOG! I’m going to give you your job and then you will leave a comment on this post to share your thoughts with me and with the other writers in our room. Ready? Ok, here we go!

Below are two of the anchor charts we’ve been using during our study of narrative writing. Reread them to yourself.

Now I want you to think about something from these charts that you know you have tried during this unit, either in your Writer’s Notebook or your story. Tell me about how you have used it in your comment below. You could start your sentence with something like: “During our study of narratives, I learned…and I tried it in my writing by…” Your words might sound different than that, but use the starter if you need it! I can’t wait to hear about your smart thinking! The pieces you are writing are pretty great, Rm. 202, and I’m excited to see where we continue to go as writers this year!

Rethinking Multiplication Strategies

First of all, I know. It’s been forever. Man, I’ve been saying that a lot lately. All I can do is apologize, though, and ask that you’ll kindly keep reading. Life is nuts these days. 🙂

So…we are just about at the end of a study of multiplication and this year I’m asking my friends to think in a different way about the word efficient when it comes to multiplying.

Based on our district rubrics, which have recently been rewritten based on work related to Common Core and an updated curriculum, the standard for 5th grade has changed. Instead of just being able to use the traditional algorithm, students are expected to be able to fluently use a variety of strategies. But get this: the strategy they choose to use should be based on the numbers in the problem, rather than personal preference or the strategy they know best. WHAT??!! I seriously have some friends whose heads might explode.

But it’s not really their fault, I guess, because for years the algorithm was the goal. And once they learned how to use it, that’s what they stuck with and used every time. For years, we (or they) saw the other strategies as lower-level–ones used by friends who didn’t yet “get” how the algorithm worked.

District Math Rubric for Multiplication

Now we’re thinking more about how mathematicians should be able to be flexible with their thinking, to use place value correctly and to explain their reasoning based on what they know about numbers. This doesn’t mean that the algorithm isn’t something kids should know how to do, but that it’s not the only thing they should know how to do. I mean think about it in the real world: there are times when you have to be able to do math in your head, in an efficient way–without paper. The algorithm doesn’t really fit into that model.

So what does this look like in our room?

First of all, here’s an anchor chart that now hangs in our room (made based on our knowledge of how to solve multiplication problems):

Classroom anchor chart for multiplication strategies

While I don’t have any pictures of the math warm-ups we’re doing right now, this is where many of our opportunities come to try out this thinking. The problem today, for example looked like this:

Math Warm-Up for October 14

There are obviously (based on the chart) multiple ways to do this problem. But based on the numbers (which were chosen on purpose), the strategy that makes the most sense is to either use splitting or a close 10 to solve the problem. That way, you can solve 75 X 20 and 75 X 3 and then add them together, which can easily be done in your head–without paper. If you chose to use the algorithm (which most would do–even most adults!) you’d have to do 5 X 3, then 70 X 3, 5 X 2 and then 70 X 2 and add it all together–many more steps than the other strategy.

So while this is still a little tricky for some friends, it will get easier with time. We just need some more practice. 🙂

What strategy would you have used to solve 75 X 23? Do you know more than one strategy to multiply? Is the traditional algorithm your “go to” strategy? I know my 5th grade mathematicians would love to hear your answers!

Headbandz: Part 2

I know. It’s been FOREVER since I was here. And even after a blogging challenge. 😦

Oh well, I’m here now, right? That’s gotta be worth something. Here’s to a FABULOUS October on the blog.

Remember when I told you about how we played 5th Grade Headbandz? Well, I didn’t get to tell you about what we did next.

After everyone had figured out whose name they had on their head, we were ready for step 2, which was really the fun part. Each student had a picture (that we had taken on the first day) that was put in the middle of a 12 x 18 poster. They got to write their name under it, and then we all got to write on it, too. We rotated around to each others’ posters and wrote the things we like about them. Especially now that we’ve been doing 3 Things, we know each other in better ways, and had more personal comments to make. I do a version of this right at the end of the year, but have never thought of doing it at the beginning. I’m really excited to see how differently we’ll be able to talk about each others’ strengths by the time we’ve spent the whole year getting to know each other!

Check out pics of our posters!