Keeping organized is always a struggle for the students.  One small thing I have done to try and combat this is to have a chart handy for them to reference when cleaning their desks.  You wouldn't think that it would make a huge difference, but it really has!  The students have access to this chart both hanging on the wall AND in their procedure manual .  Each day, when we go to clean up the room, the check their desks to make sure they are clean and tidy...and match the chart. In the 14 years I have been hanging a desk chart on my wall, I have to say that there are only a handful of students who EVER have a messy desk.  (Extra points, anyone care to guess where I made my chart???  :) ) Head on over to Fabulous 4th Grade Froggies to read about more organizational tips....
Harry Wong's First Days of School is my teaching bible.  I was given his book as a student teacher 14 years ago, and read it during the summer each year.  Every time I read it, I get a better understanding of classroom behavior and student expectation.  Harry Wong is a firm believer in procedure, and after the first 5 weeks of my very first year teaching, became a believer as well. Procedures are a part of life.  We follow procedures for eating in the cafeteria, getting off a bus, playing soccer, and attending a movie.  The reason we have procedures in life is so that people can function in society knowing the acceptable and efficient ways other people do things. There are procedures in my classroom as well.  These procedures establish our classroom culture and allow us to function as a learning, cohesive group. To help the students better remember these procedures, I have created a "Procedure Manual", which the student keep in their desk as al...
I am a firm believer in repeated teaching.  I teach small ideas, in small chunks and constantly revisit those ideas.  (see Calendar Math for a math example)  In language arts, I have decided to incorporate "Morning Message" into my day. I know, I know.  I can hear the gasps from the upper grade teachers now.   But don't worry, it isn't the same thing that  they do in Kindergarten and 1st grade.....well, it isn't totally the same.  Click the picture for an upclose view Each morning, when the students enter the class, they find a "Morning Message" pre-written and waiting to be picked up in the front of the room.  This friendly letter is written to both preview the day, as well as help all of the students practice the important standards they must know as 5th graders.    As I am writing the message, I am embedding the key skills that the students must practice.  Figurative language, parts of speech, sentence combining, and basic grammatical skill...
Click here to access the Circle Map The BEST idea I ever borrowed from another teacher was this little gem from my friend Risa.  I was looking for something to have my early bird parents do during Back to School Night while they milled around, waiting for everyone to show up.  Risa came to my rescue. She had the idea of having the parents make a list of all the things that they would like me to know about their child.  I turned it into a Circle Map (and my love of Thinking Map continues...) and set them out on the desks. What I got back in return was THE MOST REWARDING AND EYEOPENING perspective of the students in my class.  Reading the responses allowed me to see these children for who they are....children.  These kids are the world to someone else.  They mean just as much to another mother as my own children mean to me.  They make someone smile at the drop of a hat, make them cry in the blink of an eye, and make them instantly proud, worried, excited, scared, and loved all at...
I am not against worksheets, really I am not.  They have their time and place in the hallways of learning.  However, I really don't think *most* worksheets have a lot of think power to them.  Filling in the blank is rather easy at times and I find myself wanting more with each worksheet assignment given. So what have I done to combat this?  Well, I try to bump it up!  When I see a worksheet in a teacher book that I think might go with my lesson, I see how I can enhance it to make the kids think just a bit more. For this lesson, which had the students ordering decimals to the thousandths, I had them cut out the little gymnasts after they ordered them, and then write a paragraph explaining HOW and WHY the child chose to order the gymnasts the way she did.  She had to use math vocabulary and actually think about the processes she was using. This final product came from a  fact and opinion sheet that was a regular "choose the fact, choose the opinion" piece.  I want...
Donors Choose has been a godsend for my classroom.  I have had so many generous people donate their own hard earned money to my classroom and have wonderful materials to show for it.  As of today, I have had 21 projects funded.  TWENTY-ONE!!  I can hardly believe it myself. Some of the things I have written proposals for are: *  Apple iMac computer *  School supplies such as folders, notebooks, pencils, sharpeners, glue, etc... *  Art materials (paintbrushes, collage supplies, etc..) *  An ELMO document camera *  An Easel *  Recorders for my students *  Test prep materials *  Social Studies and Science supplemental materials and books *  Binders for our Heritage Albums *  A rug *  A vacuum (for the rug) *  Wireless speakers for the computer And many more useful items that I would have spent my own money on.  My classroom is a place full of tools for my students because of anonymous donors, as well as my family and friends. Because I have had so many projects funded,...
My wonderful teaching partner, Mrs. Simon, introduced me to her classroom economy a few years ago.  After avoiding it and pushing it aside, I finally sat down and implemented it in my classroom...and I am SO glad I did!  It is such a motivator for my students, is very little work for me, and teaches some great concepts (budgeting, responsibility, math skills, and teamwork -- just to name a few) How It All Works When the students enter the room, they begin to earn classroom cash for performing their job as a student.  Just as I earn money to teach (although I do love it, I also get compensated for it), the students earn money for getting to school on time, turning in homework, being on task, and performing classroom jobs .  They also earn money for proper behavior (in the form of getting green cards, table points, etc...).  In turn, students will also lose money for being off task or neglecting their student duties. One of the classroom jobs in my class is that of a bank...
On the first day of school, the students walk in, quiet and ready to work.  I take advantage of this and have them complete this questionnaire for me.  Not only does it give the students something to do immediately, SILENTLY, when they walk into class, but it answers some burning questions that *I* have about the students as well. Once I read over the questionnaire, I have a better idea of who they are, what life is like for them at home, how long they have been at my school, who their friends are, etc...I also get to see their work habits right off the bat.  This simple little questionnaire (which takes them about 20 minutes to complete) gives me a wealth of knowledge about the students. ...
I am big on "At Home" projects.  I like that the students have a chance to budget their own time (something critical for when they move on to middle school), that they get to work with their parents on a school related project, and that they will have a great project, made with materials they found at home, as an end product. Now I know there are some people who feel they can never grade something that a child did at home because they don't know how much input a parent had.  Well, I honestly have never had that problem.  My students are doing the work.  They have *help*, but I haven't received a project that was completed solely by a parent (or if I have, it has not be evident in the least ;) ) Anyway, that is not what this post is about.  Back to the subject.... Heritage is a unit that we teach through our reading series in 5th grade.  The unit is jampacked with stories of different people, where they come from, and how their culture influences who they are tod...
Since my first day of teaching, I knew that one of my main goals as a teacher was/is to create lifelong readers.  I strive to give the students the tools they need to gain a real love of reading.  One way for me to do that is to have an ample supply of appropriate books for students to read available in my classroom.  And, boy, do I have books!  That was never a problem for me.  What was a problem was the over all lack of organization to my library.  I had books in bins, but they weren't really labeled, the students had a hard time putting the books back in the right place, books seemed to be strewn all over the place, and there was a general "whatever" type attitude towards the library as a whole.   I knew that students wouldn't become readers if they didn't ever read, and my library was holding them back.  So I decided to change that.  One hot summer day, two years ago, I sat down and finally did it.  I organized my library in such a way that it would r...
I LOVE those real estate magazines you get for free at the supermarket.  The gorgeous houses just call out to me.  The pools, the rooms, the fantastic layouts, the backyards.  One day, I will live in a magazine-worthy house.  However, until then, I can dream....and use the magazines in my classroom. These are great tools to get the students using and thinking about large numbers.  In the beginning of the year, I have my students "go shopping" in one of the aforementioned magazines.  Given a budget of $5,000,000, the students must purchase three houses, with at least one priced over $1,000,000.  (since we are in Southern California, that isn't a problem in the least) Once the houses are "bought" (cut out from the magazine), the students write a check for each one.  This is where they practice writing large numbers in both word and standard forms (if you wanted, you can have them write it in expanded form on the "memo" line) Then, the student...
There is much debate on whether or not to use Reading Logs.  I myself have gone back and forth on them.  I really don't like the "you read for 30 minutes and mom signs" logs.  They just weren't working for me.  I didn't feel like the kids were actually reading, or getting anything out of it.  So I decided to create my own. I wanted the students to have to respond to what they were reading in a meaningful way.  To help try to ensure this, I created a 5 part response log, with different responses each day.  The students choose which response they want to do, and complete one part a night.  They then get the log back the next day to repeat the process.  By the end of the week, they have done 4 responses of their choosing (with one response left on the log).  The next week, they get a brand new log, with new responses to choose from!  Here is the doc I made on my Teachers Pay Teachers Store (it does cost $5, but if you read the comments you will see that it is...
Over the summer, I discovered the amazing timesucking resource known as Pinterest .  I quickly became addicted and found myself pinning idea after idea after idea.  After about a month of pinning, I decided that I should actually *make* one of the things I was pinning.  This post is dedicated to two of those early projects.  This is *the very first* Pin that I aspired to recreate for my classroom.  I saw it and knew that it would be perfect for my classroom.  Since Vista Print was having a sale (and my love of Vista Print grows), I immediately hopped on it and created this poster, which now hangs on my wall. Now that we are 1/3 of the way into the year, the banner is not clean and white anymore.  It is filled with many of the things we have learned this year in 5th grade.  The students remind me daily that we need to add something to this banner.  (Since my mind can't remember ANYTHING anymore it seems!)   They really like having the record of their learning.  It has b...
Math is one subject I dread teaching.  For me, math is SO easy (well, not calculus, but that was a whole different ballgame ;) )  I just get it and I don't understand why the kids don't.  5 + 5 is 10.  It always will be.  And I just don't see how some kids can't grasp that concept.  So when I am looking for ideas and ways to teach math concepts, I always look for things that will help the students better understand with little frustration on my part ;) Hands-On Equations was a program sent from the gods to my classroom.  It so simply, so easily, so ridiculously effectively taught algebra concepts to my struggling 4th and 5th graders that I thank my lucky stars I went to the random inservice one day to learn about this program. Hands-On Equations uses manipulatives to give the kids a concrete experience with this abstract concept.  My students LOVE it.  They BEG for it.   It gets cheers, yes, actual cheers, from my students!  They feel successful doing algebra, and...
A few years ago, Oprah had a special on about bullying in schools.  Watching that episode was, for me, a "lightbulb moment" (as the great Oprah would say).  As I sat there, bawling my eyes out over these terribly tragic stories of students who were bullied in school, I thought to myself, there has to be *something* I can do.  Anything.  There is NO reason why children who are 10 or 11 (the age range of my students) should be driven to the point of killing themselves.  I scoured the web, looked through all of my materials, even thought of some ideas on my own.  But nothing I found fit what I wanted to accomplish.  Everything I saw dealt with preventing the bully from acting.  There was nothing I found that gave students strategies for coping with a bully going after them.  The next day, I immediately paid a visit to our psychologist.  As luck would have it, she had gotten a shipment from The American Girl company with some information on their new Girl of the Year, Crissa ...
My wonderful teaching partner, Mrs. Simon, had this amazing idea in her classroom that I have stolen borrowed to use in my own class.  Algebraic table points!! It was such a simple, yet brilliant idea, that I just HAD to use it in my class.  So, for the past three years or so, it has become a staple for me.  The basic idea is that instead of earning tallies for points (as I had done in the years past) the students earned either x's or + points.  The points area was set up like this: The x is assigned a value each week.  Sometimes, it is high.  Others weeks, it is low (as shown in the picture, it was only worth 2). The students then either can earn x's (they can have 2x or 3x or 5x or 9x by the end of the week)  or +'s.  Right now, it has a +0.  If they earn +2, the equation on the board would be x + 2. X's are earned for whole group, spectacular behavior.  If the table was very quiet when no other table was, they earn an x.  If the table cleaned up really wel...