Having an Ishful Day

We had a busy Monday! We kicked off our first full week learning about our spelling routine. During the fall I like to get the agents into a routine. They have the choice between regular spelling words or a word list with some challenge words that I created. Both lists of words fit a rule each week. Spelling homework goes home on Monday. There are 4 sheets: ABC order, Sentences, Three Times a Charm, and a practice sheet. Most of it they are welcome to type in Google Docs and share with me or do it in a word processing program and email it to me as an attachment. It can also be handwritten neatly. They should work no more than 20 min a night (unless your child chooses to work longer) on each sheet. One sheet is due per day. It is your child’s choice what sheet to do each night. However if they do some early less they have to do later in the week. This is the beauty of teaching time management skills. Students should craft thoughtful sentences where they show understanding of the word.

We spent some time organizing our writing for The Best Part of Me project. We reviewed similes, personification, and alliteration as writing techniques to make their paragraphs stronger and more interesting. Using a graphic organizer, students thought about different ways to describe the best part of them. Teaching students to use graphic organizers as a tool is vital to help them as they grow as your authors.

During read aloud we continued our Peter Reynold’s author study. Friday we read So Few Of Me and discussed lessons we learned. Ask your agent what he or she learned from the story!  Peter is a fantastic illustrator and author who believes in teaching kids creativity and following their dreams. International Dot Day, celebrated by millions worldwide is taking place September 15^th. Students are encouraged to wear dots that day to school! Today we read Ish, which teaches students about the power of being okay with something looking ishful!. Through this tale you learn to be yourself, and it is okay not to be perfect. Thinking ishfully allows us all to be okay with our own creativity. We might not draw a tiger perfectly but I bet it is tigerish. We could have a saddish day. Students had the opportunity to create something ishful! To learn more about Dot Day visit:

http://www.thedotclub.org/dotday/

I wanted to share my latestblog post from my other blog as it relates to what we are doing in school! It is called Wait! You Do Not Want Us To Raise Our Hands?

As part of my student learning goal I want to teach students how to be more mindful when communicating with others. Therefore I am working with them on not raising their hands but speaking and waiting their turn just like a conversation at the dinner table. I am tracking data per subject until the number of hands raised reaches zero. I began to think about how in the real world no one raises their hand to speak in the office, at the dinner table, or out on the playground.

I introduced the concept the first day of school while going over classroom guidelines in a presentation. Students were pretty taken aback by this. I never realized how raising hands was such a conditioned behavior like Pavlov’s dogs until I started this. Over the course of the first three days of school I noticed it was very hard for students to not raise their hands. They actually waited for me to call on them until one figured out she could just speak, so she did. Then others followed. What is tricky is figuring out how to share the communication space, especially when so many students want to speak at once. What I am finding (even after three days) is that some of my more quiet students are expressing themselves to the class more with not feeling the pressure of having that hand raised. Others are trying to navigate when to speak. Some are not sure what to make of this. Hands are still being raised all day, but I am hoping we can eventually get there.

I am wondering if students will be more apt to speak in this manner. Will they embrace this change? How will they view this? Trying to unlearn such a conditioned behavior can be challenging, but I am hoping this builds our classroom community and teaches students not only about mindfulness but how to be in the world.

Using clicker counter I began collecting data on the number of times students raised their hands for each core subject until each subject was at 0 hands. I was curious to see which subject would be the first and which one would be the last for this experiment. 

#Iwishmyteacherknew and Questions I can Ask

The agenda book was more formerly introduced yesterday morning, which will be a powerful tool for students to keep their at home assignments organized. I sign it before the book is placed in the student’s mailbox so we know it matches the agenda book on the board. I color code the assignments so if your child is color blind kindly let me know, as they all told me they could see color. If the date is written in orange, any assignment due the following school day is also written in orange. However if assignments are due on different days then each one will have its own color and due date. If you are ever in the room check it out! Students are getting to know our morning routine, which involves writing in the agenda book, ordering lunch, and handwriting. On Friday’s students complete a Going for Goals sheet which will give you insight into their week at school. If they are done with all classwork for the week they transition to pentominoes, which is a logic puzzle using various shapes to make a perfect rectangle.

Students participated in an activity called “I wish my teacher knew.” This is a great way for me to truly understand the individual children in our classroom. I work very hard to reach the individuals in our room! Students shared they were athletes, readers, and writers. Several have interest in social studies. Some have fears of taking risks and being wrong. Others wish the world was a fair place. The idea for this activity was inspired by a story that made national news. Check it out here:

http://wqad.com/2015/04/16/teachers-assignment-brings-out-surprisingly-honest-notes-from-students/

You will hear me talking a lot about growth of the student. I did a lot of reading last summer on growth mindset and teaching kids grit in order to succeed in this world. Though this is something I have always done I wanted to share some information with you. One is an argument for mindset and the other a counter argument; however I find I am more in the middle of the two! The third is about grit.

http://www.salon.com/2015/08/16/the_education_fad_thats_hurting_our_kids_what_you_need_to_know_about_growth_mindset_theory_and_the_harmful_lessons_it_imparts/

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/06/the-s-word/397205/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/back-to-school/why-kids-need-to-fail-to-succeed-in-school/article4513436/?page=all

Students also learned about our question wall. This is a place for them to write down their questions that they might not be ready to ask in front of the class. I had read this article about a teacher who completed a math unit and asked the kids if they were ready for the assessment. They students responded with an enthusiastic yes but did not do well upon taking the assessment. She handed them all a piece of paper and asked them to write down the questions they never asked during the unit and the questions she received were fascinating! I hope to encourage students to take risks and feel comfortable asking anything, even if it means writing on a piece of paper.

Lastly, Catlin Tucker (one of our keynote speakers at the MassCUE Fall conference)  tweeted a great resource for parents.

https://medium.com/synapse/30-questions-to-ask-your-kid-instead-of-how-was-your-day-26be75072f13

There are fantastic questions to ask your child beyond how was your day. I hope you find these resources helpful.

Today we talked about the 5 Finger rule when choose just right books, Multiplication Madness, and our math drills today too!

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/selecting-books-your-child-finding-just-right-books

During our PBIS lesson we discussed appropriate behavior in the hallway. Student did some improve exercises to model various hallway behaviors that could occur and how to react to them. Students also discovered they have a detective log which will be used to reflect and write in throughout the year.  It will be used in conjunction with my state teacher and student learning goal on mindfulness. Today’s exercise asked students to think about things that distract them and to reflect on that. We also celebrated Stella’s birthday!

We kicked off our Peter Reynold’s author study during read aloud! His books have fabulous life lessons that inspire people to think and follow their own path. He encourages creativity and imagination in his stories.

I taught the agents how to play pico, fermi, bagels during our mini math lesson today. We have been spending time getting to know each other through play, which will come up again when we delve into our Red Rubber Ball project. Here is how to play the game in case you want to play at home:

 http://www.mathfairy.com/wp/kids/pico-fermi-bagels/

Monday we will have our first math lesson on place value. Research says that place value may be a difficult concept for fifth grade students when it involved place value notations beyond tens. A status study of children found that one third of fifth graders had difficulty with the place value concept involving relatively small numbers such as 25. In this lesson, as students use a chart to represent place value, they develop a foundation for understanding place value and representing large numbers. We discussed math vocabulary such as digits, value, standard form, expanded form, and word form. Students have a math assignment Monday evening based on the lesson that will be due Tuesday.

140 characters, The Best Part of Me and an RUP!

It was so wonderful hearing so many positive comments about our agents' first day of school! We are working hard to build a strong classroom community in A113! This morning students completed work from yesterday and then worked in their handwriting books. They work at their own pace. Students should be able to finish their book before the end of the year, as I believe learning cursive is important. Then we reviewed our classroom rules and expectations, and I discussed Mastery Club, the bothering box, smile-o-grams, and some other exciting things around our classroom. Some students may have come home with a mastery club scratch pad. This is an enrichment opportunity offered in our classroom.

Learn more about it here:

http://mansfieldjjes.ss8.sharpschool.com/cms/One.aspx?portalId=1016284&pageId=2292243

Students created bulletin boards today and yesterday. We made visual selfies of how we learn and created tweets to share goals for the year! Getting goals down to 140 characters with their agent # is challenging! They learned a lot about Twitter! We celebrated Marissa’s birthday too!

Students are coming home with their first two assignments. One is an All About Me poster, which they began in class. This is a great way to get to know our classmates and build our learning community. Students will bring them back to school no later than Thursday of next week as we will be presenting them next Friday to the class. Public speaking is a crucial skill to learn and agents become experts at that by the time June rolls around! We also began our “Best Part of Me” project. I am super excited about this project, which I learned about at the International Society of Technology in Education conference I attended in Atlanta a few years ago. To see what I saw click here as it will give you insight into what we are creating:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/sharing-best-part-me

This is the third time I am doing this project and I cannot wait to share it with you! A letter about it came home today and I will be emailing it as well. I need some photos our agents to complete this project. It is a wonderful project to get students thinking about themselves positively. Even as adults we find fault in how we look so instead of finding the faults we will look at what is the best part of us! Ask your student what he or she chose as the best part of him or her. Over the course of the next few weeks we will work on crafting a written piece that includes figurative language (similes and personification). We will also connect this project to curriculum night and have a presentation of our work on October 31 at 8:30 AM. You are all invited to come! 

Before lunch we read The Holes in Your Nose and talked about the holes in your nose. They are not for picking and if your nose is running please use tissues. Following read aloud we did a close reading activity on the school’s responsible use policy (RUP) for technology. Click here to see the school’s policy! We went through what students are responsible for when using technology in school and what the policy means in language our agents will understand. Your child is coming home with a copy of the K-7 explanation of the RUP. I strongly encourage you to go over this with your child at home. This policy is one that is used all over the world. When I am at the doctor’s office and gym I am asked to check off that I have read their RUP before being signed on to their WIFI. Students are allowed to use our technology responsibly. I am excited to be able to use so many tools with our students and look forward to teaching and learning with them! Understanding the consequences that come with irresponsible use is something we will be discussing as well. This is a learning process for our young agents! I did tell them they are allowed to email me at my school email address from their school provided GMAIL accounts. If they have questions, need to talk about something, or just want to say hello they should feel free to do so!

Our class does a lot online. I like to send this out as it is a great reference for how to teach your child about online safety:
http://www.safekids.com/kids-rules-for-online-safety/

Tomorrow we will take a tour of our math book. We will discuss the common core math practices. Click the link to learn more about the common core here:

http://www.corestandards.org/what-parents-should-know/

A Selfie of Day One!

Our first day of school was filled with laughter, curiosity, and excitement for the year ahead of us! Our young students came in ready to work. We talked about the exciting year ahead.

This morning they filled out a resume so I could get to know them better. I asked them to share what they are good at, their weaknesses, and what makes them unique. I was curious to know the favorite thing about their bedroom, things that make them happy or worry, as well as what they want to be when they grow up. I look forward to reading their thinking over the weekend! Then we had our agent in training ceremony in which the agent number chose the student. Every year, similar to Harry Potter and the sorting hat, students come up to the table and pick a stick out of the sorting mug. The agent number that comes out is his or her number for the year. Then I get to learn everyone's name and number! We discussed our creed and got to investigate several staff members who came to visit us.

After this activity we headed to the cafeteria to learn about procedures for lunch and recess. This year our school is continuing to use the PBIS model (http://www.pbis.org/) to help bring success and positive behavior to our school culture. With the PBIS model we do a lot of talking about caring about ourselves, others, and our school. Click here to see our classroom matrix.

We spent some time getting to know our classroom. We learned about Where Am I-which is a weekly guessing activity that challenges student's state knowledge. We discovered we have a lot of books in our classroom. Students saw we had a bothering box and a smile o gram box. The bothering box is a great place for students to put things in when they are being bothered or need help problem solving. Please encourage your agent to use it throughout the year! The smile o gram box is a place for students to write compliments to classmates when they catch each other doing a good deed. Students then moved to their tool section of the classroom and saw the lunch board/assignment bins. I pointed out the common core bulletin board, which focuses on everything we will be learning this year.

Students then noticed we had a white board table. We had a presentation on classroom guidelines and routines. Click here to see it! We completed our classroom tour and returned to our seats. You might have heard, but yes we have a microwave in which students can heat up lunch (no popcorn though).

Students then created shelf markers for our library. They are allowed to take out two books to leave in their book boxes and also have a classroom library card to take books home. Please make sure your child returns the book when he or she is finished. If you ever need book suggestions please do not hesitate to ask. Students received a whole lot of materials too!

Before lunch we had our read aloud. Today we read Everyone Poops and The Gas We Pass. We then had a serious conversation about bathroom etiquette and hand washing, as well as what to do when you have to pass gas in school. The words excuse me is great and the rest of us continue with whatever we are working on. There is no need to laugh or wonder where it came from.  Tomorrow students will hear The Holes in Your Nose. Students had PE with Mr. Dunlea and we celebrated Julia’s birthday.

We had to activities today to create our hallway bulletin boards. The first asked students to create a visible selfie. You might be wondering what that means. Click here to learn more! Tomorrow we will do some goal setting and discuss what it means to be successful in school. We will create tweets of our goals, learning about how many characters Twitter actually allows. Students certainly do reach for the stars in A113! I hope they all reach their goals by June! Thank you for sharing your most precious gift with me and welcoming me into your lives.

It is the Beginning. . . Not the End

The day has finally arrived where I sit down and type my final blog of the year. I want to thank you all for taking time out of your busy schedule to keep up with all of my emails, notes, blogs, comments, and FYI's. Parent communication and a bridge to home is what made our classroom community so strong and lasting. I know in the beginning, for many of you, it is a transition to get used to your inbox being filled with Ms. Freedman notes. However, your inbox will now be quieter.  It has been a pleasure to share daily information and insights into your child's educational experience in the fourth grade. It has been an honor teaching your agent, so thank you for letting your greatest gift spend 180 days with me. I hope your child had an enriching and positive experience in the fifth grade. They are heading off to 6^th grade with all the tools they need to be successful. I look forward to hearing about all the successful adventures your agent goes on through his or her career as a student here in Mansfield and beyond. A final thank you for making fifth grade simply unforgettable. I will always treasure this experience.

The curtain is coming down. The inboxes go dark.


Have a wonderful summer!

2,879 tabs open

As we get closer to the end of our journey in fifth grade I began to reflect on our year. I happened to come across the photo above that made me laugh because it is exactly how I feel. Even today, with two and a half days left I still feel this way. We have to complete our bridges and Revolution Musical. Students have worked so hard on their STEAM lessons this year. Their inventions that arrived are so impressive! Some should patent them. It is amazing what their inventive minds created! I cannot wait to share the finished product with you all! The skills students gained during these activities will resonate with them long after they leave me. They worked in collaborative teams, discovered design process thinking, and presented work to an authentic audience. Our students should be so PROUD of their work as these learning experiences will certainly help others! I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for giving me their best self each and ever day. I could not have had all those tabs open without them!

As I get ready to close those tabs we will be packing down our classroom, celebrating our success, and giving our final presentations of the year. Please reflect on the student who walked into our room in September. I promised you all it would be a completely different kid by the time he or she walked out. I hope you all agree that is the case. Our students have grown so much this year and I was thrilled to be part of that!

Hutch; A Creativity Magazine for Kids and Big Kids

For the past five years my students have been published artists and authors thanks to Peter Reynolds and the Blue Bunny’s Hutch magazine. Every year students are given two assignments for the magazine based on the theme. Prior to this June I sent the assignment home for students to work on. They had a month to create something that spoke to the theme. Examples of themes were family, what can you make, and act of kindness. I had students write poems, stories, paragraphs, captions for pictures while others drew, built structures, took photographs, or made videos (they submitted their script and YouTube link). Some are asked to go on special assignment for the magazine, reviewing movies and books. Others interview authors.  Students wait patiently for an email from the magazine’s editor, Nancy Marsh. A sprinkling of students is in the last ten issues. I could not be more proud of my students for submitting an assignment to be considered for publication. Hutch magazine provides an authentic learning experience for students to share their work with an international audience. As a teacher it gives me an opportunity to provide a learning experience for students to create, take risks, and push limits with their innovative thinking. There are no boundaries when it comes to creativity.

This June I decided to have students work on their final submission in class. The theme is The Great Outdoors. Watching students sit around the classroom with various tools writing and drawing was astounding. I listened to their quiet conversations and saw students offer ideas to each other. The creative collaboration happening in the room was electric. Students work was impressive, and I realized students work better in a creative and collaborative community than at home in isolation. I look forward to seeing some of the students who are working so hard now receive an email from Nancy in the fall. I hope some of you consider submitting your child’s work (or your own) to be considered for publication in Hutch. It opens doors for students, inspires them to think big, and affords them opportunities to think in new ways. Their smiles say it all!