Monday Made It!

Today was the first official teacher workday.  Although I had a meeting all day long I am still so excited to link up for my first ever Monday Made It.  I actually have two projects and can't wait to share them with you.  

This first one is actually a modified version of a blog post I read about over at Mrs. D's Corner.  It was actually her Monday Made it post dated July 28th. Click on her blog post above to see the original one.   I was super excited to try it but since I don't have a color printer I needed to modify it for myself.  I recreated her template and used colored card stock for the yellow one and a piece of chevron ( my classroom theme is chevron and school colors are orange and black) scrap book paper for the orange one.  Here is how mine turned out.  I am sending the yellow one to my best friend Nancy for her classroom.  

My second project comes from a post I found at More Time 2 Teach.   I found this blog post way back in December of last year and saved it so that I could create my own during the summer.  This is a Twitter board that students can use post it notes to respond to questions or discussions.  I use lots of exit tickets so I thought this would be a great place for students to place their post it note exit ticket at the end of a lesson.  I plan on using mine in a variety of different ways and think that the students will enjoy tweeting their answers.  

A big thank you to my wonderful hubby who made the straight lines for me.  I am  not good at making straight lines!  In each square there is a picture of a bird with a number-I use a number system for everything and then can reuse the board each year since student names are not in the squares.  The little bird clip art in the middle of each square came from Teachers Pay Teachers and was created by The Class of Joy.  Click on The Class of Joy to download your free copy. 

Hope you enjoy both of these Monday Made It projects.  

Organization

I was not born an organized person.  In fact when I began working at the age of 40 I realized that I probably suffer from adult ADHD (never officially diagnosed) as I recall all the projects I would begin during a day at home with my kids yet never manage to finish any of them.  I used to make lists but couldn't find them when I was ready to start working on something.

Therefore when I began my teaching career I had to work hard at becoming organized.  I believe that I have grown tremendously in this area and since moving to a new school last year I have attempted to keep only those items that I will truly use at school.  Hence, the reason the garage now looks like a disaster area.

Imagine my happiness when I found this great post over at Mrs. D's Corner.  She created a forever FREEBIE on her Teachers Pay Teachers page to go along with her Monday Made it craft.  I used her idea to create my own version since I don't have a color printer and am currently obsessed with chevron.  So I created my own template to use that I could put on the colored cardstock that I had, I also got a piece of orange chevron scrapbook paper given to me by a friend and used it to create my own plan, copy, prep and grade clipboard.  I followed Mrs. D's directions as I created my own. This was my first attempt at Mod Podge and I think it turned it pretty darn good.

Here is my final two clipboards.  I am going to send the yellow one to my best friend Nancy.  She doesn't read the Internet too much so I hope when it arrives it is a surprise!

 I am so excited to use this product.  A big shout out to Stephanie at Mrs. D's Corner for allowing me to post about my own version.

Summer is over!

Summer Schedule

At the end of the school year I posted my summer schedule.  It worked well and I have logged lots of miles on my Fitbit this summer.  I was able to keep to my schedule for the most part, with the exception of when I went to visit my beautiful granddaughters.  

Summer is almost over and I can't believe it.  I go back to work tomorrow to set up my room.  I have two days and then mandatory teacher workdays begin.  I am moving to a new classroom this year-literally next door to the one that I was in last year, but seems to have more space.  I am excited to get in there and get my things put together.  

Weekend plans

                         

Before the weekend is over I plan to see the new movie The Giver with hubby.  I am so excited to see this movie as the book is my favorite of all times.  I hope that the movie is close to the book I am always disappointed when the movie doesn't follow the book.  

Currently                   

Linking up with  Oh Boy 4th Grade for this month's August Currently!  I have not linked up every month but I love the idea and hope to do more of them this school year.  Check out Farley's blog if you want to link up with your Currently.

Random thoughts for the end of the year!

#1

The school year is finally over and I am starting to feel human again! This was an amazing year and I loved my new school.  I taught fourth this year after several years in a third grade classroom. I wasn't sure about 4th grade but really enjoyed it!  My students were awesome and I love the atmosphere at my new school.

I took a few days off after the last workday to decompress and am now in full swing with my summer schedule.  First thing I did was ordered myself a new school bag. While I was waiting for my new bag to arrive I cleaned out the old one.  I must have a hoarding problem because I found tons of pens in my bag.  Along with a large number of post it notes.

I don't know how to stop buying pens.  I actually ask for them for a birthday present.  Here is my new bag  from Thirty One gifts.  I love that it has my initials monogrammed on it and holds my laptop.

#2

Although I am happy to have summer break I am not good at unstructured time.  I made myself a summer schedule and put it in a table so that I can check off each item as it is completed!
Here is a picture of my summer schedule:

I have little boxes on the right hand side to check off each of my items.  It really helps me keep myself busy and stay on task.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer break.

Compare and Contrast with vocabulary words

Finally a blog post about reading!  This past week we read a portion of a story called, Riding Freedom.  My school uses Houghton Mifflin Journeys and the stories are incredible.  Each week we ask the students questions where they have to refer to the text to find or infer the answers.  The question was about vocabulary:    Based on paragraph 2 and 3 which word is similar to the word route?  Two of the choices were road and highway.  All the students chose the word road but I was curious to see if they could tell me the difference between the two words.  So we created a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two words, compare and contrast was our skill for the week.  I would love to use this strategy with vocabulary words, I will need to create a list of words that I could use for this activity.  I was amazed at what they were able to come up with to compare the two words.

Here is our completed Venn diagram.  Let me know what you think.

Modeling Mixed Numbers

We have been working diligently on our fraction unit despite all the recent snow days we have experienced!  One recent lesson was adding two fractions with the result an improper fraction.  We needed to change our improper fractions into a mixed number.  My students really struggled with this lesson and I needed to find a way to help them visualize how the two fractions would form a mixed number.

After some thought I decided to create a worksheet with pictures that were rectangular arrays.  My colleague  suggested that the students color each portion of the fraction with a different color to help them visualize how the mixed number is made.

Here is a picture of the original sheet I created.  At the time it was quicker to hand write the sheet than to use the computer and make it look good.

Students were much more successful with the assignment once they could visualize how the mixed number was created by the two different colors on their worksheet.  I was very happy to see how well they did on the assignment.  The addition of color helped them to cement the concept of the mixed numbers.

Hope everyone is enjoying their Sunday afternoon.

Fraction Review

I saw this great post on the blog http://www.teachingwithtaskcards.com/2014/02/using-task-cards-in-interactive.html and decided that this would be a great way to use the worksheet that was to be independent practice for one of our fraction lessons.

I used the worksheet and retyped each question or problem into a table so that students would have eight small problems to glue into their math journal.  I hoped that the eight little problems would look less daunting to my students than a full worksheet page.  I guided students as to how to place and glue the "task cards" into their notebook and then explained how they would record their work. This is what they looked like after they completed each "task card".

Students worked with their partner to complete each task card.  Once again I heard some great math talk.  The problems on the left hand side of the notebook were comparing and ordering fractions.  The tasks on the right hand side were word problems.  I quickly realized that many students did not understand how to do one of the problems so we took a break and worked on that problem as a whole class.

This was a great way to use a worksheet in a new and more engaging way.  Thanks again to Mary from http://www.teachingwithtaskcards.com for the great idea!