Today was my youngest son's 7th birthday! We were lucky enough to be able to celebrate together with his class and mine. His class is our reading buddy class, so he wanted to share cupcakes with my class. We went to their room and enoyed some yummy Steelers (his team) cupcakes. My class made him this giant birthday card.
While we were in his room I learned a great writing idea from his first grade teacher. At the beginning of the year she gave each student a circle map to write about themselves and the things that they liked. Luke's circle graph had: dolphins, nachos, Chinese food, and action figures. On the student's birthday, she has all of the students write them a letter picking one of these items as their topic to focus on. Many letters said things about dolphins and nachos, but it was a great way to teach the kiddos to stay on topic.
Here are a few of the letters:
Luke even wrote a letter to himself!
I think I will be stealing this idea for next year, although with my 3rd graders I might have them write a paragraph for each item.
Do you have any ideas for teaching the idea of staying on topic while writing?
If you have been reading my blog for a bit, you might already know that my kiddos have a way of "hijacking" my lessons as I like to call it. I already told you about the time one of them brought in a tomato hornworm, but that wasn't the only time. We will be in the middle of something I had planned when one of them will go on a tangent and the next thing I know we are in a learning frenzy. I am learning to love their spontaneous lessons as I let go more and more to their student centered learning.
A few weeks before Christmas break it happened again. We were in the middle of our morning meeting and I don't remember what happened right before (if anything) a student raised his hand (YEAH - Following rule #2 Raise your hand for permission to speak - yes I am a WBT addict). Anyway, he asks, "Mrs. Malloy, could we get a class pet?"
And the lesson was on!
Could we get a class pet? Could we? What do we have to do? Let's write down all of our questions.
Who would we have to ask/convince? Mrs. Malloy and our principal.
How much would it cost? How could we pay for it? Off to the computers to research pet costs and pet grants. "We could apply for a grant Mrs. Malloy!!!!"
What type of pet should we get? More research, and maybe we should take a vote!
Asking and answering questions while reading Non-fiction texts is the common core standard we were focused on - and I think my formative assessment would say they got it!
Then we were off to write persuasive letters to both Mrs. Malloy and our principal. We also wrote about our pet with a research project. We made a budget and applied for a grant (which we received!). Fun, fun learning with a real world purpose! Loved it!
So... I decided to create a unit based on what we did over the holiday break and this is what I came up with:
Download the preview for a freebie! And, I am giving away this unit to a few of my followers! Be one of the first three commenters with you email address and I will send it your way!
Hopefully the pics are ok in this post- Blogger is being a problem today :(
Today was one of those days when you have a perfectly good lesson plan written, and suddenly a great teaching moment lands in your lap, so you scrap your lesson plans and watch the students soar as learners.
One of my students came in with his mom and a jar with what looked like a bunch of leaves in it. She told me that they had found this horn worm on their tomato plants, and decided to bring it in to share with the class.
I planned on just having the student share his little "friend" during our sharing portion of our morning meeting, but I would have never guessed that my students would be so intrigued! They started asking a billion and one questions and even asked if we could do some research about the horn worm (which has a horn at it's bottom that gives it its name - we had quite the discussion deciding whether it was its head or its bottom, but when it started eating we knew the answer).
The students spent some time writing down their observations and questions.
Then they decided to do some research on the computers about the tomato horn worm. They checked out these two sites: VegEdge and Wikipedia. They also loved watching this video on youtube.
We talked about how gardeners might not like these worms on their plants as much as we liked learning about them.
It was amazing how many different ways the students responded to the hornworm in our classroom. Some of them approached their learning as artists, drawing pictures of the hornworm.
Some of the students responded as scientists formulating a list of questions they could discover and research.
This little guy lying on the carpet saw me with the camera and said, "Quick! Mrs. Malloy has the camera! Camouflage - blend in like the worm!"
We wrapped up our fun-filled learning day by writing thank you letters to the student and his mom for bringing in the horn worm for us to learn about!
All in all, this was one of my best teaching days ever- the kids were completely engaged from morning until afternoon (we actually worked past the bell and had to scramble to leave!). One of my older boys came into my class this day because he left his lunch at home and commented about how busy all of the students were. "It was a whirlwind of activity!" he said.
