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Workshop Wednesday: Mentor Texts!

March 27, 2013

It’s another Workshop Wednesday! Today: Tell us all about your favorite mentor texts you use to teach author’s craft!

Make sure to grab the button when you link up!

Ok, seriously. I think I may have to do this linky topic again, and again, and again, because there are just TOO many books I could rant and rave about, so I know you feel the same!! I’m going to try to share some of the “not so obvious” ones that people may not already use in hopes that you can get some new ideas from this post! 🙂

Today, I’m going to focus on books I use to teach WORD CHOICE. There are so many of course, but here are a couple of my favorites:

Click on the book to visit Amazon!

I think I’ve probably shared this one with you before… maybe? It is one of my all time favorites. The story is about a little girl living in a city in the summer, totally hot and dried out, begging for rain. It describes those moments before rain-you know them, where it starts to cool, the wind picks up, and the smell of rain is in the air. There is soooo much you can use this book for. I actually use it during reading and writing for a whole week! For teaching word choice in writing though, I like to use this book for figurative language, awesome adjectives, and vivid verbs. Here are some example sentences from the book that I make sure to focus on:

I am sizzling like a hot potato.
The smell of hot tar and garbage bullies the air as I climb the steps to Jackie-Joyce’s porch.
Everyone, everywhere, everything is misty limbs, springing back to life.

Want my unit for this book? 🙂 Click here or on the preview to get it from my TPT store!

This next book, I’m actually using this week. I am in love. The fabulous Amanda at Collaboration Cuties found this book last year and realized how amazingly perfect it was for our Westward Expansion Unit. It’s called Dandelions.

Click on the book to visit Amazon!

The story is about a family moving to the Nebraska Territory in a covered wagon. Mama’s emotions make it very apparent that she is not happy about leaving her former home to live in a soddie (a dirt home), pregnant, away from all her friends and other family, although this is definitely an inference. She is lonely, but these feelings remain unspoken while the author describes her actions. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, too!

As for word choice, this book is FULL of language and imagery that provide the students with opportunities to visualize. In fact, when I read it to my kiddos for the first time yesterday, I did NOT show them the pictures. Instead, I had them write down everything they could vizualize using their five senses. This helps them to “show, not tell” in their own writing. Some of the sentences that are excellent examples to focus on from this book are:

Then, on a morning when the roar of the grass seemed quieter, Papa jumped from the wagon and shouted, “We’re here!”
The town was lifting itself as if by magic out of the distance.
The sky was a burning blue and the grass seemed tinged with red fire.

Want an amazing unit aligned for reading and writing skills for this book? Check it out here at Collaboration Cuties TPT store or by clicking on the title page below

I can’t wait to see the awesome books you all link up!! Make sure to grab the button from the top to include in your post, link back to blog posts only please, and kindly follow the rule of 3! 🙂

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Mentor Texts and Mentor Sentences

March 30, 2013

I have a ~~problem~~ slight obsession with books. I LOVE reading to my kiddos, and I love for my kiddos to WANT to get books from my class library to read. 2 years ago, I did a class library inventory and put them into an Excel spreadsheet with location (if it was on my shelf or their shelf- I still have some that are “mine”) and reading level. My intention was to add to it everytime I got new books, and I did for a while… but I haven’t kept up with it… and the thought of going through all my books again to figure out which ones aren’t in the spreadsheet makes me break out in hives. There are 977 listed on the spreadsheet, but I’ve gotten many more since then through book orders and book fairs and Amazon orders…

The books that are “mine” are the ones I use for lessons. I like to use books as mentor texts- books I can refer to for many lessons over a period of time. Sometimes, I read the book more than once, but usually, I read it once and then can just refer to a few pages later since the students are already familiar with it. This saves on time and keeps my lessons true “mini-lessons.”

I say all this because I’m linking up with Collaboration Cuties today to share how I use Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs in my classroom as a mentor text.

This is such a fun book and YES it can be used in upper grades!!

I use it for a week in Reading, Writing, and Grammar using the skills listed above. I have a unit in my TPT store you should check out if you are interested in using it, too!

One thing that is not included in the unit is how I use this book during grammar time (although there is an activity in the unit identifying parts of speech). I don’t teach grammar explicity very often. I use Jeff Anderson’s method of Mentor Sentences. (Have you ever seen him speak? Oh my gosh, he is hysterical and so full of information!!) I lift a sentence from my mentor text and I use it as an example of whatever skill I want them to focus on that week. The idea is that the students are seeing excellent sentences instead of sentences full of mistakes trying to figure out what’s wrong, which hopefully will transfer to their writing, as well. I HAVE seen my students imitate the authors in their own writing, which makes me so happy!

For this book, I chose a complex sentence (the book is full of them!) for the students to study.

“By the time they woke up in the morning, breakfast was coming down.”

On the first day with the sentence, the students try to figure out why I’ve chosen this sentence in particular. They might notice (among other things) that the sentence is in past tense, there are prepositional phrases, and hopefully, that it is a complex sentence!

We focus on the fact that it’s a complex sentence all week and they look for sentences in their own reading that has the same style, and during “grammar time,” we also work to notice parts of speech in the sentence (like adverbs: up and down; prepositions: by, in; verbs: woke, was coming; etc), we revise the sentence one day (they have to figure out how to make the sentence EVEN better- usually by adding adjectives or changing verbs), and they also try to imitate the sentence (in this case, they write their own complex sentence with the subordinating conjunction coming at the beginning of the sentence so that there is a comma separating the two clauses, and they also try to incorporate adverbs and prepositional phrases since the author did). At the end of the week, there is a quiz over what we worked on all week.

Click here or on either of the images below to download for free and try mentor sentences in your own class! The first page is so they can glue the sentence into their journals- they fill up that page over the course of the week with the work we do with that sentence.

I hope this is helpful to you! I’ve said I was going to share how I use mentor sentences in my room, and something else always comes up. I plan on doing another post this week (FOR REAL!) with a new mentor sentence showing actual student work so you can really see how it happens in my room! 🙂

If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!

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Earth Day Freebie!

April 1, 2013

For once, I’m AHEAD of the game when it comes to monthly themed activities!!

I realized the other day that my kiddos still need some practice with ABC order. YIKES.

So here is a cutie Earth Day ABC Order activity I created! 🙂 Hope you’ll get some use out of it, too!

For those of you who aren’t making me totally jealous on Spring Break right now, how did April Fool’s Day go for y’all? Did you get in any good pranks? (And hopefully, didn’t get tricked too badly by the kids?) I played a fun one on my kids. I downloaded a quiz from Slide Share and gave it to my kiddos. The first direction says to read ALL of the directions. There are 18 items, numbered. The last direction says don’t do anything except #1 and #2 and sit quietly. I told them it was a timed pop quiz. They had 15 minutes- we got the privacy folders out and everything! I only had ONE student actually read all the way through and see that she didn’t need to do anything! Everyone else was frantically working. I stopped them after 9 minutes and let them in on the secret. 😛 They all thought it was hilarious!

We started reading Wonder today.

I am so excited after all the rave reviews I’ve heard! And the kids are already soooo into it. 🙂

Don’t forget, this Wednesday, link up with Workshop Wednesday for Math Websites! Let’s share our favorite websites that are our “go-to sources” for math. It can be to show what the kids use, or for you as a resource! And I’m hoping to be unveiling a NEW Workshop Wednesday Linky Button! Yippee!! 🙂 Stay tuned!!

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Tried It Tuesday: Oregon Trail Journals

April 2, 2013

Hello again, BBBs! I just LOVE Holly’s linky party! Have you linked up yet? Join in the fun! (Or at least go read everyone’s awesome ideas! My brain was on overload last week with all I wanted to do!!)

This week, I’m going to share something new I am trying this year with Westward Expansion. (Are you sick of hearing about this topic yet?? LOL Hopefully you see how much my social studies is integrated into my language arts based on all of the stuff I’ve shared for this unit over the last couple of weeks! Integration is the only possible way I can ever get it all in!)

I used our amazing poster maker at school to blow up the map. A friend of mine created the journal entry ideas for each stop along the Oregon Trail, but I had to “cute” them up with frames. (I am not sharing them here though since they aren’t my creation, but you can get some GREAT ideas for journal entries from this book if you are interested.

I used it last year and we actually did the simulations, but as I said, they could easily be made into “journal ideas.”) At each stop along the way, they “experience” something that would have really happened on the Oregon Trail – fording a river, buying supplies from a fort, people getting sick, seeing landmarks, like Chimney Rock… etc. To give them background information that they can use to write their entries, I’m reading parts of this book to them.

I read only the parts that are valid for that day’s entry- for example, today in their entry, they crossed a river on a ferry so I read to them about that. Then we list the things we think are important to include as a class, and they get busy! 🙂

Here is a sample of one of my sweet girl’s first entry in her journal. The starter said they had arrived in Independence, Missouri and they were waiting on other wagons to come so they could form their wagon train. They were to talk about the things they brought with them, the family that was there, and how they felt about the move:

As any good teacher does, I must reflect on what is working and not working… I love that they are getting background information before writing because I feel like their writing is more authentic. I don’t love that I waited until the week before Spring Break to start this. SIGH. We managed to get two entries done today instead of just one, but there won’t be enough time to make our whole journey this week. I wish I would have started last week! But, oh well. 🙂

I hope this post provided you with something you could take away!! I look forward to reading everyone else’s Tried It Tuesday posts!

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Workshop Wednesday: Math Websites

April 3, 2013

It’s time for another Workshop Wednesday! And guess what? I’m unveiling my new button! 🙂 Since my linky party seems to be a success (and hopefully will be around for quite some time!), I wanted to make a button that was a little more “me.” Are you ready…?

TAAAA DAAAA!!!!

Ok so really, you don’t need to keep it this size when you grab it for your link-up, but I wanted you to see all the cute little details! 😉 I had so much fun creating it actually… I am considering offering my services to others who might need buttons!! Just give me a holler! :o)

Ok, so now on to business! This week, we are sharing our favorite websites that are our “go-to sources” for math. It can be to show what the kids use, or for you as a resource! I’m going to share one of both!

First, my site for teachers:

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has a GREAT website called Illuminations. It has 607 lesson plans available for you to view- some are interactive with online activities, too!

You can narrow your search by grade level and standard.

The online activities are great for the kiddos to access, too! You can find them through the lessons or you can just go to them by clicking “Activities” at the top left of the page. I found this one recently that I REALLY wish I had used during our division unit when I taught partial quotients:

The kids start by setting the number of aliens and the number of waffles they will divide among them to eat.

Then, they go through step by step- I plugged in numbers my lower students might have picked to show you how it works… It asks them how many waffles they each get (I said 7 first), then prompts them to figure out by multiplying how many waffles they ate so far (35 if they each ate 7), followed by a prompt to subtract to see how many waffles are still left. This would have been so great for those kiddos that struggle to remember the steps!

They can continue choosing new problems for practice, or reset it to try a new way with the same problem. Pretty cool, huh?

My site for students that I LOVE and the kids totally ADORE is Education City. Unfortunately, this is not a free site, but we are lucky enough to have a subscription for it. If you don’t have it at your school, it is definitely worth it! The program’s animations are so amazing, which is why the kiddos love it. They stay so engaged the whole time, they think they are just playing a fun game. But… muahahaha! <evil laugh> They are learning!!!!

The site is for Pre-K through 6th grades and also ELL students, and it covers the subjects: Math, Language Arts, and Science! There’s also something called “Play Live” that the kids get so stinkin’ excited about. The kids join into rooms where they compete against each other or kids from other schools in math facts- kind of like speed tests!

These are just a few of the math games for 4th grade- they are all aligned to the Common Core and as I said, all extremely interactive. They go to space, Granny’s house, the golf course, the soccer field… the list goes on and on.

There are so many more sites I could share honestly, but this post is long enough, and I know you all have amazing sites to share too! :o) So what are your favorite go-to math sites? Link up below! Don’t forget to grab my (NEW!) button and link back to this post from your blog post!

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Revisiting Mentor Sentences!

April 4, 2013

Here is the beginning of the Mastering Mentor Sentences Series with Collaboration Cuties!

I told you about the book Dandelions last week in this post about mentor texts. As I mentioned, I use the book for reading and writing, with social studies integration, too… and I’m here to tell you I also used it for my mentor sentence to teach grammar!

Before I get into the actual sentence I used, I wanted to share with you the directions I give to my students so they know what to expect each day. We use composition notebooks for our mentor sentence journals, so I laminate these directions and tape them on the inside of the front cover of their journals. (Of course, after doing it for a few weeks consistently, they know exactly what’s coming. But they can always peek if they need to!)

Click the picture or click here to download the directions!

I chose the sentence, Mares-tail clouds waved in the sky and the grass sang around us, from the book Dandelions by Eve Bunting because we have been working on prepositional phrases as well as distinguishing between compound and complex sentences. It’s also a FABULOUS sentence for imagery.

Here is a student’s notebook from the week. I hope it helps you see what the students do each day!

To celebrate the students as writers, I choose 4 students each Thursday to display their super sentences for the class to see! Here were the sentences I chose for Dandelions:

It is hard to choose the kids each week to display their sentences because there are so many good ones! They really have blossomed as writers this year! I try to just make sure I don’t pick “those same kiddos” every week.

On Friday, they take their quiz. It focuses on all the things we have been working on all week!

Next Tuesday and Thursday, I will share more of what my chart and dialogue looks and sounds like, as well as more of what the students’ notebooks look like. Amanda and Stacia will also be posting those days in our Mastering Mentor Sentences Series on their blog! But until then, catch up with what they have already shared about mentor sentences here.

Is there anything you have questions about? Comment below and I’ll be happy to answer! 🙂

If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!

Workshop Wednesday: Mentor Texts!

Mentor Texts and Mentor Sentences

Earth Day Freebie!

Workshop Wednesday: Math Websites

Revisiting Mentor Sentences!

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