Our New Sensory Center

This project has been on the top of my list for "Back to School" for quite some time.  It's making a sensory center from scratch using common items easily picked up at your local home improvement store.  First off-- credit and special thanks to Mr. Greg from The Kindergarten Smorgasbord for his inspiration-- and more importantly-- his instructions for completing this project.

The materials needed are shown above.  They are PVC pipes (any size works), but I got the 1 inch-width kind, a number of PVC pipe connectors and a bin (not pictured).  In addition, you see some spray paint and a PVC pipe cutter.  I didn't have one of my own, so I picked it up for about ten dollars.  It cuts the pipes very easily!  There's orange spray paint and what I thought was a clear fix spray to prevent the paint from chipping.  Turns out it was a white glaze, so I turned my newly painted orange sensory center back into a white one--oh well, it happens!  For the complete set of directions and list of materials, please click HERE to get sent over to The Kindergarten Smorgasbord.

Here's the completed frame before the bin rests in it.  I pretty much made the dimensions match the bin's size and the height match the average height (from memory) of my first and second graders.  I didn't use any glue at the points of connection, but I'm sure you could to be extra safe.

With it being Halloween and all, I used spiders, skulls, bones and eyeballs to fill my sensory bin.  The rice is dyed with food coloring.  To do this, simply place some rice in a zipped plastic bag along with a few teaspoons of rubbing alcohol and your food coloring.  Shake it up and add more food coloring and alcohol if needed.  Leave it to dry over night in flat pans covered with aluminum foil to prevent you having to wash the pans when you are done...no clean up = awesome!  You can also use the same method to dye pasta.  Other fillers I have been saving are green and red bow tie pasta for December as well as white styrofoam peanuts for January.  Click HERE for 13 of Mr. Greg's sensory bin ideas throughout the year.  

Here is the completed project in my classroom.  I cut up an orange pool noodle to keep the bin sturdy.  Mr. Greg said this step was optional.  I like it. It's orange along with most of the things in my classroom.

I used witch fingers and candy corn clip art (free from TpT) to make my center activities.  With the fingers, the students sort them according to true and false equations.  Get them HERE.  With the candy corn, the students need to find the mystery number to make the equations true.  Get them HERE.  My mathematicians love this so far.  It really is fun to sift through, calming in a way for may of them too! 

I hope you feel as inspired as I was to make one of these over next weekend.

Accountable Talk Tools

Boy, has it been a long time since my last post!  I've been busy, to say the least, with teaching three courses this semester, loving my 1/2 classroom by day and shoveling, shoveling, shoveling the 3 feet + of snow that has plagued the Northeast.  Can we say seven snow days and school on two days during April vacation?

Since last year, my school has had professional development on Accountable Talk across all subject areas.  We want our learners to be thinkers--more than that.  We want our students to think deep, to encourage each other to think deeply and to be able to clearly and accurately explain their deep thinking to others.  We have had quite a few walk-throughs in order to measure our growth (anonymously) throughout our journey.  The results have allowed us to celebrate how far we have come and to plan our next steps to get even better!

Encouraging Accountable Talk in my classroom has been a learning curve.  I was challenged at first to figure out when I could talk and when I couldn't!  At the same time however, I was eager to push my students.  They were ready.

In mathematics one day, my principal and a team were doing a walk-through.  The children were very busy working on a non routine math problem (at the beginning stages).  They hadn't solved it right away.  Some weren't on the right path to getting the problem solved.  Some mathematicians were doing a lot of talking, but were saying incorrect information.  

At first, I thought this went wayyyyy wrong.  I wasn't sure if saying anything to the groups was OK.  Afterwards, my principal said something really powerful.  "You coach the talk, not the math."

Coaching the talking, not necessarily the content was an eye opener for me.  Because I teach first and second graders, my goal was to work on how we talk to each other.  To do this, I need to model it, scaffold it, reinforce it and model it some more!  It's OK to be doing the talking as the teacher when it comes to training our young thinkers how to use accountable talk.  I do this in a number of ways.

If a student appears to be challenged I may say, "How about talk to your team?  Tell them the specific part that has you confused."

If a group is finished with a problem early, I may say, "Talk to each other.  Come up with another way to show your thinking."

In a turn and talk, I am always reinforcing accountable talk "I notice how not only did you say you disagree with your partner's thinking.  You explained why with evidence from the text!"

From the above example, you can notice how I am coaching the talk, not the content of my lesson.  There are so many great resources out there to promote accountable talk.  

My teaching partner and I really like this one because of the icons that diving the type of talk from talk that will ask a question, to talk that will begin to state a friendly disagreement.

In my classroom, I made an Accountable Talk bookmarks and have hung up many banners with questions, response stems, etc.  Both are available in my TpT store by clicking HERE.  Below are some to which I refer when I want to push thinking during mathematics.

I have a whole banner of them over one of my large bulletin boards too.  I have modeled a few at a time over the course of this year.  The reading teacher and the speech therapist in my school have both hung some up in their classrooms too.

Here's what I have used to make handy dandy bookmarks or reminder cards for my students.

Happy weekend.  Melt, snow melt!

Cooking Up a Delicious Resource on Equality

I put together this set of activities to go along with my teaching of equality.  Way too often I have seen things like this:

6 + 5 = 11 + 3.

Look familiar?  Yes, 6 + 5 does equal 11, but that does not balance this equation properly.  Throw in the less than and greater than symbols and you get a double yikes!  

Using a bowl of "spaghetti and meatballs," students create equations, and fill in a missing number that finishes incomplete equations (like you see above).  If you pick a meatball labeled "al dente," you get to pick whatever you wish to make the equation true.  My young mathematicians had a blast with these activities.

Serve up a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs by visiting my TpT store by clicking here.

Mr. Giso's Room to Read Takes Part in Another Magical Product Swap

I'm very proud to take part in my third Magical Product Swap put together by Jessica Stanford, author of the blog entitled Mrs. Stanford's Class.

This time around, I had the pleasure of being paired up with Nicole Johnson, author of her fantastic blog Teaching's a Hoot-- Musings of an Elementary School Teacher.

It was so cool emailing back and forth with Nicole, prior to the swap.  We have a lot in common.  We are both former reading teachers, her from Title I and myself from Reading First.  We share the passion of having a classroom and a group of kiddos to call "our own."  As a result, we both returned to the classroom as first grade teachers.  What could be better?  It's obvious Nicole has a love of teaching.  She's created countless, quality resources, supplementary materials, science units and mini-books.  Check out her TpT store by clicking HERE.  Her blog's a lot of fun to browse, for you can learn a lot more than teaching tips--like what she likes to read, where she likes to shop and her favorite places to grab a bite--I really enjoy her personal touch.  I'd be all set if I were to leave Boston for a trip to Oregon!
On to my product...
There were so many of Nicole's items that aligned with my first grade curriculum in MA (life cycles, living/nonliving, etc.), but I chose to review her item entitled "My Book of Fact Families."  You see, that was what I was just starting to teach.  I've seen adorable ideas out there with the "fact family in a house" theme, but never came across any first-hand.  This item was exactly what I needed.  It includes over 60 (yes, 60) pages of all the possible fact families for numbers 1-10.  There's a colorful cover too.  Each page has a house with a cloud backdrop and is decorated with charming clipart.
Here's how I used Nicole's "My Book of Fact Families" in my classroom.  I printed, in color, and laminated a bunch of her sheets.  I love laminating...woohoo. 

  Next, I got a shiny new clipboard and tied a bunch of colored curling ribbon to the top (spring has hit New England).  I was a bit cheerful.  I also attached a dry-erase marker.  

In my math center I let children fill out the members of the fact family and show me when they were done.  Then, they easily erased their answers and got another sheet.

I also decided to print out the cover page, in color.  I printed the other pages in black and white ink and decided to make a book with most of the pages for all of my first graders, because they were really into this activity.  How neat is this cover?

In my math center, I made our number lines, 120 grids and 10-frames with colored counters readily available to complete the fact families if needed.  My two furbabies are standing quite proud by the final product.  They both give it two paws up!  Oh, I also used some sheets for Before School Work and for homework--so many uses...

There you have it!  "My Book of Fact Families" is a valuable addition to my unit of addition--obviously it's Common Core-aligned and ready-to-go.  To get this item, please click away HERE.  Click HERE to check out  some more quality resources out there in the blogging world.  This swap is always so much fun.  It's great to meet other teachers from all over the country and to have a chance to grab and try out a great product.

Diary of My Mathematics Center Makeover

An itch for spring cleaning combined with the new Common Core State Standards for Mathematics put me to work throughout the month of February.  My goal was to give my Mathematics Center a makeover consisting of the following.

               1.  Updated Content:  The Common Core requires that I teach some new terminology and concepts such as the associative property of addition, and that students utilize a 120 Grid as opposed to a Hundred Grid, for example.  Also, some concepts are now deemed no longer appropriate for the first grade.

               2.  Less Clutter:  My bulletin board in my center-- although colorful and rich in appropriate content-- was very busy.  I found that my students rarely used the visuals without me prompting that helpful content was up on the board.  Furthermore, the table had hardly any room for the students to write on it or use it for centers.

               3.  Better Storage:  I wanted to be able to house more manipulatives in an organized, uniform way that was easy to identify where each manipulative was located.  I wanted a clean look.

               4.  More Usage:  I wished for there to be a way for my students to access the information on the bulletin board other than trying to see it from their desks or getting up and down, and up again, to find what they were seeking.

The results are finished!  Check out these two before pics.  I loved the center as is but wanted it to be even better.  Notice the busy bulletin board and crowded table.

Mathematics Center Before

Table Before

Here is my Mathematics Center after...drumroll please...

New and Improved Mathematics Center

One of the things that you may notice is how I tossed the mix and match bins and bought matching bins.  This made the same amount of "stuff" look less cluttered.  Here you see my find at a local Big Lots.  Gotta love those closeouts!  By creating labels for the bins, everything has a spot and everything is easy to locate.

Each of the posters you see on my bulletin board is now copied and laminated multiple times and stored in our Math Tool Box.  This way if someone wants a money or greater than and less than poster, they can just take the visual and bring it to their seats.  In the Tool Box are my new colorful 120 Grids, too.

I also updated my Estimation Station which includes a jar, a binder to record past estimates (for students to use for strategy purposes), record sheets for student estimates and a bin in which students place their completed estimates.

I also made a banner for the Math Center and used colorful clothespins and ribbon to hang it.

All the posters, labels, banner, 120 grids, estimation materials and more are featured in my newest item.   I cleverly titled it Common Core All in One Math Center.  You can click here to get it.  Now that my Mathematics Center has had it's makeover, I'm off to tackle the supply cart--the Mathematics Center's neighbor.  Wish me luck.