Mr. Giso's Ways to Learn At Home #7

"Miss Rumphius" 

Read Aloud, Write a Post Card and Journal about Leaving Your Mark/ Making the World a More Beautiful Place

Hi, my friends!  

Our fantastic Community Volunteer is featured today.  We are so excited to hear Mrs. Karam read aloud a book for us that shines with unique illustrations and beautiful messages.  It's one of my favorites.  Special thank you to Mrs. Karam for taking the time to put this read aloud together.  Be sure to notice the framed print on the wall to the right of Mrs. Karam; it connects to the story so nicely.  The main character in this story is Miss Rumphius.  The book is both written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.

Miss Rumphius travels far and wide in search of a way to leave her legacy to the world.  She does find a way to make the world a more beautiful place thanks to a certain type of flower.  Mrs. Karam wants to share her connection to the story, as she too, enjoys working in her garden just like the main character you are about to meet.

Enjoy listening to the travels of Miss Rumphius.  Tell someone in your family what you think the theme of the story is.  What lesson does the author want you to take away?  Here is Mrs. Karam in one of her many travels just like Miss Rumphius.  She is hiking the Pacific Coast Trail in the state of California.  Click HERE to listen to Mrs. Karam read our story.

Pack Your Bags and Write a Postcard!

After listening to this story we know two things.  Miss Rumphius traveled near and far and took the time to appreciate what was around her.  The setting of this story appears to change on every page.  I'd like you to pretend that you are traveling.  Pick a place.  It can be to a place you have traveled to OR a place you would like to visit.  It can be near like the park or a place far away like Antarctica!

Write a postcard to someone about what you see.  What sights do you take in?  What do you hear?  What do you smell?  You can even design your own stamp in the upper right hand corner that resembles your place too.  On the back draw the scenery you see.  You don't need a printer at home to do this; just draw a postcard like the picture below.  If you want to, though, print out my postcard by clicking HERE.  

Write in a Daily Journal after Reading

Mr. Giso's Journal Idea #7 

After reading and listening to "Miss Rumphius," write about what you think you can do to make the world a better place.  You may be young, but there are so many simple things you can do around your house these days to make someone smile.  Imagine that you are now 20 or more years older.  What do you see yourself doing to leave your mark like Miss Rumphius? We can't wait to hear what you have to say.  Your thoughts are important.  They matter.  Thank you again, Mrs. Karam!

Print out my "Journal Pages" by clicking HERE if you'd like to have some paper.  There's a spot for an illustration, too.  Thank you, Mrs. Karam!

DIY Halloween Shaker

BOO!

It's almost here.  You know you are excited that it's on a Friday this year, right?  No "day after Halloween candy hangovers" to fret over.   I'm looking forward to having an little extra Halloween fun myself.  I made these Halloween shakers last year, but I never got around to blogging about them.  Oh I know that it's so hard to believe that a teacher got too busy, but it's true.  This idea was inspired by lots of fellow bloggers out there.  If you look around you will see sight word shakers, addition facts shakers, verb shakers, etc.  I've made some for spring and for Valentine's Day, too inspired by teachers that are nice enough to share their ideas.  

My Halloween shakers start off by recycling those fancy Tropicana orange juice bottles. I use my all time favorite GOOF OFF remover to take off the labels.  Let it sit on there for about 10 minutes and peel away.

Next, go to the supermarket and pick up some Goya beans that are black and orange--for obvious reasons.  I selected black beans and lentils.  It's odd that the bag says red lentils, but believe me, they were orange.  Here's the picture to prove it.

For my next trip, I headed to the local craft store to buy some orange glitter and some Halloween trinkets.  These eyeballs are actually erasers.  In addition, I picked up rubber spiders, skeletons and some fancy glitter pompoms.  Oh, I got some candy corn too.  

For my next step, I typed up a label for the front of the shaker and a bunch of words to be used to create a spooky Halloween story.  To do this, I printed out the words and cut them so that the same word was on the front and back of the cutouts.  These words were placed inside the shakers.  I laminated them, but I don't think it's necessary.  To use this activity, the students get fun Halloween-themed paper, start to write a spooky story, and shake the shaker to find spooky words to incorporate into their story.  It's like having a 3D word bank.  Check these out!

Shaky, shaky.  Click HERE to download the label for the front of the shaker as well as my words.

Have fun and happy haunting to all!

A Little of This and a Little of That

Busy, busy, busy just about sums up my winter so far.  A snow day here, another snow day there, too.  I took a bunch of pictures before I left my classroom today because upon looking up from my table I thought to myself, "There's a lot going on here!"  As a result, this post was born.

I'm really liking my new part of my dry erase board where I "post" my objectives.  Before, I had them typed out and would switch them out of clear pocket charts--a real pain.  They had to be refiled which means they were kept in a pile.  To fix this, I hung some letters with ribbon and clothespins.  I added a border and magnetic signs for each subject and viola.  I can erase and change my "We Can!" statements in just a few seconds.  Waaaaay easier.

We are well into our Lucy Calkins unit on Opinion Writing--I'm a big fan of her ideas, her language and her overall philosophy on how to teach writing.  The only problem I have, though, is that I have no more room to hang her anchor charts!  Completely out of room this afternoon, I had no choice but to hang a chart on my bookshelf--it's actually the perfect fit.  Don't you think?

  

On my writing bulletin board we are still enjoying our New Year's project of mine--"Ringing in the New Year."  Our resolutions are not only radiant.  They look pretty nice on display.  Check out this item by clicking HERE.

In science, we are studying matter.  In particular, we are learning about changing states.  We have two ongoing experiments with evaporation happening in our classroom.  Both are so easy and oh so interesting.  Today is day 73 of our evaporating orange water experiment.  All we did was fill an old snack jar with water and food coloring and made predictions on how many days it would take for the water to completely evaporate.  We have been marking its evaporation every so often.  Here's what we have so far.  Boy, this is taking much longer than I had expected.  You can see by my guess of 80 days.

We also started an evaporation race.  I put an equal amount of water in four different containers with four different sized openings.  I measured the water right in front of my young scientists.  We made predictions as to which container would cause the water to evaporate the quickest.  We are watching carefully for the winner.

Moments ago, I uploaded my newest item--  A Bloom's Taxonomy Jar.  I put color coded prompts for each of Bloom's level on large craft sticks in a spray-painted, recycled can (I added some fun accents).  I haven't used these yet, but I plan to send my students off with a prompt to write about after a guided reading lesson.  We will see how this works.  You may get this item by visiting my TpT store or by clicking HERE.  It also comes with a ladder visual to use in explicit instruction regarding the levels of questioning.

Well that's all my pictures.  I hope you have been able to be inspired!  

The Things We LOVE!

It's been a real crazy time of the year!  No school this past Friday and no school today = 100 Day and Valentine's Day on THE SAME DAY.  Yikes!  Tomorrow night is our Family Literacy Night (blog post to come).  Can you say crazy?  I've decided to celebrate Valentine's Day with a quick and fun writing workshop.  I plan to do this tomorrow, so I may post some pictures when I'm done.  Just in case your week is going to be as hectic as mine, I thought I would share this item.  Get it by clicking HERE.

First, I plan to read aloud some fun Valentine's Day poems from this book by my favorite children's poet, Jack Prelutsky.  

After that, we will brainstorm things that we "love" on chart paper.  I always like to start with a nice "work bank" to get the creative juices flowing.  Next, for prewriting, I plan to have students list BIG and little things they love.  We have been working on categories, so this fits in nicely.  I love when that happens.  Here is the organizer I have created.

After a quick edit, I will have my young authors copy their lists in random order on a heart I plan to copy onto construction paper.  Little things will be written small and BIG things will be written, well...LARGE, of course.  Two heart halves have been included for you to trim and assemble to make a whole heart.  I hope you and your students have a fantastic Valentine's Day AND an exciting 100 Day if, like me, they are close together.  Looking for more fun Freebies like this one?  Click below.

Room 120's Snowy Day

Recently, I saw this terrific writing project that my teaching buddy/ neighbor did with her first graders.  I immediately went to TpT and  purchased the item by Laurie Gibbons (get it by clicking here) and was not disappointed in the results.  I had to share what my talented firsties created all inspired by our first heavy snow of the season.  Look at this view from our classroom window.  How could we not take advantage of this teachable moment?  Shh!  No core program today.

This week long writing workshop began with a shared reading experience.  Students had copies of the Caldecott Award winner, The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.  I'm very fortunate to have an ENO board in my classroom, so I played the book's DVD...it actually snowed on the screen.  My firsties enjoyed the book and noted some of their favorite snow words from the text such as "crunch," "plop," "deep" and "heaping."  I love talking about an author's craft and word choice so that my young writers can be inspired to use similar descriptive language.  It's so important to me that they know what author's do, and that they see themselves as authors.

After enjoying the book, I tied in comprehension of course.  I used the provided organizer that asked students to record what Peter did in the snow.  We referred to the text to make sure we were remembering all the details  (my readers are trained well).  After that, we discussed the story's setting, again using the graphic organizer included in this item.  We listed images from the text in three categories using our sense of sight, hearing and touch.  This tied in nicely, as I had done some minilessons on categorizing weeks before.

Now comes the fun part.  It's something I have never done in 15 years of teaching.  I took my firsties to our all-glass stairway, and we sat and watched the snowstorm.  It was magical.  We probably should have had a snow day, but we didn't.  As we watched the snow fall heavily, we recorded descriptive, "juicy" words to depict the beauty of the snowstorm.   I even went out and collected a snow sample.  We kept track of this fun "matter specimen" all 
day-- I was introducing our new science unit on the states of matter.  Talk about a throwback to thematic teaching!  Check out all these snow words.

In the next lesson, the students were introduced to the writing prompt.  "If this day was full of snow, What would I do?  Where would I go?"  Students first drew a picture of what they would do on a snowy day.  Check out this budding artist of mine in action.

After illustrating, students wrote about their snowy day.  I told them they had to use a minimum of three snowy words from our brainstorm.  As they were writing, students got to observe the snow sample with their hand lenses to add even more rich detail to their writing.  These "sloppy copies" were then edited while the students worked on their publishing craftivity included, too.  They created themselves bundled up just like Peter from the story.   I was sure to have my multicultural-colored markers at hand.  Snow sample anyone?

By the end of the day, our solid had changed to a liquid.  We had a text connection to discuss; the same thing happened to Peter's snowball after he had placed it in his pocket before returning home

I whipped up a "Peter" out of poster board for my outside bulletin board display.  How cute?

Look at this finished project.  My first grader captured the style of The Snowy Day and the mood of our snowstorm perfectly.

Here are the finished projects.  How impressive are these?

I'm proud to share this terrific idea by a fellow TpT seller with you, and how I turned a writing assignment into a complete week of activities incorporating reading, categorizing, use of the senses, author's craft, adjectives and science!  

In November Pattern Poems

The leaves may have been falling, but poetry was in bloom among my first grade poets this week.  Each November, I kick off our new month with the book entitled In November by Cynthia Rylant.  It's a quick, yet powerful read that really paints a picture and appeals to all five of our senses.  The running text reads like a poem.  The illustrations by Jill Kastner paint a watercolor-like tour through the images, sounds and traditions that November brings.  Trees without arms spread their branches "like dancers."  Food in November is "better than any time of the year," and animals "sleep more."

Many of the pages begin with "In November..."  This was my inspiration to make pattern poems with my first graders that paint just as clear of a picture in our minds as does Cynthia Rylant.  Another inspiration for this product was this neat dollar store find of the stationary on which we published our poems.

Here's the directions for this writing workshop.

1.  I read aloud the book and had the children recall the images that the author and illustrator described as happening "In November."

2.  I asked children if they noticed any patterns about the way many of the pages began.  They were able to, right away, tell me that the words "In November" repeat.

3.  We discussed the meaning of the word "pattern" and applied it to the fact that a poem that starts the same way, repeatedly, is called a pattern poem.

4.  Students watched me model writing a few lines of my In November Poem.  I noted how I used the book for help and also was sure to come up with my own ideas, too.

5.  Students went to their desks to complete drafts of their poems.  The template was copied on white paper.  Grab your template here--free all November.  I had picture books about Thanksgiving, fall, etc. everywhere.

6.  We had writing conferences and edited accordingly.  Thank you to my editors for all your help.

7.  Students copied their final drafts onto the template printed on the fancy fall stationary.

8.  We had a celebration!  Students read aloud their poems sitting on the author throne.  Click here to read my post on making your own author throne.  It was a Mr. Giso's Room to Read Bright Idea (#3).

I'm really happy with the results!  I hope you will be too.  I'm please to announce that I have passed the "5 Star Blogger" challenge from the Organized Classroom Blog.  Check it out!  Best wishes to all my friends for a happy and healthy Thanksgiving week!  

Mr. Giso's Room to Read's Bright Idea #3

Make an Author Throne for Your Classroom!

Here's a fun idea to get ready for the new school year.  I decided to retire my old Author Throne and make a new one.  It was all chipped from years of use.  First, get a plastic lawn chair--they are pretty cheap the end of summer.  I found this one hanging around in Walmart, Inc.  It was really asking to come home to my classroom!

"Take me home, please!"

Second, spray paint it gold.  I used a can of Bright Coat Metallic Finish by RUST-OLEUM® and gave the chair a few coats.

Lastly, I used a hot glue gun to apply some acrylic jewels--I only burned my thumb once.  I had this sparkly pillow from my old Author Throne, so I decided to recycle it.  Here's the finished product--with a little glimpse of my new basement office.

I use the Author Throne for students to use when sharing their writing aloud from a journal or Writer's Workshop, finished product.  It inspires even the most reluctant students to share their writing in front of the class.  After sharing, the author gets a round of applause from my Classroom Clap Card of the day.  Be sure to download them while you're at it if you haven't yet.