Mr. Giso's Room to Read Bright Idea #14

Make a Set of Stacking City, Country and State Cups

Well it's certainly been busy, busy, busy since we came back from February vacation.  For those of you unfamiliar with this New England custom, we have a week off for President's Day.  Spring is here, but is definitely NOT in the air, for we are getting snow and maybe a (fingers crossed) two hour snow delay tomorrow.  I have been battling a three week sore throat--along with my students and colleagues as well.  YUCK!

I started our mini unit in social studies covering "City, Country and State" today with reading the all familiar book, Me on the Map by Joan Sweeny.  If you have not used it before to introduce this concept, you don't know what you are missing.  In this book, we trace the many global "addresses" of a young girl from Kansas.  Students are easily introduced to the theme that "we live in many places."  The sequence of events build from the immediate location of the character (her room) to the entire world in this sequence.
•my room
•my home
•my street
•my city/town
•my state
•my country
•my world

From this read aloud, I continue my introduction by demonstrating this concept a step further using a set of those baby/toddler stacking cups.  For this concrete model, I label the following using a permanent marker--starting with the smallest cup.
•room
•home
•street
•city or town
•state
•country
•continent
•planet
I know this varies slightly from Me on the Map, but I prefer to include the terms continent and planet (rather than world).  As you can see, a set of these eight stacking cups works nicely.  My young geographers can stack and unstack the cups saying their address, their state, their country, etc.  It's great practice whole class, small group, with a partner or independently.

After this introduction, I make a flip book that I have customized to our city, state, etc.  It's done with good old cutting out pictures and permanent marker.  Sorry, I would love to post it for you.  I did, however, really enjoy coming across these two ideas.  Look at these nesting cans featured on Teach Beside Me's blog.

You can also download (for free!!!) this concentric circle idea from Courtney Quinlan by clicking HERE.

Please share other ideas you have on teaching this popular social studies concept.  I'd really enjoying hearing about them.

It's a Mrs. Wishy-Washy Kind of Sunday!

 Happy Sunday folks.  I'm excited to share Hameray Publishing's celebration of Mrs. Wishy-Washy and all her funny farm antics.  As you may know, I contribute to their Classroom Literacy Blog.  Check out my posts, to date, by clicking HERE.  Who doesn't love Joy Cowley's Mrs. Wishy-Washy and all of her adventures with her friends the Cow, Duck and Pig?  Like her, I have an obsession with cleanliness and have no luck keeping my floors clean in this New England wintery weather.  My dogs, Toby and Winston, do a number on my house.  They are pros at tracking in the snow and mud on a clean hardwood floor.

The rhyme, rhythm and repetition common in Cowley's books are great for my younger readers.  When high frequency words are introduced, they are done nicely in context to promote automaticity.  I like how the story structure of a Mrs. Wishy-Washy adventure is linear and comical--perfect for introducing my readers to the problem and solution in fictional texts.  As a series, my readers gravitate towards filling their browsing boxes with her tales when book shopping for independent reading material.

Mrs. Wishy-Washy, along with her husband, make us laugh.  Her barnyard friends make me chuckle when the pretend to be sleeping when it's time to take a bath.  It's adorable when a mirror is introduced to the characters for the first time.  I enjoy a good mystery and am eager to find out what happened to all Mrs. Wishy-Washy's corn.  All of these familiar plot lines are favorites among my students too.

To celebrate, I'd like to share Hameray's Mrs. Wishy-Washy Contest.  Enter it by clicking HERE.  All you need to do is follow a few simple steps to win books, puppets and more.

I'm also offering up a little contest of my own thanks to the folks at Hameray--the chance to win a title chosen at random from the Mrs. Wishy-Washy Big Book collection mailed to you.  Sorry, but you need to live in the 48 contiguous states to win.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Mrs. Wishy-Washy is on Facebook, so be sure to shoot her a "like."
For more information on Hameray's outstanding literature collections, find them on Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook.  Have a good week and do Mrs. Wishy-Washy a favor and STAY OUT OF THE MUD!

Teachers Pay Teachers 3 Million Teachers Strong Sale

Just a quick post to remind those who don't know already that there is a HUGE TpT Sale going on until tomorrow.  I'm offering every item in my store for sale plus you can get an additional TpT 10% discount when you enter the code TPT3.  This totals 28% off.  Not too shabby.  It's time to go through your shopping carts and ring up those purchases.  I'm doing the same.  Happy shopping everyone!  Thank you to all my followers and customers.

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!  

Activating Schema

Good readers and writers--well good learners in general, bring a "backpack" of prior background knowledge to school each day along with the backpack that holds their lunch, homework, and so on.  This knowledge is what has been coined the "fancy-smancy" term schema by Piaget.  We all know that what children learn is based on their adaption to the world as we present it through books, inquiry-based learning, read-alouds and technology.

Assimilation occurs when our young learners use their background knowledge to learn something new.  Accommodation occurs when the background knowledge doesn't fit in the right way so things have to be adjusted.  We do this through reading all the time.  It's our job to explicitly teach our young readers this skill.  

Since the best ideas I get are often the ones I learn from other teachers, I saw this idea from Erica's Ed-Ventures (check out her blog by clicking HERE) and had to use it.  Here's her photograph that was my inspiration.  She used this anchor chart to activate her students' schema on bats.

I decided to type up these headings for myself because my first and second graders are well into our Weather Unit, specifically studying about rain.  We discussed our background knowledge to kick-off our study.  We did some science experiments, and I read aloud several books on rain.  My favorite book is Down Comes the Rain by the Let's-Read-and-Find-Out series.  All of these are AWESOME, by the way.

Here is what our Schema Map looked like.  Notice in these two pictures how we started to move the stickies along as our schema was assimilated and accommodated--what a powerful visual to trace our learning.

The possibilities for these headings are endless, and I'm sharing them with all my followers by clicking HERE.  Enjoy and please share how you plan to use them by leaving me a comment--share the love!

Thanking Those in Our Armed Forces

Each year in honor of Veterans Day, I read a few of my usual readalouds including The Wall by Eve Bunting, Pepper's Purple Heart by former Miss America Heather French Henry and Veterans Day by the Rookie Read-About Holidays Series.

  

More importantly, my kiddos do their parts to thank those who served in our Armed Forces by making Veterans Day cards.  We mail them to a local Veterans Hospital, The Soldiers' Home.  I was so happy to be able to continue this tradition of mine in my new school with my teaching partner and the kids we share.  The words on the cards are so heart-felt and inspirational I wanted to share some.  The Veterans in my family, my Uncle Lenny and my NoNo would have been proud of our first and second graders.

Dear Veterans, Thank you for helping keep our country safe
and free.  We love you.  We appreciate you keeping our
country free.

Dear Veterans, You guys did a great job when you were fighting!
Thank you for keeping our country safe and free.  We love
you guys!

Thank you for keeping our country safe.  I love you.

Dear Veterans, Thank you for saving us and helping us.
We love you so much and we are celebrating Veterans Day
just for you guys.  But thank you for helping us.

Thank you Veterans for making our country great!