Picture Books for Science AND Readworks.org

I'm on the deck this morning with four, yes FOUR, grandbabies 4-years-old and under. They've been having a fine bubbles party, which of course leads this retired (or "expired," as one little friend put it) science teacher to think about science.

I've also been on Pinterest, where I found a link to a great blog post from Erica, over at What Do We Do All Day. You NEED to go:

I love books, and reading, and science -- and I believe in combining them as much as possible. With the emphasis in CCSS on nonfiction, teachers have a wonderful opportunity to teach reading and science as a two-for-one! 

I'm also a fan of Readworks, which provides more than 1,000 leveled literary & nonfiction passages with questions, as well as comprehension & novel units, and skill & strategy units. You simply can't go wrong there.

Erica recommends The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer. Cross-reference with Readworks, and you find a complete 3rd grade unit to use with that book! It includes a detailed lesson plan in three parts:

1. Teacher Modeling and Questioning
2. Guided Practice and Discussion (with a graphic organizer)
3. Student Independent Practice 

If you are new at teaching close reading, this is for you. If you aren't new, well, here's a lesson you don't have to create! As always, you should make it your own by tweaking any part of it.

Be sure to look at all the books in Erica's list, and while you're looking at the Readworks links, check out what else is available there, for FREE. Just register, and everything on the site is yours. Enjoy!

Listen and Read: Read-Along Books from Scholastic

I love Scholastic for many reasons; the newest is their Listen and Read site, where they provide 54 FREE nonfiction read-along ebooks for primary students. Your kiddos can access them on a computer or tablet, or you can use them with a group on an interactive whiteboard. They are sorted by subject and by level, with a good mix of science and social studies topics.

So why is it called Listen and Read? Because each of the ebooks is also an audiobook - by clicking on a "listen" button, your beginning reader can hear the words on the screen as she reads along. A nice feature at the end of each story is a list of vocabulary words.

Here's a sample page from a story for 2nd graders:

I learned about this great resource via a Facebook post by Charity Preston, who writes the Organized Classroom blog. Charity's post linked to a Pinterest pin by Carolyn Wilhelm, who operates the Wise Owl Factory. Both of these sites offer a ton of free resources themselves, and are definitely worthy of a visit.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

An Excellent Find: E is for Explore!

You are going to LOVE the site I have to share with you tonight! I came across it via a science activity posted to Pinterest, and was I ever amazed and delighted when I followed the link to Erin Bittman's blog, E is for Explore!

Erin blends graphic design, her original career, with her current path toward becoming a teacher, to "develop unique learning activities, search the internet and compile additional great ideas from other sources." Her site is chock-full of manipulatives and activities useful across the curriculum, from literacy to math and engineering, and she provides easy links to sites that she shares.

Since Easter is coming soon, I'll show you images from one of Erin's posts, wherein she shares activities from inferencing to fractions using Plastic Eggs: 

Great, huh? Click on over to Erin's blog, where "all 'E is for Explore' activities conform to state common core curriculum standards."

And you're welcome! :-)

New Discovery: Teacher Support Force

Thanks to Pinterest and my friend Melissa McCormick Roysdon, a Tennessee ESL teacher in DeKalb County, I have a wonderful new discovery to share with you!

Pat Jones, a teacher for almost 30 years in Georgia & North Carolina, writes a blog that is part of an amazing website called Teacher Support Force.

LET THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

The site is divided into sections: 

• Aesthetics, which includes strategies using drama, art, dance, and music
• Learning Environment, including cooperative learning, creative grouping, motivation, time management, and lowering stress
• Reading, with coordination, vocabulary, Dolch sight words, reading fluency, and comprehension sections
• Math, addressing the language of math, math word walls and centers, math and art, engaging the senses, and integer rules
• Games & Strategies, including word walls, focus games, memory activities, and free games
• The Early Years, featuring early childhood, parents, car games, benefits of play, reading together, and focus problems

The "pin" that grabbed my attention and took me to Pat's site was this one:

Citing the brain research of Dr. Fritz Mengert, she explains using a red dot in the center of a word to help kids focus on the middle of a word and not just the beginning (to stop guessing), as well as Using a Red Dot to Improve Fluency. 

I'll be letting Pat know that I linked to her site today; I can't wait to share it with the teachers at the school where I'm working as an Academic Specialist. I hope you'll find the site useful and that you'll let her know if you do! 

Everybody is a Genius

Ok, so I was busily pinning post after post from Everybody is a Genius, and suddenly realized that only my Pinterest followers were ever going to see Sarah's amazing blog if I didn't write my own post about it!

Sarah is a middle and high school math teacher in New Jersey who's been teaching for six years and blogging for four. She's young and inventive, and some of her ideas knock my socks off!

From her lesson plan binders

to her activities with manipulatives

and interactive student notebooks,

Sarah's ideas simply ROCK!

So, click right on over, "steal" all of Sarah's ideas that will work for you, and maybe leave her a thank-you comment. I'm letting her know how much I like them and that I've shared with you!

Anchor Charts - Five Essential Features

Persistence pays off....eventually. This morning, I felt like a miner who had discovered a rich new vein! I've been looking for a clear description of what an anchor chart should be, to be most useful for student learning. That's really all that matters in any instructional strategy, right? I found the information below on a wikispace, and finally found the source through some backwards searches. I DO love technology. ;-)

Cornerstone Literacy is "a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that strives to improve literacy outcomes for students in elementary schools serving urban and high-poverty communities by dramatically increasing the number of highly effective teachers." Their website is amazing, packed with research, strategies, and frameworks for literacy and thinking skills. Be sure to go there and check out what they offer for FREE.

Cornerstone's information about Anchor Charts, written by Wendy Seger, is exactly what I've wanted to share with you:

1. An anchor chart should have a single focus. Sometimes a teaching standard is broad by design, such as "Students will write with a clear focus, coherent organization, and sufficient detail." To be able to meet this standard, teachers would have to help students accomplish the many discrete skills that build capacity to meet the writing expectation. Those skills make up the topics of the lessons that are taught in the day-to-day work in the classroom. It is such discrete skills that are represented in an anchor chart. For example, the chart below supports the learner in one of the skills that would lead toward mastery of this standard.

2. The anchor chart is co-constructed with the students. The brain-based research of Marcia Tate and others support the use of visuals to incorporate new learning into memory. When the visual represents a learning event that includes the students, it becomes an artifact of the learning experience. It has meaning for the students because they participated in its construction. 

3. The anchor chart has an organized appearance. Clarity is paramount to understanding. If the students can’t read the chart or find the statement of explicit instruction, the anchor chart will be of no support to the students when they return to it as a scaffold.

4. The anchor chart matches the learners’ developmental level. The language, the amount of information, the length of the sentences, and the size of lettering should all match the cognitive level of the students for whom the chart is created. Below are three anchor charts developed for the same lesson: introduction to the comprehension strategy of schema. The one on the left was designed for second graders, the one in the middle for fourth graders, and the one on the right for first graders. Notice the differences in language and complexity.

5. The anchor chart supports on-going learning. One of the most important considerations is whether or not the chart is relevant and used by the students. Charts should reflect recent lessons or concepts that need continued scaffolding. Teachers can support learning by placing an anchor chart in a classroom library where students can access the information later. 

NOTES: 

• See "Anchor Charts - Another Blogger's Ideas" for a great way to save your charts in a binder.
• Jodi, over at The Clutter-Free Classroom, posted a great idea in Anchor Chart Planning and Management about creating an ongoing Powerpoint presentation that students could access on classroom computers and that you could project when the entire class needs to revisit the chart.

I've put together a list of sites that you can visit to see a variety of beautiful examples of Anchor Charts for different grades and subjects:

A Literate Life at julieballew.com

Classroom Anchor Charts and Ideas

Fabulous Fourth Grade

Hall County Schools Literacy Site

Mrs. Meacham's Classroom Snapshots

Mrs. Zimmerman's Learning Conservatory

My Life as a Third Grade Teacher

Second Grade with Mrs. Wade

Teaching in High Heels

Working 4 the Classroom

To see photos of more great anchor charts, click over to my "learning twice: Teaching Resources" board on Pinterest!

So. Read about anchor charts. Look at exemplary anchor charts. Make anchor charts with your students. Use anchor charts for reflection, reteaching, review, and scaffolding. And let me know how anchor charts work for you and your kiddos!

Teaching Channel - Pinterest for Teachers, But Better

Back in the day (say the late 1980s), there were filmstrips and old reel-to-reel films, but teaching videos? Not so much. Flash forward to the early 2000s, and my librarian best friends had amassed hundreds of VHS tapes and indexed them for our faculty. We were rich!

Now here we are in 2012, with YouTube, TeacherTube, and Gaggle, oh, my! Gaggle even has a "my videos" button, but sadly, not every school system has a Gaggle subscription for its teachers. 

Enter Teaching Channel, which features videos of lesson ideas in addition to exemplary lessons and strategies:

• "Teaching Channel is a video showcase -- on the Internet and TV -- of innovative and effective teaching practices in America's schools."
• "Videos labeled 'Lesson Idea Common Core' are Common Core aligned."
•  It's my favorite price - free!

All good, right? Well, I saved THE (absolute) BEST for last. Once you register for your free Tch account, click on the Workspace tab, and choose Lesson Planner from the My Workspace menu, you can

The Button enables you to "pin" not only videos and ideas from the Teaching Channel website, but also those you find anywhere on the web! I just pinned this great 2-minute video from Tch :
https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/classroom-silent-communication-signals?fd=1 
AND
this one from YouTube, an animation of one of my favorite children's books, Swimmy by Leo Lionni: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=442ie2qFANQ

Simply amazing!!!