What We're Reading in December

Five days, everyone, five days. We can do this, right? Right??

With the in-and-out of November and December, my fifth graders are still working their way through what we began in November. (Curious? Check that post out here.)

Which is OK, because I'll share with you what I'm doing with my fourthies! Hopefully, you'll still find something new and cool to try with your big kids.

We're about halfway through:

I'm working with the themes of individuality, inner and outer beauty, and unconditional love, so I've paired these close reads with it:
"Remembering", a poem in my Jacob's Ladder comprehension set,
"Beauty and the Beast",  as in the real one, and quite different from the Disney version. It's in my Junior Great Books (set 4A), but you can find the text here.
"Harrison Bergeron", another bit of science fiction, in which people with talents or gifts are purposely handicapped to make everyone equal. More scary for grown-ups (because you can see this happening one day) than for kids. They just get mad. Find it here.
"Tesseract" a webpage describing what a tesseract really is. Find it here.

My fourth grade reading is tiny, so we only have two book clubs:

 

By the way, at least in my town, it's time for the Scholastic Book Clubs Warehouse Sale! Most of the books in the warehouse (and it's an actual warehouse) are half off, so this is when I go and shore up my book club choices. When will your city have one? Find out here. 

Five days, y'all, we got this. 

I hope you and yours have a peaceful, restful, awesome-amazing couple of weeks off! Enjoy it now...winter is coming, my friends. Unless you teach in New Zealand, like our Learning to be Awesome's Erin. She's ready for summer. 

Check out what the other Focused of Fifth collaborators are reading in their classrooms! Just click on the icon below or right here.

November Products for Payday (and Cyber Monday!)

Well, the turkey's down to a carcass, the sweet potato casserole has pretty much had it. Time for shopping! (Better yet, shopping in my jammie pants.)

I've done some serious damage at the sale at Ravelry. I've got enough crochet patterns to keep me busy for a looong time, and that's a good thing! I really do find stitch-counting relaxing, and I love when a big project comes together. That, and while I don't watch much TV, when I do, my hands have to be busy. Drives my husband up a tree, but I'm just wired that way.

Still, I'm holding back, just a bit. Why? Because TpT's fall sale starts Monday, and I've got a few things on my wish list! Here's something you might like to add to yours...

We'll be hitting fractions big in December and January. The thing with fractions is that the kids absolutely have to get their heads around it, even if they can just do the calculations. If they don't get how they 'work', they're going to run in to trouble down the road, and we don't want that for our kiddos! This set of differentiated sheets offers some challenging problems for your kids to engage in math talk, and we know that math talk makes it stick!

These are labeled for fourth grade because they use like denominators, but would be excellent for the first week of instruction while you review those concepts or for your low fifth graders.

What have the other fab Focused on Fifth teachers got for your list? Click below to find out!

Using Color to Keep It All Together

So, this was going to be a post about how I use color-coding to keep all of my things organized. I teach two subjects each to two grades, and failing to keep my teaching materials, data, etc. organized is a recipe for bad, bad things.

But now it's not. I absolutely promise you that there's a good reason for this, but you didn't come here for a neurology lesson, so suffice it to say that I didn't get back to Room 301 to take pictures of my shelves of color-coded binders, my files, or my data board. Too bad; you'd have been impressed.

However, you all know that teaching is one business in which, if you can't fly by the seat of your pants,  you're going to be unhappy. A lot. So, I'm going with what I've got, and hope you'll think this is pretty cool, too.

I'm a big believer in math games. Kids need a chance to play with concepts and practice skills, even my upper-grades, gifted kids. Especially my upper-grades, gifted kids. Games and work like tiling tasks (I adore the Time to Tile jobs from Got to Teach on TpT.) and mindbenders are good for their busy brains.

I do math rotations, and wanted a defined 'games' space, one that would require fewer things to organize and would make it easy to participate. On Pinterest, I found a chalkboard-paint topped table that a primary grades teacher was using for word study. I can't handle chalk dust. My nose just goes nuts. No one was happier than I when we lost the chalkboards and went to whiteboards; I'm sure not putting one BACK in my classroom! On the other hand, on Amazon I found inexpensive whiteboard stickers! Woo-hoo!

After a trip to IKEA and a little frustration on my high schooler's part, we had a snazzy, new games table for about $35. There's a border of Washi tape around the big ol' whiteboard sticker so it won't curl up, and we needed a shower squeegee to get the sticker on the table top without bubbles, but, as a whole, easy-peasy!

 The kids love being able to write directly on the table; I love that there aren't crates of whiteboards all over the place. It's also easy for me to glance over their shoulders and see what they're really up to...

... and you can see some of my color-coding. Green is for fifth grade math; blue's for fourth.
I'm also kinda OCD about my math manipulatives and game parts. They live on the shelf like this:

I've since labeled the drawers of my Pink Box drawers (It was a lot cheaper on Amazon than the other brands.) with some cute labels from Ladybug's Teacher Files. I'm religious about sorting and labeling, because when I can find the parts I need for different games without a lot of fuss, I'm more likely to get them into the kids' hands. If it's a hassle...well, ain't nobody got time for that!

So, there's my tip. Games rock, if you organize the things you need to have them and create a space for them, you're far more likely to use them! Bonus: January's coming! That's when all the tubs, containers, and shelves go on sale!

Next, you'll be hopping over to Jessica, our Whimsical Teacher, to see what tips she's got ready for you! (Her title didn't give anything away, so I'm looking forward to finding out, too!)

Did you miss the first part of the hop? You've missed a lot! Start right here!

Diving in Deeper this November - What We're Reading

Ah... November! Here, in the South, our leaves are finally changing in earnest. Fall happens quickly here. Some years we go from green to gone in a matter of a week or ten days. This year, not so much, what with all the rain. And more rain. And rain after that. The TV anchorguy announced the start of the 6AM news yesterday morning with, "Well, it's another crummy day."

On the upside, it's November. We've all survived the September-October push, gotten to know our classes better, and are ready to start tossing the kids a little meat.

With my fifth grade, I'm wrapping up The View from Saturday, with its twining plotlines and oddball connections, which my kids love exploring, and get into:

This is one of my favorite books to teach. It's got a lot to work with, just with the parallel plots and a couple of wicked plot twists. There's a line of dialogue,  spoken by a heartbroken grandpa at the end, that makes me - widely known as the toughest teacher in school - teary eyed every. single. time. Somehow, the kids think that's awesome.

It's also useful to me, as a fifth grade teacher, because we'll work with the universal theme of rejection and acceptance, one that's good for going-to-middle-school kids to explore. My essential question will be, "How can the fear of rejection create unhealthy patterns of behavior?"

I'm going to be pairing this text with a few close-reads, two fiction and one non-fiction:
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
Chanclas by Sandra  Cisneros
Brown v. BOE by Walter Dean Myers

Here are my book club choices to pair with it:

Well, that's what's up for fifth grade in room 301 this month. I'm still waffling on my fourth grade. I wanted to do The Tiger Rising, but I'm having a hard time putting a finger on a universal theme for it.. I might hit A Wrinkle in  Time in the meantime, and focus on order and chaos as a theme, though sacrificial love's a good one, too. I'm hunting for close reading work for both of them.

So what are the other fab Focused on Fifth collaborators up to?
Find out here!

Have an amazing month! The next three go by in just a blink...take time to enjoy them and your kiddos!

October Products for Payday

Happy payday! That happens every month on the 25th here on The Big Kids Hall, and I've always got a few things on my wish list waiting for it.

If you're looking for an easy-peasy way to challenge your readers and take care of reading homework, you might consider adding my Reading Homework Choice Boards to yours!

Three different menus let me focus on skills related to plot, theme, and character. All I do is print and go. Each board has 16 tasks, so you could use it for two or three weeks if you wanted to. I just do single-week assignments.

I would have classroom pictures to show this item in action, but we in room 301 have been in a different sort of action this week. I've just gotten back (as in got home about and hour and a half ago) from a three-day camp on beautiful Seabrook Island, SC studying ecosystems. It sits on a large estuary, and we've been walking in a palmetto forest, seine netting, and slogging through plough mud in the salt marsh. Sadly, it rained for most of the time there, but the kids still had a good time. Did I mention that there was a lot of plough (pronouce it 'pluff') mud?

If you've ever done one of these camps, you know how this smells. And sticks to utterly everything. It has the strangest gelatinous texture that sucks at your shoes. Of course, the kids thought this was the most awesome part. That, and petting a baby alligator.

If you've heard about the serious flooding South Carolina's had over the last few weeks, it's the salt marsh and its ability to absorb and distribute water, that's rescued Charleston. Stinky, but necessary.

I hope you've had as much fun as we've had this week! Hang on; it's almost payday, and the long September-October haul is nearly over!

What I'm Reading This October

The truth is, not much. I've still got a sixteen year old with a migraine that, after six weeks now, won't die (and stay that way) so between doctor trips and holing up in the dark, I don't get a lot of anything done.

What am I supposed to be reading? Well, this:

 We teachers of Academically/Intellectually Gifted kids in my county are part of a required book study, and this is the text. I'll have to admit that, at first, I was less-than impressed. I have real concerns that this move toward 'text dependence' represents a dumbing-down of curriculum (Don't think; just go fetch the right answer.) and I still think that, used poorly, that's what it becomes.

I've been pleasantly surprised, though. What I've read, so far, has shown that using text dependent questions can, in fact, promote real thinking into text. We are given strategies that take kids well beyond the literal, but stay within a TDQ framework. The book doesn't read like a textbook, with a much less formal vibe and down-to-earth examples.

I've got a lot more reading to do, but already, I've changed my attitude toward this type of work from, "Yippee! Let's raise some convergent, low-level thinkers that'll make great sheep when they grow up." to "Maybe this does have a place in my classroom."  It's a start.

What am I reading with my classes? That's a different story. I teach a lot of my skills through read-aloud with accountable talk and follow up with book clubs. I teach reading twice a day, once with fourth grade and once with fifth. Both groups just finished our first read-alouds (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH  and Crispin: The Cross of Lead respectively) and we're cruising into:

Fourth:

This is where we'll begin to look closely at character: identifying and supporting character traits, how those traits both create problems and equip characters to solve them, and how relationships play out throughout a text. 

For fifth:

For plot, we'll focus on how the individual stories intertwine (and how so many lead back to one minor character, which is weird.) For character, we'll look at different types of characters (flat, round, sympathetic, static, dynamic.) This has a good variety of those.

Plus, I love reading how the snobby admin.-type refers to himself as an ed-you-cat-or, as opposed to the warmth the kids' teacher, Mrs. Olinski, exudes. 

So, what are my awesome, bloggy friends reading these days? Click the button below to stop by the Focused on Fifth site and find out. Share what you're reading, too; it's a linky party!

Football Freebie Frenzy!

It was a rough day yesterday in my football world. UNC-Charlotte, my undergrad alma mater, joined the D1 teams last week and got whupped. This week, they got slaughtered. Poor 49ers; it's going to be a bag-your-face kind of season.

My grad school, Duke, lost, too, though not nearly so badly, and let's face it, nobody expects Duke football to be good. We Blue Devils are OK with that. Winter is coming.... and we own it.

That leaves the Panthers. With no Luke Kuechly. (A wise decision - he's a very young man. I'm all about hitting hard. It's football, for crying out loud, but I'm glad to see the league taking head injuries seriously and allowing players time to heal.) His absence will be felt, and I hope not too badly. Maybe it'll be a good week and the receivers will actually receive. It could happen...

Oh, and the Houston Texans will be in town, and their star lineback, a particular Mr.Clowney, is from about 20 minutes southeast of here. We remember him as a high school player and as a Gamecock, so we'll enjoy watching him play today.

So, just for today, since it's been a mixed bag this weekend, I'm offering a place value scavenger hunt, perfect for fifth graders and your bright fourths, at half price. If the Panthers win, it'll be free for the rest of the day. (I teach at an early start school, so that'll be about 8:30 EST, unless I get busy and forget, in which case it'll be until I suddenly remember tomorrow...) Makes an excellent print-and-go center or whole-class activity. To find it, click on the pic:

Hopefully, this weekend won't be a wash. May your team play well and score big, unless, of course, you pull for Houston. ;)