New School Year.......New Kiddos :)

Well fellow bloggers I just finished my first week of my fourth year of teaching and my first year of grad school. Woooooo! it was quite exhausting but I am absolutely loving my classes and the fabulous teachers I have meet. My class is also pretty great! :)

Well I'm trying some new stuff in my room this year and I'm pretty pumped about them!

One of the amazing things I am trying out this year is called "Whole Brain Teaching". If you haven't heard of this before you need head on over to their website and start reading up. https://www.wholebrainteaching.com

Here are five reasons I LOVE using WBT in my room.
1. The kids are super engaged.
2. No more trying lots of different attention getters. Class?Yes! is the best!
3. The students love teaching each other.
4. I love using all the gestures and expression when teaching!
5. The scoreboard is my new best friend!

This is a video I found on Youtube that gives a perfect example of why WBT is so AH-mazing!

The second thing I am trying this year is incorporating the Notice and Note Signposts into my Daily 5 lessons. Another teacher on my grade level and I spent the summer reading the book and adding the signposts to our curriculum map. We tried to think which reading strategies we already taught would be good to introduce with each of the signposts. We plan on introducing the "Contrasts and Contradictions" signpost with character traits and story elements. We can't wait to try this out and have our students thinking deeply about what they are reading! I'll let you know how it goes when we try it. If you haven't read this book and are looking for a professional book, I would recommend this one!

Well that's all for now. I'm going to make it a personal goal to blog at least once a week this year! So tune it for more from Adventures in 4th grade.

April currently :)

Now onto what's going on in Ms. G's class this month.

April is a busy, busy month!

#1 Free Verse poetry writing for National Poetry Month. I am hoping to have a poetry slam day at the end of the month. The students have been writing up a storm and are loving poetry. They are so eager to share their poems everyday. Students are going to start editing and typing up their poems on the "Notebook +" app on the iPads. Then they will create their very own poetry anthology. I've gotten all my inspiration and lesson ideas from the infamous Regie Routman.  Check out her book.

#2 Country Research for International Day on April 25th. Students have been working for the last three weeks researching a country of their choice in preparation for a presentation on International Day. I got the project guidelines from teacherspayteachers. The project has students pretend like they are going on a vacation to their chosen country. The kids write about the country like they are actually there. The students have had to broaden their thinking and get creative. As a final project the students will then create a Prezi or powerpoint on their country and bring in a "suitcase full of souvenirs" from their travels.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Traveling-the-World-A-Social-StudiesELA-Research-Project

#3 Starting next week I will begin the dreaded test prep. AAAHHH!!!! But as a fun way to review for the BIG TEST I'm going to have the students participate in test prep rotations. 

      1. Teacher Time- I plan on using these resources during time with me. I plan on reviewing test taking strategies and how questions are worded because my students struggle with the format in which questions are asked on the State tests. 

CCSS TDQ Text Evidence April Close Reading Comp Pack
      2. Independent Time- I plan on using the following pack because it does a good job of reviewing comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, and writing all on one page!
Common Core ELA Fourth Grade Test Prep
      3. Vocabulary Games from Florida Reading Research Center as well as some TPT resources.

      4. iPads- I will be having the kids using the following website to review reading strategies learned throughout the year. I like the lesson, practice, and "quiz" format.
New York Elementary Test Prep


Well that's all for now! :)

March Currently :)

I've been out of the blogging world for a few months now so I thought I'd link up. Well here it is.........to link up head on over to Oh' Boy 4th Grade. Oh! Spring Break is in the near future. Only four more weeks!!!!! YAY!!!!

Close Reading

After reading several blogs and attending some professional development workshops, I have realized that we should be teaching students how to read the text closely a.k.a "Close Reading". For the first half of the year I primarily spent time during my focus lessons teaching grammar, comprehension strategies, and accuracy strategies. I use Fridays to work on fluency. I call this time "Fluency Friday". Students practice their reader's theater every week with guidance from me. Then the fourth Friday of the month they perform their play. But I eventually realized that even though we were collecting words on our word collector that it wasn't enough. I needed to choose mentor text to read and teach vocabulary words. I stumbled upon this blog called Hello Literacy. I read her post about Marzano's Vocabulary and decided to use this in my classroom. Free feel to hop on over and check it out on her blog.

Marzano's Six Steps to Vocabulary Instruction

Then I read some more and realized I could reach all of my reading needs by doing what is called "Close Reading" (which is what common core wants us to be doing). My co-team member and I decided that we would sit down and create our first close reading lesson.

We chose to complete this reading with the book "Molly Bannaky". First, we had students read the text by themselves(We made copies of the first few pages of the text so they could make notes. This is totally legal if you only copy 10% of the book). They underlined information they felt was important and circled any word they thought was interesting or they didn't know. Next, we scanned the first few pages onto the Smart Board and wrote text dependent questions and syntax that we thought would be difficult for students. Then we used the think, pair, and share strategy to go through the questions we asked. We had students check for understanding, make predictions/inferences, and form their own opinion about what was going on in the story.

All in all, I think our first try at close reading was a success.

One last note:
This book below is one we are currently reading as professional development with some of our other team members. So far it is great and they have lessons in the book that are ready to apply in your classroom. Apparently, there are six signposts in the book that students should notice then students will make notes about what they noticed in the text. The first lesson is called "Contrasts and Contradictions".  I plan on trying the first lesson out in the next couple of weeks. I'll post to let everyone know how it went!!! :)

Updated Safari Themed Classroom

 Here is my front wall with my new cafe board and anchor chart space!!

 Here is my word wall area and my teacher's corner!

 Here is my reading area. The bench is a pinterest inspired idea. I'm going to have my students write book reviews when they finish a book and post them on the wall.

This is my new behavior clip chart! So far it has been working wonders!

Daily Cafe

So it's been a while since I've posted. This first half of the year has been very busy(common core, daily five, CAFE, crazy kids, reading, RTI! etc.). I have absolutely loved implementing the Daily Cafe with my co-team member Mrs. Wyatt. I feel so connected to my students this year and they are becoming such amazing readers. They constantly come up to me and are like "Ms. Gibson I'm inferring this....." Or "look at this word I found, can we put it on our word collector?".  In addition to the Daily Cafe we have started book clubs in January. The clubs meet twice a week and when they are meeting, the students complete read to self with their books. Students select the book they want to read with their group. The children have gotten extremely good at summarizing, questioning, picking out parts from the text and analyzing them, and reflecting on their meetings.

With that being said here are positives about the Daily Cafe:

Students are becoming more fluent readers, more, accurate, and thinking critically.
Students love picking their own books to read.
They love the different rounds.
Their writing has become deep and thought provoking.
They are learning lots of new words.
The variety of genres being read have increased.
It has been amazing having flexible strategy groups and being able to confer one on one.
Students have grow close with their elbow buddy and most pairs work really well together.

Here are some of the negatives:
There isn't always time to fit in all the rounds.
Currently, I'm only doing three rounds a day for about 15-20 for a round.
Sometimes my mini lessons last longer than the 7-10 minutes the sisters usually do.


But obviously those who have started the Daily Cafe in their classroom can agree that the positives outweigh the negatives tremendously.


One last plus, our school just got 30 iPads!!!!!!!!!!!! So Mrs. Wyatt and I are slowly implementing them into our rounds. We have used the StoryKit app during Work on Writing time. They are creating stories with their elbow buddy.

Two Sisters' Workshop- CAFE

It's been FOREVER since I've been on here. I worked so much throughout the summer that I had no time to think about school. Now that I'm back in school I hope to blog more frequently. 

So for all those who have read "The Daily Five" and "Cafe" I know you would be as excited as I was to go to one of their workshops. I decided only to go to the Cafe workshop because I thought that would be more beneficial. My principal would only pay for one of them. It was one of the best workshops I've ever been to. If you are a teacher/literacy coach/ principal you should definitely go to one of their workshops. I learned so much about how to implement "Cafe" and how to teach reading. I read the book before I went to the workshop but was very nervous about using it in my class. But after the workshop it seemed like perfect sense to make this work in my class. They provided many research based reasons explaining why "Cafe" works. 

If you aren't familiar with "Cafe" it stands for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary. You would teach the students specific strategies and practice them as a group. Then you assess all of your students to see what kind of instruction they need. Afterwards you and your students discuss their assessment results and have students pick a "Cafe" strategy to work on during independent reading time and practicing it until they have mastered the skill. The sisters did a wonderful job explaining touch points. Touch points are what they use to assess each conference they have with a child. There are four levels: 1-below standard, 2-approaching standard, 3- meets standard, and 4- exceeds standard. If a child gets 3s or 4s for five or more conferences then they are ready to add a new goal to work on. This method really works because teachers are catering their instruction to each individual student based on their needs. I could go on and on about why I love their ideas! So if you have any questions please feel free to ask. :)

Another wonderful thing about the workshop is you get tons of free stuff. BOOKS, classroom materials, and a year subscription to their website which is super useful!

Keep a look out for my next post which will be about my first week of using Daily 5 and CAFE. :)