Writing

So this post is mainly just for me because I wanted a way to keep track of these ideas visually and in a way that I can refer back to later.

I am having all of those "ahhhh" feelings that happen to first grade teachers at the end of the year. The students have grown so much that they are sometimes not recognizable. I want to keep track of this feeling and the knowledge of how far they have come to refer back to next year when we are in the middle of the year and we are all working so hard to make this growth happen. This post will inspire me to keep plugging along and working at it.

I am mostly just going to post photos with a few sentences to tell about what growth I see in each photo. There will be samples from all types of writers. I will still see many things to teach each child but I will also see just how far each child has come. So here goes.

This writer is combining things she learned in math, art, our bee study during our Expedition and writing.

This writer used an idea from a book we read as a mentor text and tried fold out illustrations.

This writer used The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer as a mentor text to create this book called, The Frog Room.

This student attempts to add descriptive language to her story to create a setting.

Another writer was inspired by The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer.

This writer was inspired to try a technique she noticed in Ready Freddy books. She added a hidden word to each illustration in her book. She hid the word "life" in each picture because it went with the theme of her book.

This writer was inspired to write his own version of a Fly Guy story.

This writer tried many things on this page - bold print, quotation marks and stretching out a word for emphasis.

This student combined two ideas into a new book of his own creation. He read Wump World by Bill Peet and the play Willy Wonka (that was put on at our school this year) to come up with his own story about The Wonka World.

This writer tried circling words that didn't look right to him and also using all uppercase letters for emphasis.

This student uses descriptive language in his story - "It was a peaceful and calm planet."

This writer had a different way of adding a foldout illustration to his story.

One of our school's character traits showed up in this illustration. This writer shows you what the world would look like with stewardship of the Earth and without.

This writer found his passion in writing. He struggled to come up with ideas all year until we wrote nonfiction. He is working on a series of nonfiction books. So far he has written about worms, bees and frogs. He is taking what he learns during our Expedition and incorporating it into his writing.

Every writer in my crew is not represented here. These are just photos that represent what many of the writers are attempting at this point in the year and will remind me of what things inspire first grade writers next year.

Summer Professional Reading

Even though the school year is not quite finished yet - this will be my last week - I am starting to think about what professional books I want to read this summer. My mind is spinning with end-of-the-year details but I know that soon I will let it all go and be ready to read and think about next year.

Last year around this time, I was on Twitter and chatting with Laura Komos and Cathy Mere about summer reading plans and we decided to have an online book club of sorts. We decided on a book, Conferring by Patrick Allen, and started #cyberPD. For our #cyberPD, we took turns hosting conversations about parts of the book on our respective blogs and had a twitter chat when we finished. Many people joined in and it turned out to be a great experience.

We are planning on doing it again this year. So to get things started, we have decided to share our summer professional reading book stacks and see what we have in common.

 

You can probably see that I have already been reading bits and pieces of some of these books by the sticky notes sticking out of the top of the books. These are all books that I really want to dive into this summer and read deeply instead of just skimming and scanning them.

I also always reread Choice Words by Peter H. Johnston every summer to really prepare myself for the new school year. This year I think I will add two other books, Math Exchanges and Catching Readers Before They Fall,  to my reread pile because they also really reflect my personal teaching philosophy. 

If you have a summer professional reading book stack, please share it in the comments below or on Twitter using #cyberPD. I am always looking for great books to add to my stack. Cathy, Laura and I will be filling you in on the details of this summer's #cyberPD soon.

Be sure to visit Cathy's blog, Reflect and Refine: Building a Learning Community and Laura's blog, Our Camp Read-A-Lot to see their summer reading book stacks.

Addicted

Yesterday I tweeted the following:

Kathy Cassidy responded with this tweet:

I haven't been able to stop thinking about what she said. I completely agree with her that first grade teachers are addicted to that progress and that it is not the same in any other grade. It is certainly true for me. I have taught grades 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 in addition to 1st grade and I can say that students do show lots of growth in those grades but Kathy is right -- it is just different in 1st grade. The change in 1st graders from the beginning of the year to the end is quite dramatic. I find myself awed when I take a moment to step back and just watch them. I have been able to capture a few of those moments recently.

This moment is the one that I tweeted about yesterday. Cole had a new book from our school's book fair and was reading it to a group of kids during snack time. This happened several days in a row.

Then on Friday, I was conferring with students during Writer's Workshop and just happened to notice how very engaged all of the students were. I jumped up and grabbed my iPad to capture the moment. We have come so far since the beginning of the year. They are all so independent now and have many ideas that they want to write about and share. As I was walking around I also noticed how much their writing has changed over the year - conventions, content, handwriting - all of it is vastly different from where we started in the beginning of the year.

These are the moments we live for as teachers. They keep us motivated and inspired. We need to be sure to take the time to find these moments in each day.

Explore Time

Darn, darn, darn, darn*! I have yet another idea that I can't get out of my head and I think I need to try to make it fit somehow into my day. Darn! I have always (since my college days) wanted to have an Explore time in my classroom but I have always convinced myself that I could never make time for it or that it would be a management nightmare but after recently reading the blog posts below by Katie Keier and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, I really just can't let go of the idea. I forwarded the posts on to the kindergarten teachers at my school trying to tell myself that if they did this then the kids would have this experience and I would be off the hook but I still can't let it go. I was able to convince myself to let it go years ago when Debbie Miller wrote about it in her book Reading with Meaning by telling myself that there was just no time for it. Then Jennifer Orr posted her Encienda presentation from Educon on her blog and it was all about giving students meaningful choices. She has also written about the value of play several times on her blog. All of these posts along with my own beliefs are forcing me to think about when and how I can add more of this type of Explore time into our day at school. These posts, along with Jennifer's Encienda presentation, have inspired me:

Explore

Literacy Explore 

Math Explore-Investigate-Choice

Playing with the Big Kids

I am thinking that I could have an Explore time as the activity part of our morning meeting - maybe one or two days a week. Darn, I just figured out the "when" now I have to work on the "how".

 

* I say "darn" but I am actually really happy about all of this thinking that these wonderful educators have led me to do on this snow day off from school.

New Books Arrived Today!

My new (to me) math books arrived today. They will complement my current collection of math books nicely. I can't wait to start reading. I still have to wait a little while for Opening Minds by Peter Johnston but it should come soon.

Word Work Wonderings

Wondering
I wonder a lot. Little things can set off a chain reaction in my mind and then I am wondering and wondering about things that I was taking for granted a few days before. This happened recently to me on the topic of phonics/word work/spelling. I had a conversation about these things with my principal and my teammate. The conversation was a good one and we left feeling like we were on the right track but my wondering had been started and I couldn't let it go without more reflection. Here is where my wonderings took me (well, at least so far - I am sure that I still have a long way to go):

Review of Professional Readings on Phonics
My first step was to go back and reread parts of books that I have on these topics. I skimmed and scanned Word Work by Fountas and Pinnell and Phonics They Use, Month by Month Phonics, and Making Words all by Patricia Cunningham. I checked out the Words Their Way series from my public library and skimmed my way through these, too. I browsed the Stenhouse and Heinemann publishing company websites looking for new books or articles on Phonics. This led me to put one more book on hold at my public library - Phonics, Naturally: Reading and Writing for Real Purposes by Robin Campbell. I am still waiting for that book to come in.

Then I did a search of the Internet and learned about a feature that I had not heard of on Google. It gave me a list "personal results." These were links to articles by people I have some connection to in some way on the Internet. Franki Sibberson came up and she had a blog post about this article on books for phonics instruction. I loved this feature and that I got a little bonus learning about how to use Google along the way.

This morning, Choice Literacy's Newsletter came out and the focus this week was on word learning and spelling. I particularly liked the article on Patterns and Punctuation and the link to the Choice Literacy FaceBook page which is featuring a series of posts on Reflections on Spelling Instruction. They have excerpts from various authors on the topic of spelling and visitors can comment and add their ideas.

Reflecting on My Own Beliefs
After doing all of this reading, I began to think about what I believe about Phonics/Word Work instruction.

• I believe that phonics instruction is most meaningful when embedded in reading and writing instruction.
• I believe that it can be difficult to only do embedded phonics when class sizes are so large, and therefore a short Word Work time can help.
• I believe that students should notice words and think about how they work in using an inquiry approach.
• I believe that I get so caught up in the excitement of reading and writing that I sometimes neglect to catch those teachable moments that are related to phonics.
• I believe that I have much more to learn about teaching students how words work.

Examining My Practice
My last step has been to examine what I am actually doing with my students to see if it matches my beliefs. My reading workshop includes a daily focus lesson, an independent reading/conferring time, a time for modified Guided Reading groups and literacy centers. After the reading workshop, I have a short word work lesson and then a very short handwriting lesson. My writing workshop includes a focus lesson, an independent writing/conferring time and at times a brief sharing time.

I notice that I almost never embed a phonics topic during either my reading focus lesson or my writing phonics lesson, but that I do embed it in almost all of the other areas.

When I confer with a student during either reading or writing and a word work issue comes up I almost always address it even if it is very brief. This makes the learning very individualized but also very hit and miss. I also embed word work in my reading groups. A recent example is that one group worked on the "tion" word ending because the word "invention" was in their book. That group went on to find more examples of words with the "tion" ending. My literacy centers have several choices that are ways for students to work with words. There is a pocket chart where they work with word families or do word sorts. There are phonics games on the computers and iPads. There are magnetic letters and board games on phonics topics. These are generally connected in some way to the word work we are doing as a whole class. I also have the students use "personal word walls" during independent writing that are placed on each table. They can find many commonly used words on these cards to help them learn to spell them correctly.

The biggest dose of word work comes during our word work lesson. I use the Fountas and Pinnell Phonics series and Month by Month Phonics as the foundation of the lessons that I do during this time. I will add in lessons on topics that come up in our reading or writing as needed. Currently we are working on looking at different ways to spell each long vowel sound.

A new practice that I am trying this year is looking at various sight words during our handwriting time. At the beginning of the year, we focus solely on letter formation during this time but now we are using this time to examine sight words and writing them using our correct letter formation. We begin by doing a "word talk" about each word and noticing what is unusual about it. For example, we recently looked at the word "one". We talked about how we thought it should be spelled "wun" but isn't. We talk about noticing "what looks right" when writing words. I put the words we work on during this handwriting time on a word wall and ask the students to use this to be sure to spell these words correctly from now on.

After writing this (very long) post, I am wondering if maybe we do too much word work in a day. But I know that this is not true. We do lots of word work in very short bursts throughout our day but spend the bulk of our time reading and writing and loving every minute of it.

Math Workshop ~ Follow Up

It is way past time to reflect back on how moving to a math workshop is going in my classroom. Overall, I am very happy with how things are going but I have to admit that things are not going exactly how I planned. Isn't that often the case, though?

I had planned to start slowly and begin meeting with one small group each day towards the end of our Math time but that turned out to be more difficult than I expected. I was always so involved with working with individuals that I lost track of time and didn't have time to meet with my new group. I think I was having trouble changing how I used my time each day. I couldn't break out of my normal math routine. So I had to come up with Plan B.

Plan B was to do Everyday Math on Monday through Thursday and then spend all of my math time on Fridays meeting with small groups to do Math Exchanges type work. This is going very well. My class and I really look forward to Fridays. We do three rotations during which I meet with 3 different heterogeneous groups of 4 students. My Educational Assistant (who also happens to be a certified teacher - I know- how lucky am I?) also meets with 3 groups during these rotations, too. This means that we are able to meet with almost all of our students every Friday. We rotate through the groups so that we eventually see all of the groups.

While this is going on, the students not meeting in a group with one of the teachers do other math activities. We have various centers that they can choose from including computers, Everyday Math games and other math games. We have a parent volunteer who comes in and helps manage these centers and answer any questions that might come up. So far it is running very smoothly.

The best part for all of us is the discussions that we have when meeting in the small groups. The kids just jumped right in and were willing to tackle tough problems together right from the start. One of our most recent problems was:

Jill has 10 cookies to share with her friends Mary Beth and Dee. How many cookies will each friend get?

As the first group and I read the problem together, one student immediately started shaking his head saying this won't work. The other students ignored him at first and counted out 10 blocks to begin dividing up the cookies. It didn't take long before the conversation started. They couldn't figure out what to do with the "leftover" cookie. Each group that I met with had the same issue and then had such wonderful discussions to figure out what to do.

Some groups simply refused to cut the cookie into pieces. They just left that cookie out even when I questioned them and tried to get them to look for other solutions. One student said that cookies just crumble when you cut them so you should just leave that cookie out.

Another student used the fact that the names I used in the story were teachers from our school. She decided that I should just give the extra cookie to my daughter, Abby.

One student (the student who was shaking his head when we read the problem) counted out the blocks and saw the leftover cookie and immediately cut it into 3 pieces.

One group quickly decided that the leftover cookie had to be cut into 3 pieces but had lots of discussion about how to cut it in a "fair" way. They drew lots of variations that they decided weren't fair (or "fare" as they spelled it). Finally someone in the group thought of cutting the cookie like a "peace sign" and they were all satisfied that this would be fair.

The discussion in our small group times are very lively and the students learn so much. I, too, learn so much about them as mathematicians. Another great thing is that this type of thinking and sharing is spilling into the rest of our math time during other days of the week. This will help as we try to transition to more of a workshop feel every day of the week. Below are some examples of kids thinking about a problem that was trying to determine which number is bigger, 23 or 15 and then they had to determine how much bigger. This student made each number in tally marks to compare them

and this student counted up from 15:

The exciting thing is that the students are much more willing to write and draw out their thinking as well as share their ideas with each other. There is still lots of work to do and I want to make all of my days have more of a workshop feel but I have to take it step by step.