How to Start Your Summer Vacation

Ok, let's see if we can get through this post without my computer getting all screwy!
(*UPDATE: By the end of this post, I had to hook up my laptop to my television so that I could use it as a monitor.)

Yes, I am terribly consistent at blogging (ha), but between the project I am about to share and Apple telling me that I need a new display for my laptop, it feels legitimate that I haven't blogged in two weeks.

Oh, and summer.
Let's not forget the pull to do nothing...that's a big factor too.

In any case, I have been in the midst of a massively gigantic project: organizing all of the master copies for second grade.



Two file boxes of papers have now been condensed down to two 3" binders. Hooray! I anticipated this job to be simple, as I already had my papers organized by month and subject. While typing the information for the labels and printing them took about an hour, the remainder of the project took somewhere in the neighborhood of 18-20 hours to complete.

Mind you, this is because (as we know) I am ridiculous and wanted to create all of the dividers myself.



Start by creating a circle design in powerpoint, and type the divider labels into the template.



Next, place post-it notes over the circles in whatever pattern you want. I color coded my binder so that each color reflected a subject.



Now for the fun part! Stick the post-it-noted paper back into your printer! Best idea ever! Thank you Ladybug's Teacher Files! Now all of my tabs matched in size and in handwriting.



At this point, the ridiculousness sort of began. I now had labels for months, as well as labels for every subject that we covered for the whole year. They were all printed nicely on post-its and looked beautiful....but all of these had to be cut out. Yay. The trusty circle cutter came out for this big job. Circle labels are my favorite. They turn out so consistently. Sometimes I have issues with my straight edge slide cutter because things don't line up properly and lines aren't entirely parallel.



From where I sit, I am about 20 minutes away from the nearest laminating machine. Cost of gas and cost of lamination taken into consideration, I had some HD Clear packing tape handy and opted for that cheap form of fake-laminating. It actually wound up working better than if I had laminated them because I was able to leave a strip of the sticky post-it exposed. This allowed me to store them neatly together until I was done, as well as to carefully position them onto the card stock divider sheets in perfect alignment.



Toss in a handy cover sheet, and now we are all ready to load it up!
That's right! Up until this point, the hours of organization were spent creating the framework to organize! Hooray!

From this point on, it was just a matter of sliding my masters into sheet protectors and placing them into their respective binder category. Which took a good amount of time sitting in front of the TV...practicing my multi-tasking...

In the end, one binder was not enough, and I had to make another trip to Staples to pick up a second....and if we're being realistic, I probably over-squeezed into both...because having a third binder that didn't match in size was not an option.

And, for all of you who are thinking, "Why not scan all of this?"

I thought of that.
About 3/4 of the way through making the dividers.

Plus...I would have to print out a master copy anyway when we got to needing that activity in the future. Ultimately, I am not teaching second grade next year, and my classroom doesn't have much storage. So now, instead of storing two file crates full of junk, I only need to find space for two binders stuffed with junk!



Now on to the next 125 hours of my 150 hour independent study! Bring on the grade level CHAMPS posters!...and some more circle cutter bonding.

Thinking About My Thinking Cap

So many things to share!

In my immediate procrastination upon sitting down to blog, I had to share that I love this blog! Hope King is fantastic; but even beyond that, the post that is linked is such a great elaboration on what I attempted last week...I will have to do that next year.

We completed our own contraction surgery in class during Week 2 of reviewing for our summative test....which was fun and engaging and such, but we didn't have surgeon masks and supplies. Next time. Next time.

I teased before that we have been discussing metacognition in regards to reading comprehension. School-wide, teachers have taught lessons to show that "Real Reading" is a combination of both thinking and reading. This leads to discussions that cause the students to really consider how they are thinking about what they read, and how they are responding to the literature. All of these ideas are listed and discussed in this book.



Most things are scripted, but you kind of run with what you've got when your kiddos are listening. Mine enjoyed it so much when we got started that they ask to do "reading salad" nearly every day during our read aloud.

Before I get into the posters, let me first explain that I didn't feel like I had an ideal place to hang the posters that go with this concept. Then, let me also explain that the only tape with any lasting quality that I have in my room is neon orange duct tape.

Proceeding.



Having completed the introductory lesson to metacognition, together you create a venn diagram that shows students they must think about what they are reading to really get something out of it. The salad activity illustrates that by using different colored papers to represent "text" and "thinking," and you put one or the other into a big bowl if you do it while you're reading to them...another demonstration of the same concept: You have to think to really read.

All of this connects into several Thinking Stems that we use to encourage metacognition. I positioned these posters on my back window, which just happens to be behind me when we are on the carpet.....hint hint. "Hey kids! Look at me! I am the way you are supposed to start your sentences!" The thinking stems are fantastic! We have been integrating them into nearly everything that we read....this also includes using them in sentence frames during science and social studies lessons. As a whole, it is incredible to see some of the thinking that comes out of their shiny brains sometimes!



We have been using white boards to take notes using these thinking stems/sentence frames while we read our Scholastic News these days. I put a frame on the board (ex: I'm thinking __________________, because I'm noticing _________________. or I'm noticing _________________, because I'm seeing ________________) and have them fill it in using their own words. Some, like my ELLs, write shorter sentences, while others fill up the board with their notes.

Finally, for today, back to my poster-hanging implements: Binder Clips and Duct Tape!
Oh, how I make my father proud! All the daily uses of duct tape in my classroom are amazing :) This was my particular favorite.

As I said, I have limited space for posters where they will be easily accessible for regular reference. Also, I wanted to be able to move and change the posters as we add to them. For instance, we have been using a lot of opinion phrases these days,



but I may want to add our inferencing poster on top when we do that activity. This also helps with some of the storage issues that I have in my portable classroom.

I have read about using binder clips with command hooks to store sentence strips or bulletin board borders, but I didn't have any command hooks handy (where are they when you need them) and I needed a place right away. To the duct tape! Who cares if it is neon orange!?




That's that! My excitement of weeks and weeks consists of metacognition and duct tape. Oh, and Pi Day....but that would be too much for one post. Perhaps I will Pi Blog this week....that would be impressive of me! In my blogger defense, it was report card time, so I sort of lost track of life outside of a correcting pen and my classroom for a while.