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.

Now For Some More Work!

What does one do with the first hours of summer.....hmm...go to lunch with friends? (check) Sit on the couch? (check) Watch kind of dumb television? (check) Get blog guilt when you realize you haven't blogged since March? (check) Start thinking about fonts for my focus wall?

Wait? What?

Having titled a blog something to the effect of "Why I Need to Teach Second Grade Next Year," I clearly jinxed my workload and am now moving up to teach third grade next year.

This will be a really good thing! Minus the fact that I will be spending some good quality time with my focus wall again - since now there is a whole new grade level to prepare for...and about ten seconds ago I realized I forgot my amazing magnet things in my classroom drawers. Sigh.

In any case, I brought all of my second grade files home...




which led me to consider what supplies I needed for creating a severely comprehensive and OCD binder detailing all of the aspects of this year in second grade in chronological order....which of course led me to This lovely blog that I have spoken about before.

I linked the page about a comprehensive binder because I love the idea, plus, it has exactly what I was looking for: circular tabs!

In addition to spending time with my focus wall this summer, I shall be spending time with my circle cutter!

Looking at the tabs set my brain on a ridiculous and untimely journey that has inhibited my laziness slightly. (only slightly, however, as I continue to sit on my butt....I have however moved from my couch to my deck - progress!) I noticed fonts that I wanted. Very seriously wanted.

I mean, when you're considering a focus wall that you have to look at all year long, the font better be fun, right?

The previous link mentioned this website as where the cute fonts for the tabs came from. It was amazing! I may have gone a bit overboard and had to walk away....but! If you're looking for cute new fonts for things this summer or for next school year, I highly recommend it!

I also recommend perusing Ladybug's Teacher Files too. Her ideas are marvelous.

And now, I leave you with a few pictures from when my classroom looked together and pretty: Open House. In an effort to walk away from my room as quickly as possible today, I did not take a picture of how blank and sad everything looks now (or the corpse of a freakish spider that is currently stuck to my big bulletin board thanks to my kids). Photos courtesy of my mom, as she and my dad came to visit my classroom that day!




Looking across the room. Desks stuffed full of portfolios, etc.



Painted Lady Butterfly Pictograph: When Did My Butterfly Emerge? (Oh, during STAR Testing Day 3...no big)




Finally, the completed Angry Verbs wall!

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.

....and I get to spend time with this EVERY weekday!

There are some days where I sit down after all of the kids have vacated campus and just think back on the ridiculous things that happened.
Seriously, some of the things that come out of their mouths are amazing. Some are hilarious. Some make me want to put my head on my desk and never look up at them again.
Honestly, it amazes me that the short weeks actually feel the longest, but I have moments and comments to get me through....oh, and fantastic classroom neighbors.

Favorite moment of the week requires a small amount of backstory. Two of my students are best friends. Both have been Star Student already this year, and both plan on being Paleontologists (like Indiana Jones) when they grow up. They are going to do it together, because they're best friends. One of them, H, lights up like it's Christmas when the topic comes up. A grin spreads across his face and you can tell that it is radiating from his soul.
This week was writing central. We worked on our summary of "Ants," having spent Tuesday creating our graphic organizer;



We wrote a letter to this week's Star Student; and we ended the day writing to our pen pals. During the final writing of the day, it seemed quiet enough (what?!) and controlled enough to put on a CD, and in thinking of H, I knew the perfect one.
This called for "Here Comes Science!" brought to you by They Might Be Giants....particularly the song, "Paleontologist" in honor of H. When he started listening to the lyrics, that smile from the soul spread across his face. Kind of amazing!


The real question is: how is it that the spazzy ones are ultimately the sweetest? I mean, really. Most of the time they drive me crazy, but then they do something that puts a smile on my face and keeps them endeared to me.


The desk fairy made another appearance this week too. There is apparently some sort of story that the whole class has concocted about this fictitious individual....I guess she has an evil counterpart who steals stuff from desks and moves it to other tables (personally, I think that would be another specific student....) In any case, I found that it was difficult to find different desks that were deserving of a visit from the desk fairy.....so pretty much all the same kids got the note. So much for equity when it comes to neatness! I tried.....really. Problem being, most of them believe that papers just naturally migrate into desks at the end of an assignment or at a transition....which makes me so wonderfully happy.....

I have so much to share. Literally, I have to keep reminding myself that things do not have to all go in one post. It will especially help me to post when I feel as though there is nothing else to write about, so I am saving them until later....I can tell you that it will be about how every kid in our school (kindergarten through fifth grade) will know what metacognition is.

Finally, I shall leave you with my Valentines. They were cute, and I am happy to share what I stole from Pinterest!

Four Day Weekend!

Time to celebrate the conclusion to a much-needed and very relaxing four-day weekend!

For the amount that I have thought about my next post, I do hope that it is not underwhelming. I sat down to write it a couple of times and then scrapped everything because I was utterly unsatisfied. Let's try again.

So here it is:
Angry Birds!



Context: I painted Angry Birds to go on my bulletin boards. One day we had a rainy day schedule. That is what I got.

What did I do when I got the call that I would have a job? I painted birds.





and pigs....



But in all of that, I was missing one wonderful and idea-creating thing: Pinterest.

I saw a picture on Pinterest last week that caused a very massive face-palm moment. One of those, why-in-the-world-did-I-not-think-of-that moments. We studied verbs ages ago, and they illustrated their verbs so very nicely....but nothing would have been so wonderful as this:



ANGRY VERBS! This will certainly have to be re-created as a review day and whatnot. Write a sentence using an amazing verb on your bird or pig. The kids seriously are obsessed with Angry Birds. All sorts of hats, clothes, valentines, toys, etc. They would eat up the idea of Angry Verbs....Plus, I have been trying to think of a good open house board configuration....since I am being lazy and leaving up my fun Ancestor Board all the way until then.....because it is cute and it took a lot of effort to get things in the right place....and I would rather just do surgery on the pieces that fall off than recreate the whole thing in May....look at me justifying my laziness.



Pinterest will ultimately be the death of me. I find myself perusing whenever I have time and there are far too many lesson ideas to fit into just one school year. In addition to that, there are far too many options of everything to fit into one lifetime.

In conclusion: Angry Birds.
The end.

Roller Coasters and Javelin Catching

I sat down to write this about an hour ago. In the process, I decided that since I needed my pictures from my phone, I would just upload them all and go from there. This is the point where my brain exploded and I decided to go through my photos in the iPhoto library and title all of the events....at which point, I noticed that all of the pictures had uploaded twice. After fixing all of that, I have finally gotten to where I wanted to be an hour ago: telling you about Roller Coaster Day.

All I can say is, "Wow." I knew my kids were awesome, but I didn't realize that they were amazing engineers. Comedians, yes. Engineers, no.

2nd grade just finished up a whole big science unit on force and motion. Throughout the process, all of my team members were coming back to touch on the logistics of Roller Coaster Day, which essentially meant almost nothing to me until yesterday. I was completely in the dark, and they kept telling me, "Don't worry, all you do is give the students the pieces and let them go."

Let them go? Have they met my class? As it is, I have issues with letting things go. I put all of this to the back of my mind and merely collected the donations of empty water bottles, cardboard boxes, paper towel rolls, and masking tape. On Thursday, Co-worker and I cut some foam tubing in half to create the "track" that the students would be using. (I really wanted to use the tubes as javelins, but kept the majority of my maturity and decided against it.) That was it. Collecting and cutting 12 pieces of tubing. All the prep.

(*I did organize some of the supplies into "starter kits" before we got going. Each group received a grocery bag with X paper towel rolls, Y toilet paper rolls, Z plastic cups, masking tape, 3 pieces of "track", and a marble. The large quantity of cardboard boxes, water bottles, and coffee cans were stored in the classroom library and were shopped for on a first-come-first-served basis.)

It is a serious struggle to leave my class to their own devices, but since that was what all team members said I needed to do, I just sat back and braced myself.

This was the result:



Careful planning.



Calculated testing.



And serious engineering.

These kids impressed me like crazy. Don't get me wrong, even though they drive me crazy, I love their silly brains and senses of humor. This day was one of the first ones this year that I've had the "This is why I am a teacher" thought.
But, I mean, look at them!



This isn't even the half of it. These are the better pictures for showing what we did....but there were a whole lot of hilarious antics happening the whole day....one kiddo stuck a box on his head and used it as a helmet for the entirety of the project. He gave it to other students and they posed for pictures together...during which he would shout, "Mr. Helmet!" instead of cheese. Wow. A.maz.ing.

Here is some more:



Their roller coasters had to have four things:
- A hill
- A loop
- A curve
- The ability to stop the marble on its own

As they put all of those elements together, you start hearing words like "position" and "friction" and "gravity" and all is right in the educational world. The group pictured below was the only one brave enough to attempt two loops. They were nearly successful; however, one of their loops was positioned where two tracks were taped together. Not entirely "loopy" so the marble didn't entirely make it through. Valiant effort though.



What I should have done is taken a picture of the clean-up. The whole day might have been wonderful and fantastic; but when it came time to dismantle and go to music, things fell apart. Literally. Tracks were knocked down, boxes kicked, water bottles thrown, patience lost....I herded them from the room as quickly as possible and returned to consolidate. My desks are set up in a rectangle around the room, giving me a big space of carpet in the middle. I begged our wonderful custodian for a stack of trash bags and then began tossing everything that had just been used in construction to the middle of the rectangle. When the kids came in to the apocalypse after lunch, their job was to do away with all of the junk.
Having tweaked my back working out on Thursday, I taped trash bags to the board (labeled for trash, recycle, and boxes) and then sat back and watched. Fortunately, I have trained their cleaning well and we were spotless in less than 10 minutes; leaving plenty of time for a debriefing and some writing about the day.
Go team.

Despite the fact that I have letting-go issues, that was a pretty excellent project. Here's hoping that I can refine some of it for next year, and make it even more successful!

The Great Desk Dump of 2012

Last week, I hid my frustrations about my class by having them tip their desks over, dump everything out, and clean/organize EVERYTHING.

Today, the desk fairy visited all of the desks that were still nice and shiny....since it's only been a week. Oh man, it was tough....some of those landfills fill up quickly. Who would have thought that was possible when I have passed out only 2 small packets since then...and they both live in the fix and finish folder.

It amazes me what finds its way into the desk, drawn by the magnetic quality of their personalities, I suppose. In the Great Desk Dump of 2012, I found beanies, all of the pencils I had been missing, menus from months ago, toys, food, basically anything that I had ever told them to take home or throw away. (Further proving that we need to continue to work on listening skills).

Regardless, most of the desks weren't awful today, but about six were exceptionally amazing and still organized exactly the way they had been organized a week ago...go team OCD!



In other news, this trimester our writing focus is on the friendly letter. We are told that this standard will go away at some point, but for now we are focusing a little bit more on our Star Student letters each week and trying to figure out good ways to make the topic more interesting...We had been tossing the idea around for a couple of weeks, but today Co-worker and I sat down and paired our classes up for pen pals!
Oh man, I am probably more excited about this than the kids are! We tried to put friends together, and I am exploding with curiosity about what they'll say!
Co-worker is ahead of me and already had her kids writing their letters today - which is great, because it will inspire my kids with questions to answer as well as questions to ask (just in case they didn't know their pal) so that they will not sit and stare at me like I'm a crazy person for assigning this project. While C7's letters were being written, I was compiling cards to deliver the names of their pen pals:




A note card, clip art, tape, and procrastinating on prepping next week's copying during silent reading....not bad! I set them to work on their persuasive posters/presentations while I put on the finishing touches, and then I got to deliver the mail. Like I said, we tried to put friends together to the best of our not-out-at-recess-with-them abilities, so the joy that happened when the kids received their pen pals was hilariously awesome. Everyone left in a good mood! Now I just need to make a cute mail box that our classes can pass back and forth.

Finally, our whole district has been learning about and using the CHAMPS program to fine-tune our classroom management strategies in a positive way. Yesterday, our staff meeting was all about analyzing what sorts of chronic behavior issues crop up in our rooms and why (attention seeking, lack of awareness, etc.)...Most importantly, we talked about how we should be reacting to these issues. What did I walk away with? Don't react emotionally to issues in the classroom.. Oh man....is that something I need to work on, or what?!
How often do I find myself with a mental face-palm about the fact that we are HALFWAY THROUGH SECOND GRADE! Why are you still acting like that?!....Usually manifests in some sort of side discussion that nobody walks away from happily.
Today I opted to not react with my emotions (I swear, my kids probably think I'm bipolar), and it was wonderful! The morning was so productive that I pulled a small group to read! I never get to do that without crazy chatter around the room. Plus, I got to have a great conversation with one of my very silly squirrels (who usually produces very little work) about how he kills all sorts of zombies on his video game. Like highly detailed. I love zombies and all, but I love him talking about them even more. He is protected from the zombie "invasion" apparently. Said something about machine gun, missiles, and body armor? Cool. I'm going to your house in the event of Zombieland, dude!
Granted, by the end of the day I was more drained than usual....it was rather difficult to keep everything bottled up 100%. We shall see how it goes tomorrow! Hopefully they will become as calm as I appear to be. Just as long as they are not as wound up as I am in my head, we should be good!


Pull-up workout from Monday was ok, but bench press workout from yesterday was exhausting. My upper body is about to give up on movement. I say that's time for bed!