Today was one of those days that makes me believe I’m doing the right thing with my life and BOY DID I NEED IT!  We are entering the winter doldrums coupled with subfreezing temperatures which can lead to some dicey days in the classroom.  We actually had decent attendance (a minor miracle considering our schools have been hit hard with the flu and nasty norovirus).  Not only did we attend but we came to work! We began our day with listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech.  I can listen to this every year and never get bored.  He had such a way with words.  When we were done, we composed our own “I Have Dreams Too” paragraph for what we would like to see the world look like for our children and grandchildren.  My class came up with some truly powerful stuff!  Take a peek at our video below:

 That, my friends was not the end of our day!  Due to inclement weather (read freezing and Mrs. Sinone was in no way going to shiver through the rest of the day) we had recess in the classroom and practiced one of our class favorites- yoga!  What a nice way to get healthy and center ourselves before our next activity!

We wrapped up our day getting poetic with similes.  We decided it was time to take down the holiday chains and put our hears on the ceiling- literally!  We created heart mobiles and composed simile valentines for all to see.  In the spirit of figurative language I leave you with a simile that described my feelings for my students at the end of this productive day.  I’m as proud as a peacock of my Room 11 kiddos!

We have our first field trip this week!  We will be visiting the governor’s residence, Drumthwacket.  Last week we learned the history behind the property and this week we will learn more about the actually building and the etiquette we must use when we visit a formal, historic building.  Remember to check in tomorrow to see our class calling card. 

This week we are beginning our new Literature Circle novels.  Now that our latest benchmark assessments are done, I was able to adjust our reading levels and choose books that were interesting and challenging for everyone to work with.  I am excited we have some great books we are working with!  If you have any questions about the explanation letter I sent home in regards to your child’s reading progress or reading level, please feel free to email me or call the school and leave a message.  I will get back to you as soon as possible.

This weeks learning objectives are listed below:

Reading: We will be continuing to work with comparing and contrasting this week.  Our main focus will be on comparing and contrasting 2 versions of the same story using fairy tales and fractured fairy tales.  Fractured fairy tales are stories that follow the same basic idea of the fairy tale but add in a twist (for example it is told from a different point of view, has an alternate ending, or the characters or setting are altered). 

Writing:    This week we are publishing our second portfolio pieces.  We will be putting the finishing touches on our revisions and typing them.

Vocabulary: Our words this week use the suffixes -ment, -tion, -ly, -ic.  Please see the Vocabulary page for a list of words and their definitions.  Remember, you need to study teh definitions for the test.  You are tested on the word’s meaning more than its spelling (there is a word bank to help you spell them correctly).

Grammar:   We will be working with conjunctions this week.  Conjunctions are words that join two or more thoughts together.  These words are and, but, and or. 

Math:   We are wrapping up Topic 8 this week with a Test on Thursday.  Look for review homework on Tuesday and Wednesday.  For the test I am encouraging students to use the method that works best for them.  Either the “window”, place value chart or the traditional method of 2 by 2 digit multiplication (the way we learned). 

Social Studies:  We will be wrapping up our Drumthwacket unit this week with our trip.  Prior to going we will create our class calling card (a historical etiquette protocol) and review our states geography.

Science: We are teaming up with a class in North Jersey to study hurricanes and their effect on our environment.  We will be studying how hurricanes are formed, when they are most likely to strike, and how they are related to other storms such as tornadoes and monsoons.  We will be using edmodo to help us communicate with the other class to share our research.

I couldn’t wait any longer!  Here is our newest class member, Sophie!  She is super sweet and friendly and can’t wait to meet her new friends!

Tomorrow is the day!!!!!  My mother, may daughters, and I are driving to North Jersey to pick up our class pet hedgehog.  Everyone is so excited!  OK, so how did I decide on a hedgehog as a class pet?  Well, we have been spending the bulk of the second marking period learning about animals, life cycles, habitats, and food chains.  Each year our district offers classroom teachers the opportunity to apply for Math and Science mini grants for up to $300.  On a lark, I put together a proposal for the purchase of a hedgehog and supplies to create a habitat for it as a culminating activity for our animal unit.  I never really believed they would actually approve this CRAZY idea.  They did. 

What followed next was a lot of research on our part.  Students researched habitat, feeding, and care needs.  I researched breeders.  We settled on purchasing our hoglet from Jersey Hedgehogs in Union, NJ.  (www.jerseyhedgehogs.com)  My students created the following shopping list for me to build our habitat:

Habitat Shopping List:

Large clear Tupperware container with a lid

Exercise wheel

Hiding Dome

Water Bottle

Food Dish- heavy enough not to be tipped over

Cat toys

Bedding material- fleece so we don’t have to keep buying it,  just wash it

Once I purchased all our materials, we set out about making our habitat for the classroom (I made a separate vacation home for our hedgie at our house for evenings, weekends, and summers).  

 First we needed to drill ventilation holes to keep the cage well ventilated and smelling relatively fresh.  To do this, we heated the plastic using my hair dryer before drilling to prevent cracking and make the drilling a little easier.

 Then we measured two inches from the top and made a series of dots four inches apart where we would drill our holes.

We drilled the holes and smoothed out the surfaces.

Then we drilled four holes in the top of the container to use to help us cut out a top ventilation area that we covered with screen material securing it with hot glue.

Once we  were done, we measured and cut fleece to line the bottom of the cage.  We made 2 coverings to we would always have a clean one to replace the dirty one. 

Finally we positioned the water bottle, food bowl, sleeping dome, wheel, and toys in our habitat to make sure it would all fit nicely.  We even added out current Hedgie mascot to test it out.

Just as a warning, this post is not very academic in nature.  It is a way to help myself come to grips with what can not and most likely will never  be understood.  I am an educator, I am a parent, I am a human with opinions, thoughts, and beliefs.  You may not agree with me and that is OK.  I just ask that you allow me a minute to persuade you to not allow these lives to have been for naught. 

I am not going to rehash the event.  I can’t.  I have had a very difficult time attempting to process the information presented to us over the past few days.  I am not going to attempt to place reasoning behind the event.  There is none that I can see.  Quite frankly, I have not been OK for a few days.  I have felt panic, sadness, anxiety just to name a few. 

 I was unsure of how to proceed at work, at home, with my kids.  I felt guilty for feeling this way when my children (all 5 of them) were sitting here in my living room laughing and playing a new game, listening to Christmas carols, and eating popcorn.  Why should I be allowed to be worried or upset?  Because I am a mom and a teacher and we worry all the time.  We worry about our own kids, about the children we grow to love each year, about the children we don’t even know.  My life is consumed by children and I would not have it any other way.  Teaching is a calling as much as it is a profession.  Those who do it best do it with their whole heart and soul.  It is draining, emotional, rewarding, and joyful at turns. 

Thankfully, I was reminded through my own children and a lesson through our church sermon today that even in the darkest of times, joy exists.  You may need to look a little harder to find it.  It may not make you burst out in laughter, but it is there and it will make you smile when you least expect to.   I spent the weekend avoiding the news,  the Internet, twitter, and facebook as much as possible.  I am so glad I did.  It forced me to disconnect, slow down and be aware of all of the joy in my life.  The laughter of my kids, the look on their faces when they saw the tree light up, the sound of them singing carols, even the arguing over who’s turn it was all of these things brought a sense of normalcy to my chaotic soul. 

My challenge to all of you is to find the joy in each day.  Find one thing that makes you smile and treasure it.  Be the joy for someone in your life.  Tell a joke, smile, give a hug, lend an ear, be present and brighten the day for someone.  Live a life with the joy of a 6 or 7 year old.  The way my 5 year old looks at life is with wonder, excitement, pure raw emotion, unwavering faith, and abounding love.  Live life through the eyes of a child.  That is how I will honor the babies and teachers whose lives have been lost.  A life lived not with anger or fear, hatred or anxiety, but with love and joy, compassion and wonder. 

We have not gone on vacation yet let me assure you!  While I will admit keeping their attention is getting tougher by the day, we are finding creative ways to sneak in academics and plan on working as long as we can.  This week we have been making our final preparations for our Holiday Concert, which is TONIGHT by the way at 7:00 in our gym.  In keeping with the musical theme that has created for our school, I planned a few lessons to analyze some familiar Christmas song lyrics, create new lyrics to old tunes, and compare and contrast different forms of media. 

We began our week by examining the traditional tune, “The 12 Days of Christmas.”  As a class we researched what each of the gifts were and how much it would cost to give those gifts this year.  The total for this year is over $25,000 for gifts that we all agreed none of us would want!  To give this old tune a modern spin, we worked together to create a list of gifts that we not only wanted to see under our trees (OK, so some are a bit big for under the tree) but also fit into the melody of the song.  We had to alter some of our gifts because they had too many syllables to fit into the melody 🙁 .  Here is our list:

Day 1- a new bike

Day 2- 2 barbie dolls

Day 3- 3 tickets to the concert or game of our choice

Day 4- 4 computers

Day 5- 5 necklaces

Day 6- 6 Lamborghinis (nice right?!)

Day 7- 7 iPad minis

Day 8- 8 little puppies (say awe- you know you want to)

Day 9- 9 razor scooters

Day 10- 10 little hedgehogs

Day 11- 11 motorcycles

Day 12- 12 Apple iPhones

I will now give you a few minutes to sing through the lyrics because you know you want to check to see how well we stayed true to the original melody.  Not too bad, huh?!

Once we wrapped up our dream wish list, I threw a monkey wrench at them.  They had to research the cost of one of each of these items, round it to the highest place value available to them, multiply it by the number of days the item fell on (ex. 2 barbie dolls would mean 2 times the cost), and then add up the total of all the items.  How’s that for some learning?  Santa definitely had to shell out some more cash for our list.  Our grand total for all items was $1,861,340.00!

So for our next Holiday hit, we took a good long look at “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”  One of my kids favorite holiday stories is, Olive, the Other Reindeer.  How appropriate that we discuss flubbed lyrics the day of the concert, right?!  Admit it, you have all rocked out to a song only to have someone inform you that what you are singing and what the lyrics actually should be are not quite matching up.  We studied the book and the poem and compared and contrasted the stories of Olive and Rudolf.  Once done we took it one step further and compared the book version of Olive to the movie of Olive.  The discussions were lively and very interesting.  Great points were made by all.  In addition to our lesson on lyrics and comparing and contrasting using Venn diagrams, we also snuck in some character education about teasing others.  Not too shabby for pre-break learning! 

I can’t believe it’s December already!  This week is one that is fraught with disruptions.  Hopefully we will be able to navigate them and still complete the objectives I have set for the week.  I think we can do it!

Every day we will be having chorus practice to prepare for our winter concert on Tuesday, December 11th.  In addition to chorus practice we will FINALLY be visiting the fire house on Tuesday. 

Here is our learning objectives for this week and how you can help out at home:

Reading: Students will be working to determine cause and effect relationships.  You can help out at home by having them explain the cause or the effect of their favorite TV characters actions.  For  example, “What did _____________ do to end up in trouble at school or with his/her parents?”

Grammar:  We are working with verbs this week.  Our focus is on action and linking verbs.  See below for more information on each.

Action Verbs: tell what the subject of the sentence does, identifies and action (runs, walks, shares, gives, takes)

Linking Verbs: Links the subject of the sentence with words that tell what the subject is or is like (am, is, are, was, were, became, seem) 

Vocabulary:   Our words this week are antonyms or opposites.  Each of the 20 words has an opposite among the list.  For example fact and opinion, ascend and descend are 2 pairs of antonyms.

Writing:   Students will begin working on a persuasive piece about why you should take them on a dream vacation to Madagascar.  I am hoping to tie in some of our work with animals in Science with this piece.

Math: Students will be wrapping up topic 6 at the beginning of the week.  There will be a test on Wednesday.  Thursday and Friday we will begin working with 2 by 2 digit multiplication (12 x 23).

Social Studies: We are continuing our work on map skills by identifying the regions in the United States.

Science:  We will be working with identifying the parts of a life cycle this week.

This week we began our first true to form literature circles.  Literature circles are similar to book clubs.  Each member of the group is reading the same section of the book and comes to the discussion time ready to share their take on what they read.  To facilitate this at the elementary level, students are given a role to complete each night.  The roles vary every night so that each day they come to class with a fresh take on the previous night’s reading.  We meet and each student shares his contribution with the group.  By the end of the session, everyone has a chance to share insights and  connections about the characters (Casting Director Role), review the chapter (Summarizer Role), ask and answer clarifying questions (Discussion Director Role), identify and define new and interesting words (Wordsmith Role), and even visualize what they read about thanks to the groups illustrator (Illustrator Role).  For more on each role’s responsibility for completing thier assigned role sheet, please visit my Literature Circle Roles page .

Now lets walk through how the steps to having a successful literature circle session.  We begin with our Summarizer who recaps the chapter or pages read the previous night.   Once our summarizer has completed his/her task, our Discussion Director takes over to facilitate the conversation.  He/she will ask a couple of questions to get the group started and then invite the Illustrator to share his/her drawing with the group to help everyone put a picture to the story.  After the illustration is shared with the group, the Casting Director discusses the characters- who they are, what they think they look like, how the act and interact with the other characters.  This role is omitted in non fiction based books.  Finally our Wordsmith shares any new or interesting words he/she found with the group so they can define them for future reference.  This is also a great time to talk about pronunciation of names and places. 

As the teacher in a literature circle it is imperative that you too read the chapters and are familiar with their content each night.  This task can be daunting, so in the beginning you may want to assign your whole class the same book to work with to ease your load as you are getting used to this new style of teaching comprehension.  Also, I suggest you teach each role in isolation.  We spent a couple of days with everyone in the class completing each role sheet one at a time.  Once everyone knows every role, it is easier to assign different roles to each group member.  As your groups are discussing, be a facilitator not a dictator of the discussion.  Add when it is appropriate to ensure that main points are not being missed, but let them discover the literature on their own as much as possible.  It is amazing to see and hear their insights when left to work together. 

I leave you with one way I like to contribute.  When possible, I like to bring in artifacts or tangible items that correlate with the books by groups are reading.  This week one of my groups is ready Out of Darkness The Story of Louis Braille.   This biography is near and dear to my heart as my step son, Tyler, is being educated to use braille due to his low vision capabilities.  Tyler helped me braille each group members name on his Perkins Braille Writer along with the braille alphabet.  The students love having that tangible piece and can now better connect with the story of this amazing individual.

Well hello again!  We are back from break, back from conferences, back from a much needed technology shut down on my part!  Thank you all for bearing with me as I took a break from the blog in order to interact face to face with the parents who attended conferences and my own family over Thanksgiving.  I must say I was tempted at times to post, but in the end I’m glad I held off. 

We are back though.  It is a full, UNINTERUPTED week of instruction on our plates!  Woo hoo!  Please take a peek at the new Literature Circle page to help you and your child navigate through our new reading homework assignments.  Each night you child will have a different literature circle role they must complete along with reading the assigned chapter in their book.  It is VERY IMPORTANT that they complete both the reading and the role sheet.  When one person comes to a literature circle unprepared, we all lose out.  My goal is 100% participation everyday so we can learn to discuss literature in depth.

Here are our learning goals for this week:

Reading– We will be starting new novels and literature circles this week.  Every day we will hold a “book club” discussion about the previous night’s reading assignment.

Grammar– we are working with pronouns this week, both common pronouns and asking pronouns.

Common pronouns– I, me, he, she, it, they, them, we, ours, hers, his, its, theirs

Asking pronouns– who, what, which

Vocabulary– This week we will be working with 20 words instead of our normal 15, but they are synonyms.  So really it is like learning 2 ways to say the same thing.

Writing– we are distinguishing between fact and opinion this week. 

Math– This week we are extending our knowledge of multiplication and multiplying 2, 3, and 4 digit numbers by 1 digit.  Parents feel free to teach your child “the old way” of how to do this. 

Social Studies– we will be using political, physical, road, and product maps to learn information.

Science- We are learning about invertebrates (animals with out a back bone) and vertebrates (animals with a back bone)

‘Twas the end of the marking period and all through the school, students and teachers were in a wrapping up mood.

Assignments were handed in completed with care, in hopes that their averages would show some repair.

Students all leave on that very last day, with sighs of relief, giving high fives on the way.

And teachers stay late, coffee cups full.  Preparing for and all-nighter to pull.  When what in the hall made such a racket? Someone has finished early and ran home donning a jacket!

Away to our windows the rest of us ran in flash. Begging for more coffee and tossing him cash.

The moon is now high.  We pack up to go.  How much longer we’ll be grading no one really does know. 

Home to our families, tired children, and cold meals, promising tomorrow more progress we’ll feel.

Monitors on for grades to input. Pop! Great! My computer just went kaput!  Frantic I call tech support STAT, “fix it” I plead, “do this then do that!”

A smooth steady hum finally returns.  Clickety, clackety typing a’til my eyes burn.  As the last grade is entered and the save button hit, a sigh of relief escapes from my lips.

I promise myself that for the next quarter, I’ll procrastinate less and do more with my daughters. 

Each prep period will to its fullest extent be used, so the night before grades are due I won’t be burning a fuse.

The lesson my friends both students and teachers, is don’t put off assignments, be hard working creatures!

Work in steady pieces, a little each day!  ‘Tis a much better, more productive way!