The day of our holiday party...perfect timing for 60 degree weather in December. I've done a holiday party in my classroom the last three years. It's always been pretty crowded, but this year was without a doubt the most crowded. I'm so glad so many family members could join us, but I did feel bad that it was so packed and hot in there! Maybe the cafeteria would've been a better venue..? But space and temperature aside, it was a good time. Thanks to all of the folks who came. It was fun to see the kids so excited and into our activities, and I'll be honest, I could've continued that game of trivia for at least another hour. If anyone has any photos from the party, please send them my way!

In ELA this week, we had one focus: main idea. We spend a large portion of our nonfiction unit on strategies to find the main idea and supporting details of a nonfiction text. For example, students are encouraged to preview the text and find the topic first. This is the subject, and it is generally stated in one or two words. The main idea is the most important point that the author is trying to make about the topic. This is a complete sentence that should include the topic. So a text's main idea might be, "Technology has changed over time.", "Turtles and tortoises are different species of animals, yet they have many similarities.", or "The John F. Kennedy School is a K-8 elementary school in Somerville." Supporting details are facts from the text that give more information about the main idea. Consolidating all of the information in a text and picking out the most important idea, along with key details to support it, requires a lot of higher level thinking skills, especially as the texts get harder. So I called in some reinforcements. Ms. Ward is our school's 6th grade ELA/SS teacher. She is absolutely awesome, and it's been great bouncing ideas off of each other related to curriculum, instruction, texts-- everything really! We met last week and I voiced how challenging this unit can be, for both the students and for me. So we came up with a plan for the week before break. Her 6th graders would select an online article on a topic that interests them, and create a mini lesson around finding the main idea and supporting details of their chosen text. Then we'd pair each of them up with a 4th grader to teach their lesson. Well, this activity exceeded my expectations. Ms. Ward's students only had two days to prepare, but many of them came to my room on Wednesday with learning targets, worksheets, even slide shows. It was sooo cool to see the kids learning from each other. Both grade levels reflected on how things went afterwards, and the consensus of both groups? We absolutely need to do something like this again.

With the craziness of our party, picking our weekly Bucket Fillers got lost in the shuffle. So we'll have lots of names to pick from on the week we get back. We hope the kids like the personalized pencils and sharpeners given to them at the end of the party. (Let's just say that, in reality, these serve as a bit of a present for us teachers too...) Thanks so much to all those who gave me such generous and thoughtful gifts! Happy holidays to everyone, and see you in 2019. (< Sorry...I had to.)

  

  

   

This week was weird. Let's start with Monday. On Monday, I had to attend a districtwide meeting for a team I'm on that is in the process of developing a leadership model for Somerville's schools. I had to leave at noon, so the kids had a substitute for the remainder of the day. This brings us to Tuesday. Tuesday was interesting, to say the least. We'll start with a little background. The Kennedy School has so many talented teachers, and we have so much we could learn from each other, so Ms. Song and I are currently facilitating two peer observation cycles using protocols from a peer observation pilot we worked with Mr. Ames and Ms. Bougas (now at the Healey) to design last year. Tuesday was the second of two observation days, and the crew of teachers with whom I had the pleasure of working was amazing: 2nd grade teacher Mr. Bayul, 3rd grade teacher Ms. Labaire, 7th/8th grade social studies teacher Ms. Brady, and music teacher Ms. Ward. Getting to see these guys in action was an unreal opportunity, and getting to debrief all of our lessons afterwards to give each other feedback and exchange ideas was equally beneficial. But for the kids, that meant a very unorthodox day. I was in and out of the classroom all day, with different substitute teachers covering for me for different chunks of time. Throw in the fact that I was beyond disheveled that morning as a result of my alarm going off 1.5 hours later than expected, then being greeted by a broken printer when I did get to school, and it could've been pure chaos. But the kids were actually AWESOME. They were flexible and patient, and I was so grateful.

Then we come to half-day Wednesday. We had our STEAM showcase that day, so again our schedule was unusual. The morning was spent getting ready to present the work we've done with Ms. Tosches so far this year, and later on, we set ourselves up in the Makerspace to prepare for our turn in the showcase. From 10:30-11:00, a few other classes came in to check out our character trait stop motion animations, our work with Scratch using the cardinal directions, and our math Book Creator projects. We also got to visit other grade levels and see their impressive STEAM-related work.

The kiddos of course got dismissed at noon on Wednesday, and Thursday was relatively normal, which leads us to Friday. We filled our classroom Transition Jar last week, which is a system I have in place that rewards students for positive behavior during transitions. I put a marble in the jar whenever we have a smooth transition from one classroom to another, as well as whenever we get a positive report from the specialist teachers. When that jar is filled, each class gets to vote on what they want as a reward. Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom opted for a whole-class game of mat ball in the gym, while my homeroom settled on a combination of pajama day and board game day. So on Friday, not only did I get to wear comfy clothes and my giant turtle slippers to work, I also got to participate in a game of mat ball. Unfortunately, we had to cut our game a few minutes short due to some game-related disagreements. However, after everyone respectfully took part in a reflective circle discussion on the rug when we got back to the classroom, I'm hopeful that students can learn from what happened. Because when it comes down to it, do the results of a just-for-fun game of mat ball truly matter? Not so much. That afternoon, the kids in my homeroom got to play some of the board games that they brought in, which was a good time. (Getting to play Scrabble on the job? Amazing.)  At the end of the day, we went to a school-wide assembly to kick off next week's Kindness Week. So, as you can see, we had quite the week!

Our Bucket Fillers this week aren't exactly strangers to each other; both Viola and Will got their name pulled. Talk about a twin dream team! Viola is a sweetheart. She is very attentive to the needs of others, and always eager to help out. In addition, she's constantly smiling, which I love. Will is a delight to teach. He embraces my recommendations and feedback, and regularly goes above and beyond what is expected when it comes to reading and writing. He's also just a genuinely nice kid. Looking forward to my lunches with the Redd twins next week. :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We do a morning-share-type routine called Connections at the start of our daily ELA block, and one of the reasons I like this routine is that I get to know what's going on in my students' lives outside of school. It's during that time that kids often talk about their extracurricular activities, and it doesn't take long to figure out most kids' hobbies and interests. Clearly getting to know kids beyond just how they do in the classroom helps to build positive student-teacher relationships...which builds a stronger classroom culture and community...which translates into a mutual respect between student and teacher...which creates a sense of trust and attentiveness that often correlates with positive behavior and adherence to classroom expectations. What am I trying to get at? Well, let's just say that while I love learning more about my students, I also have an ulterior motive: better behaved kiddos. This weekend, I got to see five of my students in action on the basketball court. When I found out my friend Mr. B. would be coaching 4th graders this season, I had him send me the game schedule so that I could sneakily show up at one of the home games at the Healey. Well apparently, today's game was only the second game the team has ever played together! It was pretty darn impressive how well Mihali, Colin, Will, Petya, Owen, and the rest of their team did, especially considering they have literally only had two practices so far...

This week, students started learning about and researching the different types of energy. This research will contribute to a multidisciplinary project that Ms. Tosches, Mrs. O'Keefe, and I put together. Since students spend a large chunk of their time in science this year on renewable energy resources, and since we're currently in our nonfiction unit in ELA, and since we have the incredibly innovative brain of Ms. Tosches at our disposal, we found a way for students to apply their understanding of nonfiction text features to what they've learned about the various forms of energy. How? By creating Makey Makey boards with nonfiction text features that display facts about a specific form of energy. Stay tuned for updates on our most recent STEAM-related (and entirely foreign to me, yet equally fascinating) task.

Our Bucket Fillers of the week were Lyla and Leanne. Lyla is a sweetheart. Not only that, but she's dedicated to her schoolwork. She wants to do well, and it shows. For example, she was sick this week and missed a day of school. Despite her absence, she did her homework by looking online and completing the assignment I posted on Schoology. I love the commitment! Leanne had a really good week during ELA. She participated lots, which is something she's had a hard time with in the past. I love seeing her hand in the air and I hope she keeps it up!

Wooooweeee what a week. I was out the day and a half before Thanksgiving because I had a stomach bug (awesome timing), and then Mrs. O'Keefe was out for a few days post Thanksgiving break. So several different substitute teachers combined with the kids coming back from a four-day celebratory weekend? You can imagine the insanity. But we survived! After an honest discussion on Wednesday morning regarding our behavior with substitutes and expectations using Chromebooks, we managed to turn things around and have a better second half of the week. Every year around this time, I tend to see a shift in behavior. I'm sure it has something to do with the weather and time change that comes with the change of seasons, as well as excitement and restlessness around the holidays. Throw in the fact that the "newness" of fourth grade has officially worn off and the school work is getting increasingly challenging, and you'll find yourself with the ultimate recipe for misbehavior. But continually reflecting on classroom conduct and problem-solving together can help us get in front of this trend. And THAT would be the ideal holiday gift for us teachers!

We kicked off our nonfiction unit this week. We discussed how the author's purpose when writing nonfiction differs from when authors write fiction. Nonfiction is primarily written to inform, explain, or persuade, whereas fiction is written to entertain. Fiction texts are stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and are read for enjoyment. That's not saying nonfiction is boring; it's saying that people tend to read nonfiction with the intention of learning something. They may learn facts about a topic, learn how to do something, or learn two sides of an argument. That being said, the author's purpose of a text isn't always cut and dry; you'll find overlaps. For example, a persuasive speech may include figures and statistics, or an autobiography might include important events in history that fascinate and entertain the reader. Yet when we talk about the author's purpose of a text, and how we can use that to help us determine the genre, we have to focus on the primary motive for writing. What is it that the author wants the reader to first and foremost take away from his/her work? We'll continue to explore author's purpose, especially as we build our own writing skills, and it's important that students consider the author's purpose when identifying whether a text is fiction or nonfiction.

This year, we're in "Spellography Training". I've been working with our resource room teachers Ms. Fudge and Ms. Jareo to implement daily spelling instruction using a comprehensive word-study program. This program teaches into prevalent spelling concepts, parts of speech, word origins, and vocabulary, and we've been spending about a week and a half per set of words. We always do a pretest and posttest for the words, and it's great when the kids see a jump in their posttest score. I love when they're proud of themselves, and we were all proud of the recent success James has had in spelling!

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Cecilia and Max. Cecilia works incredibly hard on her Quick Writes. I truly admire the effort she continually puts into her classwork, and it's wonderful to witness her grow as a learner this year. Speaking of growth, Max's participation this week was off the charts. What a difference a few months makes! He is now regularly putting himself out there and raising his hand, and my hope is that we can build his confidence at school so much so that it competes with his confidence on the baseball field!

It's still crazy to think that we have one-to-one Chromebooks in fourth grade. It's not super natural for me to consider the incorporation of technology when I'm lesson planning, but I know that the more I give kids the opportunity to use the Chromebooks, the more confident they'll be when it comes to using the technological tools and resources we have available to us. The biggest hurdle for most kids is their typing skills. Some kids don't use computers at home, so they haven't had much exposure to typing. In addition, I remember literally having typing classes when I was in school, with lessons on how to place our hands on the keyboard and lots of practice to build up our typing pace and stamina. That's not the case anymore, and to be honest, I think it's a bummer. It already feels like there's not enough time in the day, so it's a challenge fitting typing practice into our schedule. But we'll do what we can! I have a bunch of typing games on the "For Students" page of my class website, and I've started giving kids a little time to play them in school in hopes that they'll play some of them at home. During intervention block, I've started creating assignments through online programs like Readworks.org and Commonlit.org. I can select and revise assignments based on the particular skills and strategies kids need to practice, and having the majority of the class working on Chromebooks allows me to focus on teaching differentiated small group lessons. We've also used an app called Kahoot!, which the kids really like. I created a multiple-choice pretest for our fiction unit, and the kids used their Chromebooks to select their answers. This past week, we took the quiz again to track the students' understanding of the standards and vocabulary addressed during the unit. It's an engaging way to gather data in relation to student growth and understanding of a topic, and I'm going to try to use it on a regular basis.

We used the Chromebooks on Friday to continue our focus on writing about characters. Students are typing up a paragraph about a character of their choosing, and then creating a word cloud displaying traits and other information about their character. The word clouds are a lot of fun for the kids to create, and a good incentive for them to work hard on the paragraph itself, since they can't do the word cloud until I've approved their writing! Another activity we did this week addressed one of the concerns the kids had during our post-test reflection, which is their lack of character trait vocabulary. It's hard to come up with traits for characters when you don't know a lot of traits in the first place. So we worked in small groups to explore about 20 new words and their meanings using characters in short fables. Both classes did a great job during this activity.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Kaleah and Basilia. Kaleah had her best week yet. She's been working hard on developing a growth mindset, and I love when I see her proud of herself for not giving up and persevering through difficult work. She excitedly came up to me a few times this week after math class, and I love seeing her eager to share her achievements with me. Basilia has made it known since the beginning of the year that she really values the feedback I give her on her work. She wrote me such a nice note this week regarding the feedback I gave her in her writing notebook. Going through all the kids' Quick Writes takes a lot of time, but it's so worth it when students appreciate and learn from my feedback. Nice job, ladies!

Our first ELA test of the school year? Check! We had our fiction test this week, which covered everything from fiction reading strategies and characteristics of fiction texts, to analyzing figurative language and writing a text-based essay about a character. Though only seven questions, this test wasn’t easy in that there were a lot of two-part questions. It ended up taking most of the kids a solid two class periods. Whenever we take a test, I always set aside a class period post-test that gives students time for revisions and reflection based on my feedback. It’s important that students view learning as a process, and that assessments don’t just receive a final grade without an opportunity to take my feedback into consideration and apply it to their work. Prior to revisions, I don't include any scores on their answers. Instead, I provide comments and questions in hopes of guiding them to make revisions that result in stronger, clearer responses. We discuss the questions as a class, talk about trends I noticed, and clear up any misunderstandings the kids may have. It isn't until after revisions that I attach a number to each question and grade the test. Students will bring those home this week to show parents, and we'll continue working one-on-one, in small groups, and as a class on various "trouble areas" that were revealed through this test and our whole group reflective discussion on the unit.

On Thursday, we concluded our unit for health, which had a teacher named Mrs. Schneider come in and teach fourteen 40-minute lessons on various topics. Between this unit and the twice-weekly yoga classes we had at the start of the school year, we unfortunately haven't done much social studies. But our schedule is finally back to normal, which will allow us much more time for writing and social studies when the students are with me in the afternoons. Our first unit is on map skills, and on Friday Ms. Tosches came in and integrated this focus with STEAM. Students applied their knowledge of the cardinal directions to create a scratch simulation that had them directing a cat around Somerville. It was cool to see them code, as they know more about coding than I do!

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Kailynn and Colin. Kailynn worked really hard on her ELA test. I didn't hear a single complaint from her, despite its not-so-fun length. Lately she's shown a resilience and ability to bounce back from frustration that makes me proud. Colin is hilarious. He makes me smile everyday with his witty remarks and insightful comments. I can't wait to have lunch with him and a friend tomorrow :) 

Most teachers dread coming into school the morning after Halloween. Most years, I fit into that majority, cringing at the thought of the kids’ excessive candy consumption throughout the day, and the inevitable sugar highs and lows that come with it. It doesn’t exactly make for a normal day at school. But this past Thursday morning, I couldn’t wait for the kids to show up. Though many of them were bound to come in bursting with excitement, stories from the night before, and backpacks full of candy, I was so pumped for them to see the surprise bulletin board I had been planning for the last few weeks. Back in September, I got an email from Viola and Will’s mom with a photo of them both engrossed in books on their couch. It was awesome seeing my students in action at home. I love reading, and I love seeing kids love reading, so it led me to an idea. I sent out an email to all our 4th grade parents, asking that they try to discreetly snap a photo of their child reading outside of school, and then send the photo to me. Over the course of 2-3 weeks, I gathered these pictures of my students reading at home, and then got them printed at CVS. After school on Wednesday, I put together a bulletin board with all the photos, and at the top of the board I included a title that says “Look Who Got Caught Reading…” I want the kids to know how important reading is and how much I appreciate an enthusiasm for reading, and I’m hoping this motivates those kids who don’t read enough at home to start doing so. So, getting to see the looks on the kids’ faces upon noticing the board, and the photos of them (and their classmates) engaged in books at home, made for a pretty exciting morning-after-Halloween. 

This week, Mrs. O’Keefe’s homeroom got a chance to do the character trait stop motion animation. Then on Friday, we did stations that focused on various skills and strategies we spent time on during our fiction unit. Two of those stations involved STEAM, made possible (yet again) by Ms. Tosches. She designed one station that integrated character traits with Makey Makey, an electronic tool involving circuits and a connected Chromebook, and another station that used Beebots. The Beebots station required students to show their knowledge of story elements (as well as differentiate between traits and feelings) through coding. These activities, along with the other two stations, served as a review for the fiction unit test we’ll be having next week. Though it’s a test, it’s important to note that our fiction unit isn’t coming to an end just yet. Following the test, we have 1-2 weeks of reteaching that will be based on how they did on the assessment and what areas the kids would most benefit revisiting. While there’ll surely be some common trends, areas of need will vary from student to student, and the test will allow me to determine which students could use further instruction in each standard associated with this particular reading unit.

Our Bucket Filler this week was Mihali. I’ve known Mihali’s family for a few years now, and I was really looking forward to having Mihali in class. It was easy to anticipate that he’d be a pleasure to teach, but honestly, he’s surpassed my expectations. He’s kind to others, hardworking, respectful, and silly, and he’s made me grateful in his own appreciation for the high expectations I set for my students. Go Mihali!

 

 

The Kennedy School is so lucky to have Lindsey Tosches. For the last three years, Ms. Tosches has taught sixth grade at the Kennedy. This year, she continues to teach sixth grade science, but she also has a new role as our school's STEAM/Innovation Learning Specialist. She works with all grade levels on a weekly basis to incorporate STEAM into the curriculum. Now, as an ELA/Social Studies teacher, I've always found it a little more challenging to incorporate STEAM into my lessons and units in an authentic, beneficial way. There are so many ideas out there of how to do it, but I just haven't felt confident in implementing them. And in reality, STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics-- Science and Math are literally part of the name! So when Ms. Tosches took on this new role, I viewed it as an opportunity to seek some guidance in how to apply the STEAM approach to my subject areas. She began the year in Mrs. O'Keefe's room, and this past week it was my turn to benefit from Ms. Tosches's expertise. Right now our focus in ELA is on character traits, and using evidence from texts to support those traits. After sharing this focus with Ms. Tosches, she found a way to integrate character traits with stop motion animation. The kids read a story called The Junkyard Wonders by Patricia Polacco. After digging into the story's characters, students were grouped in twos and assigned one of the characters from the text. Their goal was to identify at least two traits to describe their character and explain their thinking using specific evidence from the story. On Friday, my homeroom selected one of the traits to illustrate using the character's actions and words in a scene from the text. They created the characters and props for the scene with pipe cleaners and paper, and physically manipulated those materials in small increments while taking pictures with an iPad. When the series of frames are played back as a fast sequence, it will create an illusion of movement. They'll have a video displaying their character's actions, which represents the trait that they came up with for their character. Pretty cool, huh? Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom will get started on this project tomorrow, and both classes will complete it by the end of the week. I can't wait to see the finish products!

Our Bucket Fillers of the week were Braedyn and Emma. I love how much Braedyn participates. He is always raising his hand and putting himself out there, and he's very kind, patient, and positive. He is just an all-around great kid. Emma is fabulous. Her love for reading and writing is a dream come true for an ELA teacher like me. She makes me smile on a daily basis with her creativity, wit, and insight. I'm loving being her teacher!