Reading Partnerships in Breakout Rooms

The primary way I use sharing screens on Zoom is in reading partnerships in breakout rooms. Students join their reading partner in a breakout room, and one student goes to getepic.com and shares their screen. Both students are then able to read a shared text together. Before we went to remote instruction, students would be able to share a book from my class library and sit side by side, or read a set of duplicate books that I had several copies of. This is no longer possible now that students do not have access to shared texts at home. Sharing their screens allows students to access shared texts online and read together like they did when we were in person. 

Now, I set up breakout rooms ahead of time with 2-3 students per breakout room, and send my second graders to their rooms with instructions to read together. They spend not more than a minute or two on Epic choosing a book, then take turns reading pages, and help each other with difficult words. I go from room to room, listening in and offering immediate feedback before I move on to the next group. I jot notes on each group like I would as if I was conducting my in-person reading groups, and eventually pull everyone back to the main session to debrief. My kids love to give "shoutouts" to their partner for reading well and helping them sound out words!

This is one of my students' favorite activities on Zoom. As soon as you can teach at least half the class to share their screens (remember, you only need one student in the partnership to be able to share their screen to get started!) you can begin using the free website getepic.com for reading partnerships online. 

10 Clever Uses for Baking Trays in the Classroom

I love my classroom set of baking trays.  (I always want to call them cookie sheets, but technically cookie sheets are completely flat, and these are definitely not.)  I bought six of them from the Dollar Tree several years ago, and I keep finding new ways to utilize them. Here are my top ten:

1. Use with magnetic poetry words to build sentences. 

I have sets of magnetic words (also from the Dollar Tree) that the kiddos can use during Word Work Center's. The magnetic pieces stick to the metal tray, and with the raised edges, the kids are less likely to mix up the sets. (My self-diagnosed OCD goes into overdrive just thinking about these word sets getting scrambled. That's also why I wrote numbers on the back of each piece with a metallic Sharpie, so I would know if word pieces ended up in the wrong container. The picture above shows a child working with set #2.) 

2. Use with magnetic letters to form words and practice spelling. 

I have two tubs of giant magnetic letters, also for Word Work during Literacy Centers time.  I used to have students stand at the white board in front of the room to arrange the letters into words, but with these trays working as little miniature metal versions, I can now have a group sitting at a table for this. 

Since I keep all the letters jumbled together into one big mix, there's no worry of keeping sets separated, but if you had distinct sets of the alphabet, the trays could also serve to (at least try to) contain those sets.

3. Use with puzzles to keep sets together when students work side by side. 

I have a ton of puzzles (also purchased from the Dollar Tree!) that I pull out when I do Critical Thinking Centers. The kids love using them, and I love seeing them use problem-solving strategies to complete them. I don't love the fact that my kids loose pieces constantly. What happens is, pieces fall to the floor, and then disappear to the same place as missing socks, hair ties, and ball point pens. The darlings will also mix up and switch pieces with their neighbor's puzzle (which of course, makes me insane on the inside, but what can you do?).  Having the students keep all their pieces on their tray has helped this a lot. (Although, as evidenced in my picture, some of your littles will still want to build directly on the table instead of their tray.)

4. Use with Play Doh to practice spelling patterns. 
I occasionally bring out Play Doh for a Word Work center, and let the kids form their spelling words with it.  It gives the kids a kinesthetic connection to the week's spelling pattern, and strengthens their fine motor skills. My biggest rule about Play Doh (aside from "Don't eat it,") is they have to keep all of their Play Doh inside the tray. (I also have a rule about not mixing the colors, and a rule about staying focused on the words instead of building unicorns and motorcycles. Maybe I have too many rules. . . A thought for another time.) Before I started using the trays along with the Play Doh, you would not believe how much of the stuff ended up on the floor.  So much that I swore off Play Doh in my classroom for a long time. The trays solve most of these problems for me though, because in addition to keeping (most) of the Play Doh on the table instead of the floor, the trays also serve an added bonus of preventing colors from mixing. 

5. Use to trace letters and spelling words in shaving cream.  

Full disclosure: I have not done this in my classroom.  I consider it every year, and even suggest it as a great homework activity for parents to do with their kids (read: at home), but just can't justify the messiness/cleanup time/risk that a child would eat the shaving cream.  But I give you my blessing to try it yourself and let me know how it goes.  

6. Use with paint and marbles to create abstract art, a la Jackson Pollack. 

I don't have any pictures to post of this art project, but the link below gives you a great idea:

http://artfulparent.com/2010/10/marble-rolling-with-a-friend.html

7. Use with water cups while painting to prevent disastrous spills. 

If you place the water cup and paints on a tray in the middle of the table, it will keep any spilled water from knocked cups inside the tray instead of on the floor/art work/kids.  Some of you might be thinking to yourselves, Just use less water in the cup, so that way there will be less water everywhere when one inevitably gets knocked over. An excellent point, but let me say this to you in response: filling the cup with a little more water makes the cup heavier (and thus less likely to tip in my experience), and allows for more paintbrush rinsing before having to dump and refill. 

8. Use during Words Their Way spelling sorts to keep words from mixing with a partner's. 

I use the "scribble-with-a-different-colored-crayon-on-the-back-of-the-words-before-cutting" trick to help students keep their words separate, but when I want them to do their Words Their Way sorts at a Center table, papers are more easily mixed up.  By giving each kid a tray to sort their words on, this is (somewhat) prevented.  (There will always be a few students who manage to lose half their words in a time span of ten minutes however, and in those cases you're just glad they managed to keep half of their words at all.)

9.  Use as a lap board for kids who don't like working at a desk. 

I have a few kids every year who don't want to sit at their desk.  I have other options for these students, such as small rugs on the floor, or standing, but occasionally they like to just sit in a chair with their work in their lap.  In these rare cases, I've given them a tray to use as a lap board.  (You can also just use a clipboard for these situations, but the tray holds their crayons/pencil as well and a clipboard does not.)

10.  Create a cutesy magnet reminder board, as seen in tons of cute Pinterest posts.  

I haven't made one, but it's on my "I would love to make this" list!

Very Silly Sentences

My kiddos are in LOVE with this new Very Silly Sentences game I just introduced to our literacy centers.  They roll the die that came with the game, which has parts of speech and numbers on the different sides.  The point of the game is to fill their game board with enough words to make a complete sentence.  The kids are literally giddy with anticipation before choosing cards, waiting to see what word they'll get to plug into their silly sentence.  

Starting next week (now that they're familiar with the game) I'm going to have the students take the sentences they build on the game board, and write them down in their writing journal.  Figuring out how to keep students accountable during literacy centers is something I've been thinking about for awhile (especially since most of my centers are independent), and I think this will be a good combination of hands-on activity/written work.

Reading Fluency Resources

I don't know about you, but the reading program my school (Imagine It! by SRA) doesn't really have a good reading fluency assessment system that I like.  SO, I've been looking around the internet for other resources that I can use to track my firsties' fluency.  Now, I know they say you shouldn't test for fluency until at least the winter of first grade, but I start testing fluency from the first week of school.  I always have at least a handful of kids who can read when they enter first grade, and I like being able to track their growth over the first few months of school (instead of waiting until December or January).

Here's a link to the passages I'm using this year to test my kids' fluency:
http://rti.dadeschools.net/pdfs/ORF-OPM_grs1-5.pdf

Just download the pdf file, and then you have everything you need for grades first through fifth in one file.  (Very handy.)  Now that the whole class is reading (albeit at widely differing levels), I'm testing my students' fluency every other week.  It's a lot of work, but it really gives me a good quantitative measure of how they're improving, as well as giving me some hard data to use during conferences with parents who believe their first grader is ready to read Chaucer.  (I'm only slightly exaggerating.)  

I keep all my fluency assessment sheets in a two-inch binder, with numbered dividers to keep each student's assessments separated.  (If you haven't already assigned each student a number, I highly recommend doing so.)  Last year I only had 28 students, so I was able to buy the dividers with tabs numbered 1-31 (which presumably are meant to be used for the days of the month), but now I have 35 students, so kiddos 31-35 are just separated by paperclips.  I'm pretty sure Staples has dividers that are numbered through 50, but I just keep forgetting to stop on my way home from school -- and when I do happen to remember, I tell myself I'll stop in another day, because getting home and into sweatpants trumps any need I may have to organize this binder.  

Here are a few more links that have good resources for reading assessment:
https://dibels.uoregon.edu/market/assessment/materialdownload?agree=true

http://www.comprehensivereadingsolutions.com/category/grades-k-5/

http://www.louisianabelieves.com/resources/library/teacher-support-toolbox-library

Rubrics for Reading Fluency: 
http://books.heinemann.com/comprehending/pdfs/ScaleForAssessingFluency.pdf

http://www.cdl.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/Hasbrouck-Tindal-Table.jpg

It's a lot of work to get through 35 students every two weeks, but I use my guided reading time during literacy centers every other Monday morning. The worst is when a student is absent, and then I have to find time to make up their Running Records assessment.  But quite honestly, I often times leave their score blank for that week, and just test them in two more weeks with the rest of the class's next round of fluency testing. 

I'd love to hear about the systems you use to test and track your students' fluency! 

Creating a Listening Center with an iPad

If you have an iPad in the classroom, you can create a listening center for your students to listen to read along books.    The trick is to buy a headphone splitter, which will allow up to five students to plug their headphones into one iPad.  You can even plug a second headphone splitter into one of the headphone jacks of the first, adding another four headphone jacks to your initial five.  I ordered mine on Amazon for about ten dollars - highly worth it, considering it just multiplied my iPad usability by five.  

Where before only one student was using an iPad to listen to a book on CD, now I have five students utilizing a single iPad. Even if you have a set of multiple iPads for your classroom, this still frees up iPads for other students to use at a different center. 

I've found a bunch of books with read along CD at the Dollar Tree last year, and all I did was put the CD in my computer to download it onto iTunes (I created a Read Along playlist just for books on CD), and then transferred my iTunes playlist onto my iPad the next time I synced up.  The kids know to go to Music on the iPad, and then look for the book title they're reading.  

Another fantastic feature of using the iPad as a Listening Center, is that you only need ONE copy of the read along CD.  Once you've put the music file on your computer, you can put it on all of your class iPads. 

Since there's five kids on one iPad, I did have to coach the kids on waiting until everyone had their headphones on, and their books open and ready before the group leader pressed Play on the iPad.   (I learned this lesson very quickly, after several students started crying that the rest of the group had started the book before they were ready.)

There are a few books with CD at Scholastic Book Clubs this month that I'm thinking about ordering... Now that I've nailed down my system for Listening Centers, I'm eager to start building my Read Along library!

What about you, readers?  How do you work listening to reading into your day?

Making sentences with Magnetic Words

The Dollar Tree really is the best place to find inexpensive teaching resources.  The pack of magnetic words below cost me (duh) a dollar, and so did the cookie sheet underneath it.  My white boards are magnetic, but I love using the cookie sheets so the little monsters lovely children don't scatter the tiny pieces all over the floor.  (And in my classroom, the floor is like a black hole.  Once something leaves the desk, it disappears like a sock in the dryer.)  

Each part of speech is color-coded as well, however I haven't taught them this yet.  Once we've reviewed the parts of speech more, I can start talking about how all sentences need a blue noun, a red verb, and even better sentences have green adjectives, etc.  Until then, students just had fun reading the sight words and helping each other sound out the other words they didn't know.  

Some of the sentences they created were pretty funny . . . My favorite may have been, "She is old."  The little one who wrote this called me over to show me, and I strongly suspect he was talking about me!  (Oh, God, thirty-three isn't old yet, is it??)

Irregular Plural Nouns

We've been doing some review work on irregular plural nouns. When I covered this earlier, a few of my kids were still a liittttlle shaky on the whole concept of nouns (compared to verbs and adjectives), so I decided to touch on it again. This is a writing activity we did last month in our writing journals:

This was enough for the majority of the class to "get it," especially after writing sentences that used irregular plural nouns.  But to let my stragglers catch up to the pack, I did this activity:

I had a list of 28 nouns one for each student, with several nouns for each of the following singular-to-plural rules: 

~add -s, 

~add -es, 

~change y to i and add -es, 

~change f to v and add -es, and 

~keep the plural noun the same as the singular. 

I then drew name sticks to assign students to a word, and they had to draw and label the singular noun on one side of the page, and draw and label the plural noun on the other half of the page, using the appropriate rule.  

The best part of this activity came the following morning during reading centers, when the kids had to sort each other's labeled drawings according to the rule they used to make the noun plural.  They recognized each other's work, and loved using their own work to do the sort. I guess there are situations where my beautifully crafted and laminated flash cards aren't the best way for kids to learn!  (While my ego took a slight blow, I realized that it's a lot less work for me if the kids make their own sorting cards for grammar and spelling conventions.)

To really drive the concept of irregular plural nouns home, I assigned this app in one of my iPad centers. In this free app, the kids are given a sentence that uses an irregular plural noun, except they have to decide what form of the noun should be used. For example, "The boy saw three ______ in the forest."  Then the students have to drag either the word deer or the word deers into the blank.