Sunday Smorgasbord on Vacation

Hi, sweet friends!

Currently, I'm enjoying my second cup of coffee with my brand new puppy sitting under my chair, my nephew watching Jake and the Neverland Pirates in the next room and a beautiful Midwestern backyard right out the windows.  (But it's literally 100% humidity outside, so we're definitely doing this blogging inside.  That's a little too much stickiness for me.)  Without any more babbling, I'm here to share my Sunday randoms with you, courtesy of one of my favorite bloggers, Michelle over at Fabulous in First.  You can check out her blog here.  Seriously.  Check it out, if you haven't before.  She's all types of fantastic.

{ONE}

Mr. Spouse and I finally added to our family.  We got this sweet, new puppy earlier this week.  On Tuesday, to be exact.  =)  She's such a little love bug, and she's been so well behaved!  We picked her up from a rescue and then we drove from DC all the way to Indiana on Wednesday.  We've been hanging out at our sibling-in-law's domicile since then, and they have a bigger dog, who has in turn made Sadie believe that she is also bigger than she is.  

These are post-play pictures, after they've tuckered each other out for the moment.  =)  Then they take like a 30 minute break and get going all over again.

{TWO}

I'm working on reading this great book right now called Smarter Charts.  It's a really great book about how to give your instructional charts more bang for their buck.  The authors focus on literacy strategies, but as you read it's easy to see how the same ideas could be using for math or science charts.  I think that the biggest take away for me has been that if you want students to use the charts you have after you've made them you have to teach the charts to kids.  It sounds so simple, and maybe it makes me sound like an idiot for not knowing this before, but that has totally been my biggest light bulb moment while reading this book.

  If you're looking for an easy read before you head back to school this book is definitely it.  It's incredibly easy to read and the layout makes it very useful.  I've read teacher books on occasion that are really dense and you have to put a lot of effort into reading them.  That's totally not this book.  It's really user friendly and there are multiple times during each section that I feel like I could use the idea/strategy/method right away.  I mean, it's summer, so I don't need to use right away, but it's on the docket for back to school charts.  =)

{THREE}

I FINALLY posted something new in my TpT store!  It's been so neglected.  :(  I always have great intentions, and then it's just hard to follow through on them all the time.  But, I just posted a new Fundations sort for unit 6.  If you're not familiar with Fundations, unit 6 is the unit when students are introduced to plurals, and the suffix s.  It aligns really well if you use Fundations, but it is also useful to introduce students to building regular plural words.  As it says in the product description, it DOES NOT include words that are made plural with -es or -ies.    You can check it out here.  So far, I have activities for the first 5 units of Fundations, and I'll continue to add to them.  I'm hoping to have units 7 and 8 up in about a week and a half.

I've been sitting at the island entirely too long now.  I need to get some family time in.  And maybe a third cup of coffee?  Have a great Sunday, friends!

xoxo

Cyber Monday is TOMORROW!

Hello, friends!

I hope that everyone had a safe, delicious, and relaxing Thanksgiving.  I know that I definitely did.

Here in DC, we only get Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, so the hubs and I stay out here for Thanksgiving and celebrate with other orphans.  But this year, we celebrated Thanksgiving with my aunt, uncle, cousin, her husband, their adorable twinnies, and a friend.  It was a great time, and I always think it's nice to build new traditions.  Not to get too sappy, but holidays are a time to spend with your family--actual, or adopted.

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving the hubs and I go out to get our Christmas tree, since we have to take it down before we travel home for Christmas.  We go to this gardening center that's in our neighborhood-ish and found a great tree.  We got a Fir tree this year; I've never had one before, but I really like it so far.  We finally finished decorating the tree yesterday, so now I just have to start finding time to write Christmas cards.  With all that extra free time I have, right?  Ha.  I do really enjoy holiday cards, though.  Sending and receiving.

The main purpose of my post today, friends, is to tell you that tomorrow is Cyber Monday!  TpT is throwing a huge site-wide sale and tons of sellers are participating!  I definitely am, and it's likely that many of your other favorite sellers are, too.  I'm putting my entire store 20% off and if you use the code CYBER at checkout TpT will give you an additional 8% off.  I'm hoping to have my Fundations unit 3 activities up by the time I go to bed tonight, but I'm also trying to work in some more family time so we'll see what wins (it might be family time).  The Cyber Monday sale is a great time to clear out your wishlist!  I know that I'm planning several purchases.  =)

Enjoy your Sunday, sweet friends!
xoxo

First Ever Five for Friday...And I'm Already Late

Y'all.  I can barely believe that it's Saturday.  Actually, if we're being really honest what I really can't believe is that I made it out with friends until 1:00am last night.  Or, this morning, I guess?  When we left I really thought we'd be home by 11:30 at the latest.  Suffice to say I'm beat today.  But it's okay because today is college football kick-off so I'm just catching up on all the things that got shoved off this week.  I'm also linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five For Friday.  Except I'm a little late.  Oopsie.  :/

Here are my 5 things.  Unfortunately, I only have 2 pictures, per some phone drama.
1.  This is honestly the best parent information form I have ever received.

  I love that this little girl's favorite thing to do outside of school is shopping.  I laughed out loud when I read this after school one day.  Watch out for this one.

2.  I love how quickly my little loves are buying into everything this year!  They're already giving the kids who are picked for line leaders silent cheers every day.  So sweet!  Yesterday, during Choice Time there were 3 girls at the art supply table and I could hear them playing school.  One of them said "Now pretend like it's your first day off the chart and you get a plus on your behavior calendar today.  Oh, yeah!  Woo hoo!"

3.  Yesterday, we worked on our hopes and dreams.  It literally took us almost all day to finish them, between having an assembly in the morning, teaching them each step of the project, plus embedding in lessons on how to use scissors and glue.  I mean, we really did hopes and dreams and read to self yesterday.  That was about it.  I snapped this picture of 2 cute littles working on their self-portraits.  The best part is that NONE of my kids wear glasses, but since I drew myself in glasses about half a dozen of them put glasses on their faces, too.  Love them.

4.  This first week back was NUTS!  I was so happy I planned the whole week over the summer; I had so much going on outside of school!  I had to 2 parties and a fantasy draft.  And really all I wanted to do was go to bed at 8:00pm every day.

5.  I'm so excited about college football coming back, and having a long weekend to recover that I'm going to put my TpT store on sale through Monday!  Take a look and snag some planning/organizing materials at a discount for back to school.  If there's something you'd like to see that's not there let me know!  =)

Have a great weekend, friends!
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Short and Sweet

Hey, y'all!  I hope everyone's weekend is off to a great start!

I know some people are back in school already, but here in DC teachers go back on Monday.  I've already firmly vowed to myself that I will NOT go up to school this weekend...even though the mess I left in my room yesterday is threatening to give me an anxiety attack.  The weather here is beautiful this weekend, and I'm enjoying my last weekend of freedom.  =)

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm participating in the huge TpT sale starting tomorrow, and with 20% off my store you can get several items in my store for under $1!

I think that  my next TpT project is going to be some guided reading planning materials.  Would that be helpful, or do you think that market is pretty saturated?

Happy Saturday!  =)

Evaluating Inverted Workshop Math Products

Greetings, and happy Sunday, friends!  I don't know about you, but I'm really starting to feel the back to school pressure.  Which is why I was so happy when the weatherman predicted a gross Sunday, because it's much easier to convince the hubs that I need to spend a (summer) weekend working on school stuff when the weather is yucky.  And it doesn't hurt that we both shirked all adult-like responsibilities and went to the pool all. day. long yesterday.  It was glorious!  And then we acted like we were both 22 again and went out way too late last night with friends.  Whoopsie!  But all in all it's been a very fun weekend; I even made eggs benedict this morning (first time ever)!  You can start calling me Martha Stewart whenever you're ready.  ;)

Today, I want to talk about evaluating student work/products in an inverted math model, especially since it's much less cut and dry than a typical word problem.  Of course there are still answers that are right and wrong, but there's a lot of information you can learn from your students' work, even if their answer is ultimately incorrect.

Initially, I was using a simple check/check plus/check minus system to evaluate my littles' work during this time, but I really felt like it wasn't really meaningful for them or for me.  And if evaluation isn't driving future/forward progress then what's the point?  So I spent some time brainstorming and trying to think about what I really wanted out of my kids' work, and how I could communicate it to them in a kid friendly way.  I've always liked the idea of rubrics, but conversely also frequently had a hard time using them in a meaningful way in my classroom.  And then I was paging through this unit that I bought from Deana Jump and DeeDee Wills and they had a writing rubric inside that was based on smiley faces, which I thought was really brilliant, and it was sort of like the clouds parted and I had this flash of teacher brilliance:  I could use a similar evaluation system for the math work that I was doing with my kids.  But one thing that was really important to me is that my kids bought into the rubric, also.  So I brainstormed the things that I really wanted to make sure were included in the rubric, and then I sat my kids down on the carpet the next day for math and I told them that we needed to think about what the very best first grade mathematician work looks like, and what it looks like when you're not doing your very best work and this is what we came up with.

After we made this chart, we had an epic dance party because we spent so much time on the carpet making it, then I laminated it and it hung up in our classroom the rest of the year.  The next thing I did that I really think helped my kids have a clear understanding of the work at each level is that we evaluated some anonymous work together as a class.  We went over what different mathematicians produced and I asked them what symbol they would have put on it, and then I showed them what symbol I actually gave it.  We did this for about 2 or 3 days so that they really understood how to get smiley face exclamation point (which, by the end of the year, was one long word in our classroom--smileyfaceexclamationpoint).  I really feel like this rubric helped my students be clearer about the way I was evaluating their work, and it gave us all a common language to use around discussing our mathematical work.  It was great to see kids using the chart with their partners to think about what they needed to add to make their work even better.

For those of you wondering how I tracked the data across units, I'm here for you.  =)  I really tracked this data in 2 ways.  I would create a chart in word of the problems we were doing each week, and all my kids names and then I would just put the symbol they earned in their box.  This allowed me to look across the week and see if there was a student who really understood and should maybe be pushed harder, or if there was a student, or group of students who really didn't seem like they were understanding our content that week.  The other way I tracked it was numerically, in a grade book so that I could use these symbols to factor into my students' math grades at the end of the quarter.  I just used a 4/3/2/1 system, with the 4 being equivalent to the smiley face exclamation point, and the 1 being equivalent to the straight face.  I didn't use 3/2/1/0 because I feel like zeros can really wreck an average.  But you are, of course, the boss of you.

Honestly, I had planned to talk about evaluation and leading a share/debrief in the same post, but I feel like this is already a super long post, so we'll save leading the debrief for tomorrow.  And last but not least I am working hard at making my debut on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I'll be sharing the documents that I use in my own classroom to make this model work--planning guides, tasks that I've already written, blank rubrics for you to fill in, and maybe a quick how-to guide, if you think that would be helpful.  I hope to have all of those documents ready to go by this Wednesday.  If there's anything else you'd like to know let me know!  I aim to please.  =)

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
Rachel