TEERs of Teacher Joy!

Last year, in fifth grade, I piloted the TEER strategy for answering short answer questions in response to literature.  TEER is an acronym to help students remember the four parts their answer needs to have.  Those parts are:

• TTQA (Turn the question around)
• Evidence (right from the book, including page number and quotation marks if not paraphrasing)
• Explanation (Why did you choose this as the most compelling evidence?)
• Restatement

With students a year younger in fourth grade, I found they needed a lot more structure.  Specifically they needed the actual words to use to signal both the evidence section and the explanation sections.  So I created a scaffolded form that helps students with language impairments create fantastic open response answers.  The words the students need are right next to the appropriate section, so students can easily access them. Why didn't I have them pre-printed so all they had to do is fill in the blank?  My mother, a sped Teacher of the Year, always taught me:

"Have students write what you want them to most remember." 

 

 

 

There certainly is a time and place for creativity in open response.  But when students are first learning the "nuts and bolts" of this specialized type of writing, they should not be creative.  Once they have learned the structure of open response, they can apply their own brand of creativity.

Writing "Retirement" Board

I have four small bulletin boards in my room.  They are a challenge to plan for.  They are not big enough to display student work, so I struggle sometimes to keep them current and relevant for my students.
This year, in implementing Lucy Calkins' Units of Study, I needed to have an area in the front of the classroom to store visuals related to that program.  I call this bulletin board my "Writer's Block".  By the end of the first quarter it is pretty full with anchor charts, "Take to Your Seat" writing ideas (for  kids that couldn't come up with something to write about), other visuals and graphic organizers.

So what to do with all that stuff at the end of the quarter?  Lucy herself expressed it best.  We need to impress upon our students that they must remember everything they have learned previously when they embark on a new project in Writing.  So, in the back of the room, I created a Writing "Retirement" board.  This is where I put the most important evidence of learning from previous quarters.  Not everything goes on the retirement wall, otherwise it would be too full.  Using the bulletin board at the back of the room makes it easy for me to see and reference for my students. 

Towards the end of the second quarter, I have moved all the six traits describers to the Retirement board.  I have also moved the four levels chart.  I have two posters I made from the first quarter: a quote from Lucy and Show Don't Tell.  I replaced the "Ideas" descriptor from my rubric because the strategy of "show don't tell"  is the best method to add ideas to writing. 
This quarter we have been studying opinion writing, including the strong organizational components of a strong thesis statement, reasons, evidence, and conclusion.  I will probably take down the organizational poster and replace it with the graphic organizer we have been using during this unit.
How do help students remember the important things you have taught without having too much "eye clutter" for your students?

Guided Reading and The Common Core State Standards

    

 



      Many teachers have asked if guided reading still has a place with the Common Core State Standards.  Guided reading is an instructional technique in which teachers load much of their instruction up front. They often preview challenging words to decode and vocabulary words that may be unfamiliar.  Often teachers also give students background about a topic covered by the text that may be unfamiliar to the age and background of our students.
     The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in general de-emphasizes pre-reading strategies in favor of students digging deeply into texts and figuring out challenging words and ideas by "wrestling" with the text itself.  This instructional technique is called close reading.



     So, back to my original question.  Does traditional guided reading still have a place in our classrooms today?  It is my belief that overusing a guided reading approach does not encourage students to use any strategies when they are reading for pleasure or during an assessment.  However, there is still a need in our classrooms to use some guided reading techniques.
     This year I have a small group of students that really struggle with comprehension and fluency.  They don't like reading and are not able to find or stick with good fit books.  Their Daily 5 reading is totally deviod of thinking or strategizing.  Despite my repeated attempts and teaching, they view reading as a passive process, often called "word calling" in the research on literacy instruction.  We're now in the second quarter. This just can't continue.  So... time to dust off guided reading, which is towards the bottom of my "bag o' tricks". 
     In my version of guided reading, I will still preview a few individual words, but I will also heavily use context clues to help the students discover for themselves what the words mean.  Then students will read the text once through, looking for the "main idea".  I am using a biography of Vasco da Gama which links in to our Social Studies unit on Explorers.  This picture book has some pretty hefty vocabulary.  The first time the students read the books, the task they will have to accomplish is to figure out where would be a good place to end the chapter, if the book was a chapter book.  Then they have to give the title a chapter and justify their choice.  They'll be marking the book with post-its, so if they need to revise their ideas they can.

Exploring the Role of Rounding and Estimating in Subtraction

All Things upper Elementary, a blog that I follow regularly recently had a post about teaching students to really develop problem-solving skills, rather than just learn rote algorithms.  See her fantastic post here.  This post really resonated with me as we are in the final days of our unit on subtraction.  Most of the kids can use the algorithm successfully to subtract multi-digit numbers.  Some cannot.  But even those that can use the algorithm don't really understand what they are doing.  To quote the ATUE:

"A written algorithm is meant to SHOW you have to think, NOT teach you how to think."

 

I realized that I needed to teach more thinking and less algorithm.  So today's freebie lesson plan is designed to focus students on using rounding and estimation to help them with subtraction.

 

Materials:  personal whiteboards, marker, and eraser for each child, the same for the teacher. 

Duration:  About 30 minutes (can be made longer or shorter)          Grade Level:     3-5

 

1.  Warm-Up:  Pose some subtraction problems using multiples of ten.  Start with problems like 90-70 = ? and end with problems like 8,000 - 5,000.

2.  Write your final problem in the warm up on the board (let's say it's 8,000 - 5,000).  Pose a related problem, leaving the first number the same, such as 8,000 - 4,875.  Have the students estimate a solution and show their answer.  If more than a few students get the answer wrong (it should still be 5,000), demonstrate how 4,875 rounds up to 5,000.  So the answer will be about the same as the original problem.  You can't just use the front of the number to estimate the answer.  You need to look at the whole number.

Do several more examples, coaching after each one as needed.  Once most of the class can successfully estimate the difference for each problem you pose, ask them to not end their estimates in zero. Pose problems in a sequence like this:

12,000 - 8,000 = (4,000)          12,000 - 7, 679 = (4,000)          12,000 - 7, 679 = (4,335)

Ask students to tell how they decided if the difference was more or less than their estimate.  If students do not come up with a method, show them how when the subtrahend is less than the estimate, the difference will be larger.  Pose several problems using this method. 

 

By using a lesson progression like this, you can help students think beyond the algorithm.  Enjoy!

 

 

Adventures in Lucy Calkins' Units of Study

This summer my major purchase for personal professional development was Lucy Calkins' Units of Study in Writing.  I spent a delightful summer with Lucy.  Reading her book was like having a conversation with a great mentor teacher.  Many people comment that her ten-plus page lesson plans are a nightmare to get through.  I would agree with that, but just because the lesson plans are this long doesn't mean you have to do all of it.  I would much rather have much more than I need than have to make up my own stuff.  Most of my lessons to my students end up being "distilled essence of Lucy" rather than a verbatim recitation of her lessons. 
Today's lesson was definitely one of those essence ones.  The lesson was about making characters come alive by describing both their internal and external traits.  To liven things up a bit, I introduced my students to one of my favorite music videos on You Tube:  Julian Smith's Reading a Book.  In it, the singer acts all tough and mean when people interrupt him while reading.  His tough exterior is totally at odds with his zest for reading.   The kids got the juxtaposition between internal and external traits immediately. It was a fun introduction to the lesson and I saw several students who tried the technique, including one of my most reluctant writers.

One of the biggest frustrations I have teaching Writing is that students seem to so very rarely take the advice we given them in our lessons.  It's absolutely unheard of in a Math class for students not to follow the algorithm the teacher provides, yet in Writing "doing your own thing" is rampant.  Today I tried to combat that by, at the end of Writing, having each child get out a highlighter.  They traded daybooks with a partner and highlighted evidence of today's lesson on character traits (if they could find it).  Overall the class was very honest in their highlighting and this gave me a quick way to judge what students could still use some help in this area.

Rounding Strategies: 3NBT1, 4NBT3, 5NBT4

     After a rough start, my leveled Math class is going smoothly at last.  My students have gotten into a routine of a whole-class lesson on Monday (with pre-test), differentiated instruction based on the pre-test on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, finishing with another whole-class lesson on Friday with a final, standards-based quiz on that day.  Most students are seeing growth as they graph their pre- and post-assessments.  With this leveled group, I have often found that the class doesn't usually fall into three groups, like I have seen with heterogeneous groups in the past.  Quite often, they only fall into two groups.  This has lead to some changes in my I Love Math groups.  Most of the time, I divide the class into two groups.  One works with me while the other works on their Ten Marks or Manga High assignments on the computer.  Then the switch.  When there is a preponderance of students who have mastered the pre-test, I will often include Wednesday as an additional whole-class lesson. 
     This past week we worked on rounding.  Rounding was one of those skills that no one in the class was even close to mastering, even after the first whole-class lesson.  I had to dig deeper in order to meet my students' needs.
     The first resources I used was Learn Zillion.  Using the Quick Code LZ525 you can see a great lesson that uses a number line to show how to round.  We used the following template:

original number:_____________________

 

 

____________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

__________                                                   __________                                                    __________

low benchmark                                                 midpoint                                                 high benchmark

 

     For each  number, they created an individual number line and place the original number as a dot on that number line.  This was a time consuming process, but after doing several together, the light bulb went on for many struggling students who could finally SEE what it means to round.

     After a differentiation day where I reinforced this method, I taught method number 2.  This I introduced as a "game" I called "Slap! Trap!".  I passed out a place value chart and a highlighter.  (Kids always get excited when the highlighters come out!)  Students used a pencil and the chart to write the number to round. 

  I announced: "Round to the nearest thousands!".  Students repeated: "Thousands, thousands, thousands, slap, TRAP!"  When they say slap, they use their left pointer finger to cover the digit in the given place.

 

 When they say trap, they color the digit in the next place to the right with the highlighter.  If the digit they "trapped" is 5 or more, the digit they "slapped" will go up by one.  If not, it will stay the same. 

 

All the digits to the right of the slapped/rounded digit turn into zeroes.  Any digits to the left of the slapped/rounded digit stay the same.  After the number line method, this seemed like a shortcut to many students.

     After instruction, some students gravitated to one method; some to the other.  In the end, all students benefitted from learning both methods.

Paragraphing...BACKWARDS: A Five Day Lesson Plan

     I am very proud of my students and the volume of writing they are now able to produce in a single setting. Most of them can routinely write more than one full page.  But with this dramatic increase in volume often comes a lack of punctuation.  In addition as the length of students' stories increases, the skill of paragraphing becomes even more important.
     Most resources about paragraphing are instruction before students begin writing.  There are all sorts of graphic organizers and hamburger diagrams.  I decided to tackle paragraphing after students have written.  By teaching about paragraphing after writing, I can also tackle issues like elaboration and end punctuation, which are still important skills that students lack.
     For the first paragraphing lesson, I copied some pages from the book we are currently reading.  I tell the students the main reasons for paragraphing:  changes in speaker, time, and place.  I used Whole Brain Teaching techniques with pair teaching and gestures to help students remember the reasons for paragraphing.  Using the text selection and highlighters (kids love those), I had my students highlight the three reasons for paragraphing in three different colors.  They did this in pairs. 
     The next day, I gave students a piece of writing I wrote without paragraphs.  Again in pairs, students discussed where the paragraphs should be.  As a class we shared our ideas, making sure to justify our conclusions. 
     On Day #3 it was time for students to begin revising their own writing.  I used Lucy Calkins "box" technique.  In this technique, students draw a box with colored markers around their paragraphs.  Students worked with pairs.  Once students make boxes around their paragraphs, I asked them to count the number of sentences in each box.  For their assignment during Writing Workshop, students need to add some detail sentences to any paragraph that has less than four sentences.  Since students write on every other line in their daybooks, it is relatively easy to add detail sentences.  I collected the daybooks and sorted students by those who were struggling with paragraphing and elaboration and those that were not. 
     The following day, I met with the students who were struggling the most for extra assistance.
     On the final day of the week, I had students choose a section of text and rewrite it for evaluation.  They had to take at least two consecutive paragraphs and rewrite them.  I went over the assessment rubric prior to the assessment.  Students had to be able to show at least two paragraphs of a minimum of four sentences each, correctly punctuated.