February Centers and Freebies

It's about time, teachers, to focus on February.

I'd like you to keep calm and focus on some new centers for your classroom.  

Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllables Center is a low prep literacy center. Friendly Frog appears in many of my syllabication products. This time he challenges your students to sort word cards according to whether they have a prefix or a suffix.

February sports a lot of pink, so you may like Valentine's Day Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, and Hinkity Pinkities.  These riddles that evoke pairs of rhyming words, are wildly popular. They work well in a literacy center, as an anchor activity, a sponge activity, and are the perfect challenge for fast finishers. This set is FREE! So download your copy now.

Scrattle: The Valentine's Day Edition is also FREE!  This center combines word work with computation and spurs your students to create more difficult words through competition.  It really and truly is appropriate for K through 5th grade because you can effortlessly differentiate for math abilities.  3 different recording sheets are provided.  One requires students to use addition, 1 calls for multiplication, and the 3rd uses mixed operations (+, -, x) with parentheses. My students beg for Scrattle. As a result, there are many versions available and all of them are FREE! 

Have you heard?  It's Freebie February in my TPT store.  Each day this month, a different priced item will be offered for FREE for just one day. So check in daily to see what I'm giving away.  

Today's offering is How Many Ways? -- February Edition. This product, like Scrattle, is appropriate for all elementary grade levels. It is a critical thinking, interactive bulletin board activity that could be used as a center, an enrichment challenge, an anchor activity, and/or for differentiation. You can read more about it here.

Freebie February!

It's February! Better yet, it's FREEBIE FEBRUARY @ It's About Time, Teachers! As you can see on the calendar above, there will be a FREEBIE offer from my TPT store everyday.  Yes, everyday!  One priced product will be FREE everyday, and everyday that FREEBIE will be different.

To start things off, I'm offering Presidential Trivia Task Cards (hot off the presses just last night!!!!) for FREE, but only for 1 day.  

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How Many Ways? Critical Thinking Challenge

I'd like to introduce you to How Many Ways? - February Edition.

If you like critical thinking math challenges for your students...

If you like open-ended activities that take very little prep...

If you like interactive bulletin boards that stay up for an entire month...

...then you will love How Many Ways? -- Feb. Edition. 

Here's the 4-1-1:

This is what your bulletin board could look like. For this example, your students are challenged to get to the target number, 30, using the numbers on the hearts and any combination of the specified operations. So, they could use just addition and get there in these ways:

4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 = 30    

or

4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 30

By adding or substituting another operation sign, such as x, students can find the target number in many more ways. For example:

(4 x 4) + (4 x 4) - 2 = 30

 3 x (1 + 2 + 3 + 4) = 30 

(4 x 3) + (3 x 2) + (3 x 3) + 3 = 30

How fun is that? Clearly there are many, many, many equations that can be constructed to equal 30. However, you are not done. Not even close. 

Included in this product are 29 more target numbers, plus 3 blank targets for you to program. Also included is a division sign, should your students be ready for that operation. 

It is up to you to determine how challenging this activity is. If you teach the littlest learners, you can program the center to just require counting. I have even included number hearts with counting dots.  

If you teach older students, this activity will challenge them to use algebraic equations (although the variable is implied), reinforcing the order of operations and the value of parentheses.

As you can see, the heart icons are presented in color and black line.  If you choose to use the black line hearts, I encourage you to copy them on colored paper.

How Many Ways? -- Feb. Edition works well as a math center.  I provide heart shaped paper for students to record their equations and let them post them on the adjacent board. We post them in columns of 10, making it easy to determine how many ways we have found.

It is also a great anchor activity and/or sponge activity.  But my favorite way to use this activity is as a challenge for fast finishers.  It is not only highly engaging for those quick minds, but I also use them as checkers.  That is, they review the posted solutions to make sure they are accurate.  If they agree, they can put a little valentine sticker on the equation to validate it, as well as to show that it has already been checked.

Now that you've met How Many Ways? -- Feb. Edition, I hope you will become life long friends.

Have you met the other members of the family?
    

        

February: Do What You Love

One of the things I love to do with my students is immerse them in poetry because it offers so many teaching possibilities. Naturally you can focus on poetic structures and poetic devices. But have you ever used poetry to teach reading skills? Because poetry is usually short and the message concise, it's a perfect venue for studying vowel sounds, contractions, punctuation, parts of speech, syllables, rimes, inflections, .... The  possibilities are nearly endless. It's always good practice to relate these skills to what is being read. Practicing skills in isolation may transfer to reading skill building; then again it may not.  

Does it sound daunting to combine poetry with ELA skills?  It doesn't have to be. As the ELA coach for my elementary building, I determined that poetry was generally intimidating to my teachers, or at least viewed as a luxury that may not receive much attention. Resolving to change that, I began giving my teachers units of poetry with "possibilities" for using it in the classroom.  Since I work with K-5 teachers and students, these Poetry Possibilities units have applications for all elementary levels.

Poems have reading skills already built into them.  All you have to do is look at it with a "reading skills eye." Thus, if the poem is replete with a particular consonant blend, use it in a guided reading lesson about that blend.  If the poem has a sprinkling of contractions, devise a review lesson about contractions using the poem.  As an example, look at the following poem, noting that it has several compound words in it.

Due to the structure of a poem, it is easier for young children to locate the compound words. If you reproduced this poem on sentence strips for use in a pocket chart, that would facilitate identifying the compound words as a group.  With a little magic and masking tape, you could make the compound words come apart. Alternately, you might focus on the punctuation and how it helps the reader to read with expression and fluency. Or, you might choose to conduct a mini-lesson on contractions. For example, the Possibilities for the above poem include:

If you are interested in more seasonal poems with teaching points and skill suggestions, visit my TpT store here. For February poems and possibilities, I have 3 (!) products: Black History Month Poetry Possibilities, February Poetry Possibilities, and  Poetry Possibilities for Winter.  Another unit, 100th Day of School Poetry Possibilities, is useful this time of year, as well. (Better yet, it's FREE!!) 

As a reading specialist, I highly recommend using poems for guided reading lessons and review lessons.  It has always been a favorite activity of my remedial students if for no other reason than they had less text to conquer.  Just a word of caution: reading poetry is principally about creating enthusiasm for reading.  Take care not to defeat that goal by always turning poetry reading into a skill drill.

As proof of just how much I love teaching with poetry, I present my Poetry Possibilities units:

Woo Hoo! I just have to tell you...

...that I am included on the TPT blog this week -- twice!  Yes, twice!! 

I am literally jumping for joy!

The first mention was for reaching a milestone in December.  Since no newsletter was published last week in deference to the holidays, those of us who reached milestones were included in this week's list. The TPT blog recognized the milestone achievers and featured the product I put up for FREE in celebration.  Because many of you may have missed that notification, I am leaving Winter Word Problems with Mortimer Moose as a free product until Tuesday, 1/6/15. Check it out before it goes back to full price. Mortimer is looking forward to meeting you!

The second mention is in the section about MLK, Jr. Day.  Scroll down and you will see my FREE product, Poetry Possibilities -- MLK, Jr. Day.  You can also find a little blurb from me about how my students and I celebrate this special day.

I feel so blessed to be included in the blog. What a way to start off the new year!  To celebrate, all of my Poetry Possibilities units are reduced 20% this week.

A Gift for You!

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Climbing Back on my Soap Box or I Told You So! Part Two

Phew!  I survived Christmas, although the 22 expected guest morphed into 28 and 8 of them are still vacationing in my home.  No problem as the left-overs continue to spill out of my refrigerator every time the door is opened.  I am a bit exhausted, though.

I find I have just enough energy to climb back on my soap box and continue my sermon on the virtues of handwriting instruction.

In my last post, I professed:

*Consistent, logical, progressive instruction and practice allow everyone to participate and experience a sense of accomplishment and success.  Then I started to explain how I construct my instruction so that it best supports my students.  Let me continue from there.  

After teaching l/L, I revisit the concepts from that lesson the next day as I teach h/H.  The same concepts are practiced:  start at the top line; go straight down to the bottom line.  We just add the short hump, thereby drawing attention to the dotted mid-line on our writing paper.  The mental recording I hope to instill goes something like this: down, up, over and down.  On subsequent days, we learn b/B and k/K.  

Having laid the foundation for the mid-line, our next step is short, straight line letters: i/I, r/R, n/N, m/M.  I still teach t as a 3/4 letter, so it comes last in this sequence.

Next up are letters that start like c.  Obviously, we start with c/C, then move on to a/A, d/D, e/E, and o/O.  All of these lower case letters start with a c and I stress that daily.  This really helps with the Reading Recovery students and those needing reading interventions.

Next I introduce letters with tails: g/G, j/J, p/P, and q/Q. I typically teach g and q in sequence since they both start like c. Similarly, j and p both start with a straight line that commences at the mid-line. While I realize that y/Y also has a tail, I refrain from teaching it yet.

f/F is an anomaly, so I teach it in isolation. The upper case F fits well with the letters that start like l, so I may teach it after b/B and k/K. Then again, I may teach it after t/T.  It all depends on the needs of my students.  

Similarly, s/S is rather unique.  It can start like a c, but must fit itself all within the lower half of the writing line.  This can be difficult for young learners, so I typically delay teaching s/S until the children have a good sense of the short letter spaces.  

Because the remaining letters are used less frequently in early writing, AND because they involve diagonal lines, they are reserved for the later lessons.  The usual sequence for diagonal letters is v/V, w/W, y/Y, x/X, z/Z.

Having worked with student teachers for many years, I am always surprised to learn that they have never considered teaching the letters in any order other than alphabetical. Similarly, many new teaching professionals have given little thought to building a scaffold with their instructional sequence.  That's a lesson that is applicable throughout their teaching and, to my mind, critical to success.

Neither did these neophytes consider all the basic skills they could squeeze into a simple handwriting lesson. Through these lessons, students can acquire the concepts of top/bottom, tall/short, begin/end, straight line, curved letters, tails/below the bottom line, middle, mid-line, diagonal, capital/lower case, proper nouns, spacing, ...

There's more to my sermon on the soap box. Please come back soon.

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