I Found Something Else...

while cleaning out my desk on Saturday! Another forgotten idea! This one was actually lost. I've moved buildings four times in all the years that I've been teaching. Each move has caused me to stream-line the materials that I take with me. This last time especially caused a huge down-sizing as my newest room as NO storage space. I've tons of things packed in boxes all over my house. This activity is packed in a box with many of my learning center items.

But I diverge! What I found, or remembered,  was one of my favorite activities of all time: Peanutty Fun!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Peanutty-Fun-Writing-Activities

Peanutty Fun is a packet of 12 writing activities for the intermediate aged student. It can be utilized as a writing center or a whole group activity. The individual topics include a wide variety of activities: writing scripts for plays, developing dialog, brainstorming lists, asking questions, and doing research.


Grab a clean coffee can, some scissors and glue, obtain this packet and you've got a great writing center for your intermediate classroom. BTW, I reworked the original activities so that they align with the Common Core State Standards, Anchor Standards for Writing: W.CCR.3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10.


Happy Teaching,
Angela
The Teacher's Desk 6
teachersdesk@yahoo.com

Cleaning out My Desk... STILL!

I've been up to my elbows in things from my old Teacher's Desk. Sorting through all the drawers has been tedious but also a trip down memory lane. For instance, one of the activities I found in the English drawer is called Quiet Hour Journals. I remember a class of sixers that I had about 26 years ago. Goodness, were they ever chatty! Everyone of their teachers complained about the incessant talking whenever they were in their class. We talked about strategies to help them overcome this behavior. Our principal even had us trained in Lee Canter's Assertive Discipline Program. However, nothing seemed to work. Out of frustration one afternoon came this brainstorm of an idea  Quiet Hour Journals.

Directions:

1. Give each student a sheet of 9" by 12" construction paper. Have him/her fold it in half to form a booklet cover.
2. Instruct each student to take five sheets of loose-leaf paper, fold them in half, slip them inside the cover, and staple all the pages together.
3. The Quiet Hour Journal is now completed and ready to go.
4. Give each student ten bingo chips and these instructions:
   • For the next 60 minutes, no conversation is permitted. All communication is to be done via writing. Write any message or question in your Quiet Hour Journal and pass it to your intended recipient.
   • The recipient is to read your entry and respond in kind.
   • If the recipient catches any proofreading mistake you made, he/she may take one of your bingo chips.
   • If anyone catches somebody talking, he/she may take one of your bingo chips.
   • If at any time you run out of bingo chips, you may no longer participate in the activity.
   • At the end of 60 minutes, the person with the most bingo chips is awarded a small prize.

I use to participate with my students.  Sometimes, I was called upon to settle a dispute. If a student challenged another's proofreading correction, I acted as a moderator, communicating with the pair through my journal. If the challenger was correct, he/she took back the lost bingo chip plus one of the student's chips who was challenged. This makes for more careful initial writing and proofreading.

I haven't done this activity in a few years. Actually, I haven't needed to do it so I pushed it to the back of the desk drawer. I'm glad I spent time today cleaning. This is the PERFECT activity for this year's sixers, another chatty bunch. Can't wait to try it this week!

Happy Teaching,
Angela
The Teacher's Desk 6
teachersesk@yahoo.com

Givin' It a Try... Manic Monday

I've been a fan of Classroom Freebies and Classroom Freebies Too for quite some time. In fact, it was these two blogs that encouraged me to turn from a traditional website to a blog myself. I've followed Manic Monday nearly every week, checking out what's available, who the bloggers are, and downloading MANY wonderful products. Now that The Teacher's Desk 6 blog is up and running, it's time for me to be an active participant in Manic Monday. I'm offering a St. Patrick's Day Take Three. This is a simple activity that is easily adapted to nearly any grade. I'll be using this with my fifth and sixth graders this week, and our fourth grade teacher is using it with her students. My kiddos will be doing some quick internet research, writing sentences and paragraphs, and doing some spontaneous speeches about the material. It's a great filler activity, homework assignment, cooperative group project, etc. I hope you can find some use for it. You can download it HERE, or by clicking on the link below the graphic.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6Q14Z2f7SoAMWpwZzRfLWZXZXc/edit?usp=sharing

Enjoy all the wonderful items available for this Manic Monday! Just click on the button and off you go!

Happy Teaching, Angela The Teacher's Desk 6 teachersdesk@yahoo.com

Blogs by State

There is a cool linky party happening at Fifth in the Middle. A BIG THANK YOU GOES TO DIANE R. FOR THIS GREAT IDEA! Education blogs are being linked by the homestate of the author. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this idea! Head over to Fifth in the Middle for some great classroom teaching ideas, leave Diane (the author) a note about her great work, then travel the US and Canada via the blogs, starting with the Midwestern States (of course). Great fun for a lazy Sunday!

http://fifthinthemiddle.blogspot.com/p/blogs-by-state-midwest.html

Happy Teaching,

Angela

The Teacher's Desk 6

teachersdesk@yahoo.com

Spring into a Good Book... UPDATE

On Feb. 27, 2013, I blogged about Pinterest and how it has given me SOOOO many new ideas to add to my teaching repertoire and caused me to spend SOOOO much time online! I also mentioned a new product that I was working on, Spring Into a Good Book, a seasonal book report/display inspired by a Pinterest project and offered a FREEBIE sample of one of the patterns.

I had to do a quickie post and share what one of my teaching partners did with my product. She added another Pinterest idea, a three dimensional water lily patterned after Monet's masterpiece, and came up with the cutest display item! A big thumbs up to Mrs. Cobb and her fourth graders for making "Spring into a Good Book" so awesome!

The third graders have finished their butterflies, and the fifth graders are working on their flowers. I've got to get my sixers going on their kites! We're the last ones to do our part of the display.

Happy Teaching,
Angela
The Teacher's Desk 6
teachersdesk@yahoo.com

Mystery Picture Parts of Speech FREEBIE

My sixers love them! Mystery pictures! I first used them years ago when I taught math for a brief stint. I had an OLD packet of color-by-number math sheets that took the drudge out of routine computational work. When I no longer taught math, I passed the packet on to the math teacher who, by the way, never used the sheets.

I saw these mystery pictures again this past Christmas. Only instead of a math orientation, they were designed for students to practice parts of speech. And they were aligned with the Common Core State Standards. YES, right up my alley! I purchased a few sets on Teachers Pay Teachers and presented them to my fifth and sixth grade Language Arts students. They were a hit! The kiddos asked for more.

Instead of returning to Teachers Pay Teachers for more, I decided to try my hand at creating my own Mystery Pictures. I came up with a few that were quite acceptable and a bit more challenging than those that I had purchased. My sixers were impressed so I offered them at my own TpT store and they've been selling nicely ever since! Especially my Angry Birds Mystery Picture. Check it out HERE. With this one being so popular, I've been developing yellow and blue angry birds and a green piggy mystery picture for parts of speech. They will be ready in a few days and will be available for purchase in my TpT Store.

The luck of the Irish touched me and I got into the holiday spirit so I developed several mystery pictures for St. Patrick's Day. These are offered separately and as a bundle in my TpT store. They feature a leprechaun, a leprechaun's hat, and a rainbow. You can view them in my store window to the right of this post. I also created a pot of shamrocks and have decided to offer it as a FREEBIE! This Language Arts mystery picture features VERBS: helping/linking, present tense, past tense, and future tense. You can download it HERE or by clicking on the link below the picture.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/St-Patricks-Day-Mystery-Picture-Parts-of-Speech-4

Happy Teaching,
Angela
The Teacher's Desk 6

Bird's Eye View of Spring or PaW Part 2

I wrote about Paragraph a Week (PaW) in a previous post, offering some St. Patrick's Story Starters as a FREEBIE to get you started, or perhaps reacquainted, with the program. Today is a good day to blog a little more about PaW.

Years ago, in the infancy of the internet, late 1996- early 1997, long before there were blogs, there were usenet groups and bulletin boards. Webrings were a new feature and email was the preferred method of "chatting". You could sometimes catch your recipient live on the other end of the message and receive an immediate reply. Ah, the simpler good ole days! I became interested in webpage creation via the students with whom I worked. They were into HTML and making webpages for Dungeons and Dragons. I can do this, I thought. And I did! Thus was born the original Teacher's Desk.

At The Teacher's Desk I hosted a homemade webring, connecting teacher websites. At its peak there were about 50 sites tied together... talk about an organizational nightmare! It wasn't long before Teachers.Net developed a "real" webring and I got out of the business. It was my webring, though, that gave life to a Connection of 5/6 grade teachers. via a new type of usenet group, a listserv. Called the 5/6Connection we eventually numbered into the 100's.

The 5/6Connection teachers were responsible for creating what would become Paragraph a Week. First called Friday English, we began sharing a few prompts along with the weekly routine behind the program. I coined the name Paragraph a Week in 1998 when I collected all of the prompts, formatted them, and posted them as part of The Teacher's Desk collection of lesson ideas where they remained until 2012 when I cleaned out my drawers.

Paragraph a Week is returning, slowly but surely, in a new format, and in a new place. Until the complete program is ready, I'll be sharing excerpts here on my blog. Today's PaW is about Spring and requires students to assume the personality of a Robin who describes the signs of spring, an opportunity for students to write in first person point of view. You can download this FREEBIE HERE or by clicking on the link below the graphic. I hope you can find it useful!

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6Q14Z2f7SoAem9nT3NRVFlEYVU/edit?usp=sharing

Happy Teaching,

Angela

The Teacher's Desk 6

teachersdesk@yahoo.com

Vatican Fever or Pope 101

Because I teach in a Catholic School, one of the courses that I teach is Religion. My students are certainly excited about the resignation of Pope Benedict the XVI and the election of a new pope. This week we are having a mini-lesson each day about how one becomes a pope, how the pope is elected, the papal flag, etc. In other words our Religion Class has become POPE 101.

Today we watched a wonderful little video on YouTube about how one becomes a pope. We had a terrific discussion about the hierarchy of the church while introducing two major conceptual vocabulary words: cardinal (and yes, one child did think a cardinal is named that because of the color of the office's garments looking like a cardinal) and conclave.

Next we will visit http://www.catholic-pages.com/pope/election.asp to read the article "How is the Pope elected?" First we will read it together from the projection TV, discussing the key points, then my sixers will need to read it independently while they answer the questions on this worksheet from Teacherweb. I modified it a bit, cleaning up the spacing and directions. You can download it HERE to use if you like.

We will also investigate the papal flag. I created a worksheet of the flag along with some questions about it. My sixers will need to do a bit of research in order to complete it correctly. I supplied them with a web address for a wikipedia article, but I will encourage them to range further for better material. This has been an ongoing lesson in research all year. If you're interested in the papal flag sheet, you can download it for FREE HERE, or by clicking on the link below the pic.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6Q14Z2f7SoAR1N3SWVGYXhQOXc/edit?usp=sharing

Depending how long the conclave lasts, we'll also do some investigating of the Sistine Chapel and the history of a few of the more notable popes.

Happy Teaching,

Angela

The Teacher's Desk 6

teachersdesk@yahoo.com

A Novel Idea: Story Chains and a TpT Holiday Offer

I mentioned today’s topic, Story Chains, in my last blog entry Novel Responses to Novels on March 1, 2013. Story Chains is a fun and motivating way for students to demonstrate they have acquired the ability to retell a story, to sequence the actions in a story, to relay the main idea and details of a selection, or to summarize the plot of a chapter or book. 

I have used this activity with my fifth- and sixth-grade students who have read both fiction and nonfiction selections and with eighth-grade Science students who have read textbook material. It could easily be adapted for any grade level and any content area. In addition, it is an activity that works well as a co-operative group activity or as an individual assignment.

Directions:

1.    Assign a story, novel, or text selection for students to read.

2.    Prepare numerous 1" by 8 1/2" white (or pastel-colored) paper strips.

3.    Distribute your determined strips to each student or co-operative group of students.

4.    On one strip, ask students to write the title and author of the selection. If it is a selection from a textbook, have them write the chapter title, page numbers, or any pertinent identification information.

5.    On each of the remaining ten strips, the students should write a sentence or two detailing important events or main ideas from the reading selection. Remind them to include events from the beginning, the middle, and the end of the selection. The chosen events should summarize the selection or identify the main idea and supporting details.

6.    Require the students to include various visual symbols that support the information on each strip as well as page or paragraph numbers where the information is found.

7.    When all the strips are completed, the students are to staple or glue them in an interlocking chain in order, similar to holiday paper chains.

8.    Ask the students to share their chains with the class.

9.    Use the chains to decorate a bulletin board or hang them in the hallway for all the students in your building to enjoy.

As I looked back at this activity that I’ve used almost since I began teaching, I noticed that it aligns nicely with the grs. 5 and 6 ELA Common Core Standards for Literature and Informational Reading. I’m sure it could also be adapted for other grades as well.

Happy Teaching,

Angela

The Teacher’s Desk 6

teachersdesk@yahoo.com

P.S. Did you notice that The Desk is WEARING THE GREEN? Happy St. Patrick's Day!

To help celebrate this holiday, I am offering my St. Patrick's Day Parts of Speech Mystery Pictures in a bundle. Each individual picture is priced at $1.00. For the month of March I am offering the bundle of THREE for only $2.00... you get one FREE! Click HERE or on the link below the picture to download your bundle. Erin go bragh!

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/MARCH-SPECIAL-St-Patrick-Parts-of-Speech-Mystery-Pictures-BUNDLE

NOVEL Responses to Novels

I've been a Language Arts teacher for a LONG time! I've seen many changes in teaching methods, philosophies, best practices, Common Core, etc., etc., etc. Some of the old becomes new again, and some of the new becomes quite old. What hasn't changed is that a good teaching activity is still a good teaching activity! 

I've been sorting through The Desk lately and have come across many good activities that I've been using since my early days. One file I found was titled NOVEL RESPONSES (one of the first ideas I posted on my original website in 1996). In it are numerous ideas for having students respond to the novels that they read. I still use most of these in either my fifth or sixth grade classes. I'll be sharing many of these novel responses in the coming days.

Here's a sampling with which to begin:

• Write a letter to one of the characters in the novel. Ask him/her questions as well as tell about yourself. Pay particular attention to letter format.
• Create a newspaper page for one of the novels. Summarize the plot in one of your articles. Cover the weather in another. Include an editorial and a collection of ads that would be pertinent to the novel.
• Summarize the plot by creating a cartoon version of the novel. Use about six to eight frames.
• Rewrite a chapter or section of your novel from another character's point of view.
• Pretend you are a newspaper reporter whose job is to interview one of the characters. Write your interview.
• You have become a character in one of the novels. Describe your experience during a conflict.
• Write a poem about one of the novels. Touch on the characters, setting, plot, and theme.
• Rewrite a portion of the novel as a play.
• Choose a familiar melody, such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and change the lyrics so they pertain to the novel.
• Develop a mini matrix for your novel... more about this activity in a later blog post
• Create a mini story wheel for your novel... more about this activity in a later blog post
• Create a story chain for your novel that consists of at least ten links... more about this activity in a later blog post
• Compare and contrast one of your novels with another that you have read for class this year or last. Remember to include how the novels are alike AND how they are different. Create a Venn diagram to show your findings.
• Redesign the front and back cover of your novel. Include the pertinent information as well as a blurb on the back.
• Develop an award for your novel. Explain the criteria for the award and why this particular book was selected to receive it. A good place to start this project is by reading about the Newbery and Caldecott awards. Notice, too, the other awards particular books have been given.
• Create a triorama for your novel that depicts the most important scene. Write a summary of this scene, explaining its role in the storyline.
• Design a story map for your novel. Include important information such as characters, setting, and the plot. Write a brief explanation of your map.

As I read through the list, it dawned on me that even though these ideas had been posted almost 20 years ago, most of them align nicely with the current Common Core State Standards. Sounds like another project for me to work on!

Happy Teaching,

Angela

The Teacher's Desk 6

teachersdesk@yahoo.com