Literacy Conference, Anchor Charts & Whole Brain Teaching

Ohmiword.......it has been FOR-EH-VER since I've blogged.  So sorry about that :(

It has been crazy busy around here lately.  You wouldn't think summer would get that hectic.....but WOW!  The hubs and I celebrated our anniversary 11 days ago and decided to take a little trip to Santa Fe with some friends of ours.  It was fabulous!

My dinner date :)



Laying poolside while my love played golf!

Then, when I return, my dreaded grad class is waiting with an assignment due (2 days ago) that I didn't bother looking at until 3 days ago.  It was madness! 

I also attended a 2-day literacy conference on July 16-17.  I love this conference.  I go every year and I am never disappointed.  They bring in a keynote speaker to keep us busy in the morning, and then teachers from all around the region come and teach break-out sessions in the afternoons.  It is always such a blast and I learn so much!!!

This year, the keynote speaker was Tanny McGregor-

author of Comprehension Connections and, more recently, Genre Connections.

 

 

 

I bought both of her books at the conference and I know I won't be disappointed!  She taught a bit from both books, showing classroom examples from around the country.  She is fabulous! 

 

She really focuses on making connections to help make meaning.  She suggests using objects and concrete materials as much as we possibly can to make abstract ideas easier for our kiddos to understand (inferencing, for example).  In "Comprehension Connections", she talks about many different lessons (easy and cheap) to help your kids make those connections and truly understand what they're reading. In "Genre Connections", it's more about introducing different genres and understanding their structure and what they're all about.  I cannot wait to start reading them!

 

One of the comprehension strategies she talks about is synthesizing, which can be really difficult for some kiddos.  She has her students make "synthesis spirals".  How cute is that?  Isn't that 10x better than a worksheet?!?!

She also has her students do "6 Picture" or "6 Word" book reports or summaries.  It really takes quite a bit of effort to summarize a story in 6 words or images.  Think about it.....you have to figure out the main idea, what is important in the story and what can be left out, and then you have to put it all together to choose 6 objects or words to convey what you think the story is about.  WOW!  That can work with kinder kids up to 5th graders!  I love the differentiation that is available here.  Again, so much better than a worksheet!

In "Genre Connections", she talks about a lesson using a huge anchor chart about genre, using metaphors and concrete objects.  She compares the genre to an object to make the idea more real for her kiddos.  For example, when she introduces adventure/fantasy, she compares that genre to a prism.  There seems to be something magical about the prism and how the spectrum of light makes so many beautiful colors.  The kids now have a very real image for an abstract concept.  Perfect!

Then, in one of the break-out sessions about anchor charts.....I walk in to see this...... 

ANCHOR CHARTS GALORE!!!!!

It was teacher heaven!!  Here are a few of the cute examples that she had displayed:

 

 These last 4 were more for us teachers, as her students that day.

I have saved the very best for last.........

 

I attended a Whole Brain Teaching break-out session and have fallen madly and deeply in love with this idea!!!  First of all, the two women teaching the class were fantastic and full of energy and that made the whole experience that much better!!  One of the presenters has a 3rd grade class, so I really felt like this could work for my kiddos. 

 

Did you know that everything {and I do mean.....EVERYTHING} on Whole Brain Teaching (WBT) is free?!?!?!?!  I'm not lying to you.....it's free.......on the world wide web.  Now, I probably spent $80 in ink printing it all off......but it's still wayyyyyy cheaper than buying it.  I printed off several (and I do mean several) e-books and cannot stop reading about it.  Simply go to this address and create an account {again...it's free} and get started!! 

 

There are a bazillion YouTube videos out there, just for your grade level where you can see WBT in action.  I'm not going to go into all the science of it, but in WBT the students use.......you guessed it......their WHOLE BRAIN!  Therefore, the engagement and retention is 10x what you get when the kiddos are NOT using their WHOLE BRAIN! 

 

I have found the cutest and best little blog, Whole Brain Teaching with Style, and it is AWESOME! I realize that I may be the very last person in the world to learn about WBT and everyone else is probably already doing this......but just in case you aren't......I urge you to check it out.   I was amazed at what I learned!!! 

 

One last thing.....my blog has reached 100 followers!!!!! YAY!!!!!  Thank you sooooo much to everyone who has followed my blog and even helped promote it.  I have loved every minute of this experience!!  I am in the midst of putting together a giveaway......but it is my very first one and it may take me some time to organize it all and get everything ready.  I look forward to sharing all of that soon :)

Keep livin' the dream, 

We (K-4 teachers) are sooooo important!!!!

Hello, friends!!!  I hope you are all enjoying your Sunday afternoon.   As some of you know, I went to a 3-day science workshop this last week.  I loved it!!  It was a great break from the classroom (at this point in the year, we all need that!) and it was a great learning experience.  The instructor was fabulous.  She was hilarious and obviously very passionate about her job!  She is the kind of teacher you hope you are in your own classroom. 

The name of this conference was "K-4 Physics".  Now, that title isn't very......well, it's not good.  It's a boring title and it completely undermines the power of the workshop.  However, my principal sent out an e-mail asking who would like to go and there isn't a teacher in the world who is gonna say no to a 3-day paid vacation workshop with a 9:00 start and an hour and a half for lunch!  Can I get an amen?!?!?!

I digress........back to my point.  The training was fabulous!!  We (60 K-4th grade teachers) sat together and vertically aligned our TEKS (in Texas, those are our standards......we haven't adopted Common Core).  It was incredibly eye-opening.  We got to see how the curriculum builds and how the verbs in our standards changed, and what that meant exactly.  For example: in kinder (in regards to force/motion/energy) the expectation is that students will use their 5 senses and explore different forms of energy, such as light, heat and sound.  Then, in 1st grade, following that same TEK about force/motion/energy, students are expected to identify and discuss how these forms of energy (light, heat and sound) are important to every day life.  In 2nd grade, students are expected to investigate the effects of increasing or decreasing amounts of light, heat and sound energy.  Third grade is then expected to take that information and build upon it.  In 3rd grade, we expand by exploring mechanical energy and we introduce "thermal energy" into their vocabulary to replace "heat energy".   Finally, in 4th grade, the students are expected to differentiate among forms of energy, including mechanical, sound, electrical, light and thermal.  We add electrical energy in 4th grade. 

We then looked at 5th grade and 8th grade released STAAR (our state mandated test) questions and saw how important our jobs are.  Everything they are asking on those tests is directly tied to what we teach in the younger grades.  We are so often overlooked.  Yes, we get the pressure for math and reading.  And those are important skills and I'm not downplaying that, but we are JUST as important in the science arena as well.  It is critical that we put an emphasis on science. 

In science, we build our students' critical thinking skills.  We use problem solving and team work and we get to have fun doing it!!  There isn't another subject that lends itself so naturally to curiosity, higher-level thinking, and real-world importance.  Science is the real world!!! 

One of the great things about this training was that they integrated math and ELA all throughout the science curriculum.  Math tends to lend itself to science anyway, so the ELA part was the biggest concern for most of my peers.  The instructor showed us ways to assess, using ELA objectives or TEKS, and it worked beautifully.  I can't remember what grade it was for, but for one experiment, we read a book called "Letters to my Energy Superheros" and in the book, the characters wrote letters to their heros (ex: Dear Sound Energy Superman, etc.) and in the assessment for that lesson, they had to write a letter to their favorite energy superhero and explain why they were thankful for their particular kind of energy and how they use it every day.  Perfect way to go cross-curricular! 

At this training, we started with a 4th grade lesson.  They wanted us to begin with the end in mind.  The next 2 days, we all did a kinder, 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade lesson, building up to the 4th grade TEK (standard).  All of the lessons followed the 5E format.  I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with that, so I'll do a quick run-down.

 Engage- the hook

Explore- let the kids explore (without much teacher explanation)

Explain- here is where we teach

Elaborate- expand on the explore and explain

Evaluate- did they get it?

Using these 5 E's, we went through every grade level and got to really see the knowledge and skills that our students should be coming to us with and what they should leave us with.  It also helped me to understand how to not step on the toes of the grade after me.  Just because it's exciting, doesn't mean that I have the right to jump ahead and teach 4th grade!  I've got enough to do with my 3rd grade curriculum, I don't need to jump ahead (as much as we want to sometimes).

 

I hope I haven't completely bored you to death.  This conference was amazing and I wished there was a conference like this for every subject!  I wish we had the time, as a collaborative team, to sit down and dissect our curriculum and really get to know what our students are coming to us with and what they need to know to get to the next level.  I wish we all had the opportunity to vertically align and see where our kiddos are headed......in the big picture.   

 

That's all for now!!  Enjoy the rest of your weekend :)

 

Keep livin' the dream,



Dr. Marcia Tate, Instagram & Five for Friday!

Hello and happy Good Friday to all my fabulous teacher peeps!  Yay for a 4-day work week and a 3-day weekend!! 

Can I just say, that living without a computer almost pushed me over the edge?!?!  There are many, many, MANY things you can do from your phone........but blogging is not one of them. Don't get me wrong.........I know it's do-able.........but it's not efficient.........at........all!!!  Not to mention that my graduate courses are all online and I'm about 3 weeks behind on those.  Lots to do :{

The first thing I wanted to share with you all is the workshop that I attended with Dr. Marcia Tate.  Ohmiword........that woman is a genius.......and she's an inspiration.  I loved every minute of that 2-day conference.  I didn't look at my watch once.  The time simply flew by. 

The first day's workshop was entitled, "Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites".  She has written a book with this same title, and then went on to make more subject specific editions (available on Amazon):

 

 

 

 

 

She also wrote a book about classroom management (see below):



The first thing she told us on Monday morning was that she had 3 reasons why every teacher needed to use the 20 instructional strategies that she was going to share with us.  She told us that they:

• increase achievement for all students
• decrease behavior problems (a successful student rarely disrupts your class) and they
• make teaching and learning fun!

Needless to say, she had 200 teachers with ears perked and sitting on the edges of our seats.  Who doesn't want that?  We all want our students to be successful!  We all want to spend more time teaching and less time managing behavior......and we all want to have a good time doing it!!!

She then went over 20 instructional strategies and how to use them in your classroom.  She used 16 of the 20 on us while she taught her workshop.  It was effortless (it seemed) and we all had a blast.  The thing that I thought was the most interesting wasn't necessarily the 20 strategies, but the reasons behind why they work.  She explained quite a bit about how the human brain works, especially memory cells.  Isn't that what learning is mostly about?  Remembering what you have been talking about, working on, etc?  If you can't remember it, did you really learn it?  Long term retention should be our goal, not just passing a test or completing a worksheet.  They need to know the information we teach in our classrooms to become life-long learners, not just test-passers.  

The second day we talked about assessment in a workshop called, "Assessment:  How do we know they're learning?".  For this workshop, we discussed and learned about different forms of assessment and why you should use an assortment of both "selected responses" (the multiple choice, true/false, matching types of assessments) and "constructed responses" (products and performances).  Between the 200 teachers in that room, we came up with over 50 ways that we could assess our students' learning without using a paper/pencil type of test.  We all know that sometimes we have to use a paper/pencil type of test........we really do.  But sometimes we over use it (I know I do).  I do it because it's easier for me to grade and it's easier for me to prepare.  But how many students do I have sitting in my room that know more than I'm aware of.......because I'm not assessing them the "right" way?  That's something I've been thinking about all week.  What if I gave them multiple ways to show me what they know??  Food for thought.....

Moving on......just a little note.  Third Grade & Lovin' It now has an Instagram account.  Some days you just wanna share a photo and not write an entire post about it......ya know?  If you wanna follow me there and get a look inside my classroom, I'd love to have ya :)

Last, but certainly not least, I'm linkin' up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for some Friday fun :)

 

 

1.  Starbucks.  Need I say more?  This stuff can turn that frown upside down.  I {heart} Starbucks.

 



 

2.  This Easter is my baby girl's very 1st Easter!!  We are having my sisters and their kiddos over tomorrow for some egg and Easter cookie decorating fun!!

 

 

3.  I don't have a picture of this........but I got my hair done on Tuesday and I love it!  My hair needed some attention........and I needed some alone time.  Gotta love the salon :)

 

4.  This blogging calendar is {da bomb}!  It is an excellent way to stay organized with your blog and linky parties and giveaways and all that good stuff.  You can get it here from Gina @ Third Grade Tidbits.

 

5.  We had to take Jaci to an ENT this week......and guess what???  We're gettin' tubes put in her ears in a couple of weeks.  She took the news quite well :)

 

 

Whew......that was a long one!  I hope you all have a fantastic Easter weekend!!!  

 

Keep livin' the dream,