The way business should be done.

More about the pencil sharpener.

This morning I announced to my fellow colleagues that before school started, I would be demonstrating my SPECTACULAR new pencil sharpener that a TEACHER created and sells. "Bring your dullest pencil!" I summoned.

They came and watched (riveted I might add) as each dull pencil became as long and sharp as an awl.

Ooooo. Aaaahh.

My Principal came in and was clearly wow'd. She said, "send the info to the secretary and let's put in an order for 36 today." She NEVER jumps on stuff like this. We only have 10 classrooms at our school, so 36 is awesome for us! She even asked to bring it to "team" tomorrow which is when the district principals and central office administration meet.

I know a pencil sharpener seems benign, well maybe not to teachers. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir. But, ooo la la, my pencils today were sharper than sharp. The kids each got two this morning and NO ONE, I mean not one single child asked me to sharpen after that. I think I gained nearly 75 extra minutes back in my life.

So, thank you Troy Decoff, owner founder and seller of The Perfect Pencil Sharpener. Thank you so very much and I really hope my district buys more because this is exactly how business in America should be done.

PS Is there a child labor law against rewarding my more challenging children who complete their work with the job of sharpening pencils? They loved it and could have done it all day. Focus is clearly NOT their challenge when motivated.

My Pencil Sharpener is in the house!

I just received my green, quiet, beautiful, most excellent pencil sharpener today. To say that I love it would be an understatement. There are few things quite as important as a room full of sharp pencils.

My friends seem to think that no pencil can be sharp enough, but not so anymore. They were super impressed by how sharp this thing gets their pencils and immediately asked if there could be a new pencil sharpener job in the classroom.

To sum this quickly, BUY ONE. BUY THREE. Get your school to BUY THIRTY-SIX. This thing rocks.

PPBF: George and The Dragon

Title: George and the Dragon

Written & Illustrated By: Chris Wormell

Publisher, year: Random House Childs 2006

Suitable For: ages 4-8

Themes/Topics: dragons, fear, princesses

Brief Synopsis: Far, far away in the high, high mountains in a deep, deep valley in a dark, dark cave - there lived a mighty dragon. He was an awesome and frightening creature, terrorizing whole armies, destroying castles, demolishing forests and kidnapping princesses. But this mighty dragon had a deep, dark secret...he’s afraid of mice. Then a mouse (George) moves in next door.

Links To Resources and ideas for use in the classroom:

Check out my Dragon Unit for links to all kinds of activities...here and here.

• draw your own dragon
• make a tissue paper dragon
• write your own dragon story following the simple pattern of this book. What’s YOUR dragon afraid of?
• write about a page or illustration you love and have students guess which page you are referring to

Why I Like This Book:  The illustrations are completely amazing. I’ve been teaching the kids about the classic looking dragons and this one is so beautiful. Each page has only a few words so any of my kids can read it, but also it allows us to really focus on the illustrations and the simple story. It is a perfect mentor text for writing because there is an easily definable beginning, middle, and end, as well as a problem and a solution. The characterization is rich and the reader must use inference skill. This is a perfect book for showing kids that good writing does not need to be complex.

Dragons Rock

How goes my Dragon Unit, you ask? Dude, it rocks!

My kids are so invested in this unit, I can't stop them from investigating it every chance they get.

I have read about 15 dragon books. With each book we stop and talk about what the author was trying to teach us because we have learned that people have used dragon stories for years and years to share a message or explain the unexplainable. We track each kind of story and keep a list for ideas to use in our writing.

• Dragons who start small and grow very quickly
• Dragons who are not seen by adults
• Dragons who hatch from presumed chicken eggs
• Dragons who are scared of mice or other innocent things

We use all the books as mentor texts. I have learned so much about facilitating writing and teaching craft. They are writing amazing stories with detail and depth because they are writing from a wealth and store of knowledge.

We are also doing lots of dragon art. We followed what Patty teaches so beautifully in her blog: Deep Space Sparkle. We drew these (click on picture for lesson).

I am reading one chapter a day of My Father's Dragon aloud and then doing each part of this amazing lapbook.

We got a lot of practice with this study method from our plant lapbook, so it's going great. I have never seen such amazing comprehension.

The big plant show!

We studied plants all last month. We made our lapbooks. Each child grew their own plants at home. They tracked the growth and wrote reports about what they learned. They studied Georgia O'Keefe flower art and learned garden songs.

Tonight we culminated the study with a plant show. It was lovely. The kids were so happy. The parents thought the kid's work was amazing. It really made my year. My kids have grown so much. They were so confident about sharing their work and learning.

I can't believe that I've almost made it through my whole year. Only 15 1/2 days left. I can't wait to do it all over again. I feel proud.

PPBF - The Scar

Title The Scar

Charlotte Moundlic (author)

Olivier Tallec (illustrator)

Candlewick Press, 2011

Suitable For: 5-16 years old

Themes/Topics: death, love

Opening:

"Mom died this morning.

It wasn't really this morning.

Dad said she died during the night,

but I was sleeping during the night.

For me, she died this morning."

Brief Synopsis: When the boy in this story wakes to find that his mother has died, he is overwhelmed with sadness, anger, and fear that he will forget her. He shuts all the windows to keep in his mother’s familiar smell and scratches open the cut on his knee to remember her comforting voice. He doesn’t know how to speak to his dad anymore, and when Grandma visits and throws open the windows, it’s more than the boy can take—until his grandmother shows him another way to feel that his mom’s love is near.

Links To Resources and ideas for use in the classroom:

http://teacher.scholastic.com/professional/bruceperry/child_loss.htm

There were many resources about talking with children, but I could find no activities. So I thought of a few…

• Create a collage of things that remind the child of his/parent
• Choose a special piece of the parent’s clothing and make it into a pillow
• Help the child write a letter to the parent and send it off with a balloon

Why I Like This Book:  

I still have both my parents. My children still have both of theirs.

My brother turns 45 on May 24 and is having a stem cell transplant next month to help him fight cancer. He is the single father of two children 10 and 15. I am bereft, so I cannot imagine what he and his children must be feeling. I am so grateful that Charlotte Moundlic had the courage and the skill to create this masterpiece. Thank God for Picture Books.

Susanna Hill's Picture Perfect Book Friday

Happiness can be fleeting

Remember how happy I was yesterday? I still feel that, but I can't imagine why.

At the end of today I had to call four parents for various events involving lying, stealing, grabbing, etc. For the love of Mary, don't they realize how much work has gone into my fabulously engaging unit on Dragons. They are engaged, but this hasn't stopped them from returning to the same shape and size of the children I met on the first day of school. This cannot go on.

So in the manner of a knight during the time of dragons, I am throwing down the gauntlet! Tomorrow I am introducing a seating chart, a behavior program, and Mrs. Stern Moran who is nothing like Mrs. Hang Out and Laugh Moran to whom they have grown accustomed.

I am a little sad to have to go back to retro-world, but I am hopeful that my sanity will be saved.

First Grade!

I found out today that I am 100% having First Grade again next year. There was a bit of uncertainty because I have a few customers this year who might have really thrived with continuity next year. And, while I love this class dearly, I am also eyeing some pretty choice Kindergarteners. There are the usual cute ones and the (in my opinion) fabulous wacko boys who make me laugh all day.

I think I might cry on the last day. I have loved these kids with every fiber of my being. Their joy at learning and laughing has been visceral. But they are ready for Second Grade. I saw it clearly today. We have 19 more days of joyous celebration of our community and of studying something we all really love...Dragons.

I can't wait to do it all over again next year. I. Can't. Wait. I am the luckiest woman in the world.

Behold...the Dragons!

“No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“The hunger of a dragon is slow to wake, but hard to sate.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Dragons and legends...It would have been difficult for any man not to want to fight beside a dragon.”

― Patricia Briggs, Dragon Blood

I want the next 20 days of school to be days my First Graders don't tear me limb from limb will never forget. I am reading A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin right now and was suddenly struck by how I have changed. I have never been one to read fantasy. A little Wrinkle in Time maybe, but not much else. A good friend suggested I try A Game of Thrones and I have sunk deep into the series. I find myself loving the imagery and the fantasy. It is while I was reading about dragons hatching that I suddenly thought DRAGONS!

So I have been madly creating a unit on Dragons to cruise us through the rest of the year. I happen to have a Dragon and Castle Lego set in my classroom that my kids adore. So I know this will be a big hit. 

Dragon myths were created to allow human beings to make sense of the natural world. When a volcano erupted, it was a dragon breathing fire out of anger. When there was thunder, a group of dragons had flown overhead. Dragons are a part of our human makeup.

I found so many amazing books which I am reviewing and will share over the next few weeks. If you have any ideas, please share them! I am working on the idea that classical dragons will be the focus of our unit. Not comic strip-like dragons you see in cartoons.

These are some of the books I have adored so far.

Mother's Day

Ah Mother's Day. I think it's supposed to be roses and breakfast in bed, or that's what the commercials say anyway. Not at my house.

My husband went out with his buddies last night and was over-served. He slept in.

My son woke up and started watching tv. When I asked him where my Mother's Day present was, he said, "I have it, but I have to finish the card and I don't want to do it until after this show."

My daughter handed me a piece of paper folded in half and insisted that since she has a Bitty Baby and an American Girl doll, she is a mother too. "Here," she said, "make me a mother's day card. Go on, take your time, I won't look. Put a lot of detail in it please."

Happy Mother's Day. Here's to hoping you realize how much love is necessary to overlook the insanity!

Picture Perfect Book Friday - A Good Day

A Good Day by Kevin Henkes was integral to why I fell in love with my husband. It's a simple, but darling story of how a small girl, a fox, a squirrel, a yellow bird, and a little white dog turn their bad day into good. My own children have loved this book so much that I have had to purchase it not twice, but three times.

Before my husband was even a twinkle in my eye, he listened to me reading this book. He was working nearby. He also noticed that I was having my very own bad day. Later on that afternoon, there was a knock on my door. My now husband stood outside with a huge lobster roll. I tilted my head, narrowed my eyes in the shape of a question, and said, "Um, thank you?" To which he replied, "I'm trying to turn this into A Good Day." And, he had.

A Good Day

Written & Illustrated By: Kevin Henkes

Greenwillow Books, 2007

Suitable For: ages one and up

Themes/Topics: persistence, perspective, joy

Opening: "It was a bad day...Little yellow bird lost his favorite tail feather."

Brief Synopsis: It started out as a bad day for little yellow bird, little white dog, little orange fox, and little brown squirrel. Until . . .

A discovery, and love, and luck and persistence, and a different point of view changed all that. What can turn a bad day into a good day? You decide.

Links To Resources and ideas for use in the classroom:

http://www.kevinhenkes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/A-Good-Day-activities.pdf

• Retell the story using colored beads on a pipe cleaner as a retelling bracelet. Have children retell each part as they touch each bead.
• Create a class book of one thing that made for a bad day and how another thing made it a good day. Two pages per child.
• Use in the beginning of school to help kids talk about worries and how to make things better.

Why I Like This Book:  Kevin Henkes is a genius with simple language and beautiful art work. In this book, he makes anyone realize how much good is all around us.

Gno way!

Tonight was the Spelling Bee fundraiser at the High School. I was on a team of three called "The Dictionaires" (say it with a French accent please). There were 16 nerds teams competing.

"We made it to the final round!" I texted to my husband as I awaited the final round. Our team had spelled malocclusion correctly. Nope, it wasn't really me who won that round, one woman on my team had been a nurse!

In the final round, after several successful spellings, we got down to only three teams.

1. Us
2. A team of three elderly people from a nursing home who were darn good spellers, and
3. A team of three teenagers, overachieving, darling girls (one of whom was the Spelling Bee State Champion of Maine). 

We did really well. During that last round I hissed at my teammates "We better WIN." It was kind of unsportsmanlike and my two teammates are lovely ladies I know from the Library where I am a Trustee. I thought they'd be horrified at me, but instead they both said forcefully, "We HAVE to WIN." I loved them.

The word given was "gnomon", nope never heard of it. The definition was part of the sundial that casts a shadow. So I wrote N-O-M-E-N because it sounded like he said that AND it was the name of something (nomen is the root word of name).

My teammates were madly scrawling "gnomen and nomon" on their pieces of paper and I was panicking because only ONE person was allowed to write on the dry erase board. So, ultimately as the official writer, I had to make the final call and gnomen looked like Garden Gnome and that seemed dumb wrong. The whistle blew and I tried to use my excellent peripheral vision to cheat, check our answer against the geezers next to us. "Hold up your board, Dictionaires, the judge rudely (I thought) demanded.

We lost.

The trophy was HUGE. I coveted it. I told them if we won it, we would have shared custody and our husbands would say to company, "Oh that, my wife won it as a hobby."

We didn't win, but we can be proud. We might even be in the local news tomorrow.

But now, it's 1:34am. I have sub plans set up because I think I have Strep Throat. I can barely swallow. It stinks.

Whew!

I can't believe I haven't posted since Sunday. Things are crazy busy at school and at home. Don't forget that this is my first year in First Grade. I had no idea how nutty the kids get, nor how much I would want to pack into 6 weeks.

In addition, I signed up to be in a spelling bee. Yes, really. I will be on a team of three. It's tonight over at our high school. I don't have to stand up alone and I get to write the word on a white board. I'm a pretty good speller. Now I feel worried that you'll look for spelling errors on my blog. I'm excited, but I woke up with a cold and a sore throat so that might slow me down a bit. No excuses, I still think I can spell just as well.

My plant unit is wrapping up. The kids Lap Books are looking amazing. I asked the art teacher if she would let them study Georgia O'Keefe and Vincent Van Gogh flowers and do paintings of the plants they are growing for our project. She delivered them yesterday. They are in watercolor and cray-pas. They are so totally beautiful and colorful. I laminated them and it made them even prettier! I am going to attach them to the back of the lap book. I will post pics this weekend.

I finished our NWEA computerized testing and the kids did pretty well. I am halfway through DRA2s. So with testing almost out of the way. I just have report cards and reviewing work.

Does anyone have suggestions or links to their own posts for making the end of the year less nuts?

Daily Word Work

It's taken me a long time to find some word work that I think is helpful to the students, can be done independently, and shows me what they are learning. Each week the kids do the same four word work "sheets". I change them depending on what we are learning. So the template is the same, the work is different.

On Monday, we do a starts with, ends with, in the middle...click here to see it.

On Tuesday, I use something that Barbara from Grade ONEderful shared. Click here for her original post. Then click here for my version.

On Wednesday, I do a say, write, and stamp which is similar to what a lot of other teachers do. Click here to see mine.

On Thursday, I use something Kristin from A Teeny Tiny Teacher sent to me that she uses to assess writing. I just changed it around a bit so it ties to what we are working on. Click here to see it.

Feel free to use any of these things if you can. The only thing I really need right now is something for Friday. Any ideas?

Currently

PPBF-The Root Children

I keep forgetting to do this on Friday! Here's my addition to the wonderful brainchild of Susanna Leonard Hill, Perfect Picture Book Friday. I have studied many different educational methods. One that I use bits and pieces of quite a bit is Waldorf. It is gentle and imaginative. I'll get a simple idea like just letting children use three colors to create a picture and it will take off. When you give children simple guidelines, they can be more free with their thinking. One book that I love to use when introducing Spring is The Story of The Root Children written by Sibylle Von Olfers in 1906.

Title: The Story of The Root Children

Author & Illustrator: Sibylle von Olfers

Publisher: Floris Books, 1990

Intended Audience: Ages 3-7

Genre: Fiction

Topic / Theme: Spring, Mother Nature, Flowers

Brief Synopsis (from www.steinerbooks.org): "This is a classic story of the changing seasons. The root children spend the winter asleep. When spring comes, they wake, sew themselves new gowns, and clean and paint the beetles and bugs. All summer they play in fields, ponds and meadows before returning in the autumn to Mother Earth, who welcomes them home and puts them to bed once more."

Opening: Under the ground, deep in the earth among the roots of the trees, the little root-children were fast asleep all winter long.

Why I Like This Book: This is a sweet story of how flowers come up from the ground. It helps children think about creating their own stories about the miracles we see all around us. The language is old fashioned and lovely. “There too old father Sliffslaff-Slibberslak came slowly creeping along.” This is about a snail and the children never forget it. They love to feel the sounds his name makes as it rolls in their mouth.

Activities/Resources:

1) This book really lends itself to the art of Storytelling. Story Arts is a great resource for this.

2) This would also work well with teaching about myths. Myths, Folktales and Fairy Tales.

3) I like to share famous pictures of mythical creatures and let the children write a story from what they see. Then I put the painting in the middle of a bulletin board and have the stories all around it. It really shows children how our own experiences and perspectives change how we see the same thing. See The Hunt of the Unicorn below. The original is at the Cloisters in NY.

Standards...and Dee!

Today the First Grade team (all 2 of us) had subs for a half day so that we could log on to the Tandberg which is sort of like Skype with the other First Grade teachers in our district. Our goal was to review the new District Standards and enter them into this new computer data base called Educate. We had to "level" each child for each standard so they go to the next grade with levels. I wasn't that psyched about it because I'm just not that sure that this is the right path for children.

That said, I was very surprised to see how much I learned from the experience. We really talked about why we teach what we do and how we assess. It was the first time I've ever been in a room (monitor?) with all of the First Grade teachers from our district. It was pretty cool to know that they know just what I do. I also learned a lot more about where I should focus next year.

The best thing by far though was that I got to meet see Dee from First Impressions! We knew we taught in the same district, but we'd never met. I was so excited to see her, so I kept saying "Hi Dee!" really loudly over the other participants.

I'm sure it wasn't annoying in the slightest.

Another great thing was that I could tell that Dee felt the same way. The tip off was when she kept screaming hi to me back over the heads of the participants. I can't wait to see her again.

Hi Dee!!