Super Science Giveaway

Cassandra has a newer blog called Adventures in Room 5. She just reached 200 followers so she asked for donations for her Super Science Giveaway. I gave her a copy of my brand new Pumpkin Unit for Big Kids and she included it in a huge bundle of life science freebies. She also has several other bundles for other science topics in her giveaway too. I can never have enough hands-on science activities, so this giveaway is awesome! Click on over to her blog to enter to win each one.

I'm also excited to share with you that I'm moving on up to Classroom Freebies instead of Classroom Freebies Too. If you aren't already a follower, you definitely should be!

I have several things I want to share with you this week, including a cute (free!) penguin craftivity we made in class, but there just aren't enough hours in the weekend! I hope I'm not the only one with that problem. Hopefully in a day or two... =)  

Happy Fall, Y'All: Pumpkin Time!

Fall is by far my favorite season. I'm such a beach lover at heart, but overall fall is just such a fun time of the year. The leaves are beautiful, there's apple cider and hot chocolate everywhere, sweaters and boots are in season, the weather is glorious, and my birthday falls right in there too. =)

It's also my favorite time in our classroom. We roll right from Johnny Appleseed into pumpkins, spiders, and monsters. Students really get into the thematic units and are so excited to see what we'll do next. I'm working hard to clean up all my units and get them posted to TpT for you. I just listed my pumpkin one this week and have spiders and monsters coming up soon in time for Halloween. 

The pumpkin one is fun because it includes our pumpkin journal where we plant and observe pumpkin seeds along with a ton of other pumpkin-themed ideas. I mostly stay away from Halloween in this one, but there are a couple ideas that use jack o' lanterns.

I pulled out one of my staple items from the new pumpkin unit to share as a freebie with you. It's my pumpkin life cycle cut and paste activity (black and white and color versions). What I really like about it is that the answer key I made also doubles as a learning chart/poster for your classroom. You can grab it for free in my TpT store without the watermark. Please leave some love if you can use it!

I also wanted to share my favorite pumpkin books with you. I use them for our partner reading centers during reading workshop and for whole class read alouds. I love the photographs in the Ken Robbins one because they're really high quality and make great writing prompts. Seed, Sprout, Pumpkin, Pie has great photographs for the life cycle though. Pumpkin Circle is pretty much our staple book for the unit. I don't think I can ever have enough books and I'm always looking for new ones. What are your favorites for fall?

The whole unit is $4 in my store. I teach third, but it could easily be used for second, fourth, and lower fifth too.

You can find other great fall products and freebies in this linky party!

Upper Elementary Pinterest Links

Today's post will be a quick one. I know I don't need to go on and on about my love of Pinterest because I think most of us are on that train by now. :)

Anyway, Debbie Clement of Rainbows within Reach is the Pinterest Queen. She's been organizing lists of educational pinners to follow for a few weeks now. This week's category is Upper Elementary. If you're looking for new ideas, you might want to check these pinners out!

Managing Student Groups/Centers Freebie

This year I'm using more centers and cooperative groups than ever before and quickly realized I needed a new management system. I had previously used a typed sheet of paper with color-coded groups. It was too small for students to see from across the room and took me time to retype and print a new group list each week. Thus, my Knight Board was born! It matches our school mascot and the fairytale themed clip art is just too cute.

velcro and ribbon... so easy!

Now I have colored groups across the top for reading (red group, green group, orange group, blue group). I can also pull all of my knights, princesses, dragons, or swords as a group. The names are printed in three different colors, so I can also pull the red, blue, or green students that way. For smaller groups of four, I can pull students across the board.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret though and this is the best part for me... I use the clip art and font colors to "code" my students so I can quickly group them for different mixed-ability purposes. I know to mix up the clip art and font colors for mixed-ability, mixed-temperment groups. I literally shuffle the stack and randomly assign students to create balanced groups. I can also allow for student choice by telling students they need partner up a dragon with a knight, etc.

To attach them to the wall, I stapled strips of wide ribbon straight down the wall. Then I attached Velcro to the ribbon and the tags so I can easily rearrange them as needed.  

 If you're another Knight school or just like the fairytale tags, you can grab a free copy here for desk nameplates or a group wall like mine. 

Penguins, Penguins Everywhere!

I think I might have mentioned this before, but I sort of have a thing for penguins. Seriously. This is the top shelf in my office. That doesn't include the pillow pet I received for Christmas last year. {Sidenote: I asked my husband for it and he said no so I asked my dad. Once a daddy's girl, always a daddy's girl, I guess. ha!}

Anyway, needless to say "penguin week" at school is one of my favorites. Each September, I bust out my very own Pierre the Penguin and build an iceberg in the hallway. We spend the week learning about nonfiction text structures, note-taking, and the basics of research using the different types of penguins. This all lays the groundwork for our Amazing Animal Reports in October.





One of my centers this week is reading penguin books (alone or with a partner for fluency). I realize I might have way too many penguin books (but can you ever really have too many books?!), but these are my favorites.

Many of us study penguins across a wide range of grade levels, so I wanted to share this penguin learning chart freebie with you. I use these charts throughout my unit to document student learning and look for gaps in their research. At the end of the week, we use them as starting points for our paragraphs. You can grab it in my TpT store.

I know I touched on centers in this post, so I'll be back with more on that soon. I'm really loving my set up this year!

My Favorite Freebie Linky Party

Cynthia's blog is near and dear to my heart because it was the very first one I made through Design by Christi so of course I had to join her linky party of freebies.

My favorite freebie so far is my writing innovations pack.

It's my favorite because I love, love, love writing workshop. It helps struggling writers come up with ideas and feel successful, but eager writers have a lot of fun with it too. I can easily get 7-10 days of writing out of my students with them too so they're great for the beginning of the year while I'm working on benchmarking my new students.

The story behind them is pretty simple. My blog was still pretty new and I wanted to do a series of posts with ideas for my followers that were near and dear to my heart. Of course I chose writing! You can see all of those posts here: http://msfultz.blogspot.com/search/label/innovations.


You can use these innovations several ways. I use them as 1-2 day lessons. I read the picture book and have students do some brainstorming on day one. We spend the second day writing in our little books and polishing our work. The books can stay in students' writing folders for the the entire unit and they can circle back and work on the various books as we build stamina for writing workshop.

Online Backup Saved My Life: Get 2 free months now!

Do you back up your computer regularly? You know... all of your family pictures, teaching files, TpT purchases, and that clip art you have way too much of. I learned the hard way what happens when you don't... your computer will crash and you'll be paying big bucks for someone to attempt to recover your stuff (with no guarantee, they actually can). It is so, so not fun.

I've been using Carbonite online backup for a year now. I just renewed for another year, in fact. They gave me 2 additional months free for paying a year in advance. for $59 I get 14 months of unlimited online backup. The best part? It does it automatically as soon as I save a file. I don't have to remember. I don't have to plug in an external drive. And I don't have to worry about running out of space. 

I know I probably sound like a commercial, but I really believe in it. I know what it feels like to lose all your stuff and then wait anxiously to see if you can get it back. I received an offer code with my renewal that lets you get an extra 2 months too. Full disclosure: I get a small referral bonus if you use my link. But truthfully? I'd be telling you about it anyway to get you the 2 free months. You can sign up through September here by clicking here.

Claco Review: File Sharing and Networking for Teachers

I connected with Jordan from Claco through Twitter and she asked me to get involved with the beta version to test it out and see what I thought. For most of you who probably haven't heard about it yet, Claco is a file-sharing and networking site for teachers. Think of it as Facebook meets Google Docs meets Twitter, almost.

You set up a basic profile and "subscribe" to other users. So far I had a little trouble connecting with other teachers around my grade level, but that will all change once the site is launched.

Then you create "binders" were you can upload and share your resources. You can share files or websites. Other teachers who like your upload can copy the file over into one of their binders with a single click. This is my reading binder with a couple tester freebies that I uploaded. {Side note: please make sure you're following copyrights and terms of use before uploading files that aren't your own!}

When you first log in, you can see all of your binders down the left and a newsfeed of activity and uploads on the right.

I can see a lot of potential with it and it's super easy to use. I'd recommend starting an account and playing around with it. I think it will only get better as more teachers upload their files!

Johnny Appleseed Apple Unit for Big Kids

Johnny Appleseed's birthday is this month! We celebrate by doing reading, writing, and social studies activities all about Johnny Appleseed and apples. We're actually celebrating a little early in our classroom because his birthday falls right in the middle of my Amazing Animal unit. I've promised the students he won't mind an early celebration though. =)

My centers this week have tons of reading and writing activities about apples. We're writing how-to papers, journal entries, poems, and descriptive menus to go along with a few simple recipes we're making right in the classroom. I'm tying in a few review concepts like facts and opinions too. For social studies we're mapping places Johnny visited as we come across facts while reading and practicing cardinal directions too. Of course we're keeping learning charts and doing a few art activities too!

I uploaded my complete unit to TpT, but I wanted to share this birthday card freebie with you too. I have students make Johnny a birthday card and then write a note inside about how they think he should spend his birthday. It's a fun way to celebrate the end of our unit and tie in what they learned during the week too. Love that!

I know this is getting long, but I can't talk about apples without mentioning two books. The first is a brand new book Apples A to Z. It's a "big kids" alphabet book packed with apple facts. For example, "G is for grafting" and then it describes what grafting is. It would be a great start to your apple unit because of all the great vocabulary.

If you haven't seen Golden Delicious: A Cinderella Apple Story before, it's a MUST for an apple unit. It's great for science discussions about apple growth because it's all about how those mysteries golden apples were first grown. I love the look of the pictures too.

Tracking Student Data Freebies

I created a new data sheet to help keep up with the increasing need to track student data for progress monitoring throughout the year. In addition to daily observations and class work, we do several formal assessments on our students in the fall, winter, and spring. I've previously recorded the data for each assessment on one sheet. This meant that student information was spread out over multiple pages. I liked that this allowed me to sort and compare students, but it wasn't very helpful when I needed all the data for one student (for a case conference or RTI meeting, for example). 

I realized I needed a new form to get all of my student data in one place. Here's a Word version of my data sheet so you can adjust it to include the assessments you use in your school. I also created a data binder with tabs for each student. I slide the data sheet in as the first page in the student's section with copies of the individual assessments behind it. Of course I had to make a cute cover for it that you can grab too. 

While having each student's data in one place is extremely helpful, I still like to sort and compare my students on each assessment to organize need-based groups. I use a fluency grid and Fountas and Pinnell recording grid for that. They are in Excel so you can sort by score and quickly see class averages.

No one ever told me in "teacher school" about all the time I would spend tracking data, that's for sure!

Visualizing Minilesson Ideas

Reading workshop is well underway in our room. In addition to teaching routines and expectations, we've been working on visualizing. I like to introduce (or review) all of the reading strategies right away and then spiral back through them during minilessons all year long. I start with visualizing because it's fairly concrete and the students seem to enjoy it the most. 


We discuss how visualizing is like making "mind movies" to help carry us through the story. I invite students to share their mind movies with partners through oral descriptions and quick sketches too. I like that visualizing is open-ended and you can't really be wrong. For example, we're reading Pencil of Doom by Andy Griffiths right now. It's another one of my favorites! It's such a good book that the substitute I had on Wednesday read way too long because she didn't want to stop, haha. Anyway, we got into a goose bump-moment debate over who the characters on the cover were. I honestly don't know which is which either and the students both loved and hated that. =) We were using our clues and the mind movies we had made to compare and contrast the cover's characters to our own. You'll probably want to go on and get the rest of the books in the series because your students are going to want to read them all. Trust me.

This year, I also pushed out a story wheel into one of my centers at the end of the week. I laminated copies of it so students could map their stories with dry erase markers, share them with the group, and then erase the maps for the next group. It was so easy to put together and a great quick assessment for me to see who was having trouble visualizing and/or recalling six main events of their story. You can grab the free story wheel from Into the Book here.


 
Finally, I read Meanwhile by Jules Feiffer for a visualizing minilesson. I usually read it in writing workshop for a pattern book or repetitive pattern minilesson, but decided to try it in reading workshop this year. It's a comic book style book about a little boy named Raymond who wishes real life worked like a comic book so you could just write "meanwhile" and change the scene. He, of course, gets his wish and is transported into various different scenes. Each time he would write "meanwhile" I would have my students stop and do a quick sketch of their mind movie. I stuck little sticky notes on those pages to help me remember them while reading. The book doesn't have page numbers (hate that!), but if you decide to get the book, I put sticky notes on pages 3, 9, 15, 19, and 25.

I haven't used it yet this year, but I also like to use Dream Weaver by Jonathan London. I'm not crazy about spiders, but the illustrations in this one *almost* make the yellow spider cute. It reminds me of classics like Verdi and has nonfiction too.

Okay, I hope that gives you some great ideas for visualizing! We're working on introducing making connections next, so I'll be back with a wrap up of those ideas soon. Until then, if you decide to purchase any of these books for your classroom, I'd love it if you used my link. Have a great week!

Teacher Interview and September Currently

I thought long weekends were supposed to leave you feeling rested, but man I am tired today! My class was wide-awake and chatty though, so I guess it was just me who needed a nap. :)

I gave an interview to Teacher Certification Degrees that you might want to read if you're interested in hearing more about our classroom, life as a third grade teacher, or some of my background. You can click here to read it. It was fun to think about some of the answers and advice for students who are thinking about becoming teachers. I thought about telling them to RUN!!! but I didn't. ;)  It's amazing how much I really do love my job when I stop to think about it, even through all the frustrating parts. I do wish we could do more teaching and less.... other stuff... though. That's a whole different story and you don't want to get me started on it!

Moving on...  Farley posted this month's currently. I love reading these! It's fun to see some of the personal happenings behind my favorite bloggers. So just in case anyone cares about mine.... Tada!

Gotta run. Sushi and a stack of papers the size of Mount Everest are waiting for me. That's another thing they don't tell you about in teacher school, huh? =)

National Geographic Freebie and Award Certificates

Way back when I was a new blogger, I posted about using National Geographic Explorer with my students each month. We're using September this week. One of the other third grade teachers made the coversheet with activities this time, so I can't share that, but I wanted to pass along the vocabulary cards I made to go with it. This month is all about bones and hurricanes, so you can probably use the cards in your science units even if you don't use National Geographic Explorer. Here's the September Teacher's Guide link with matching printables.

In other news, love rewarding my students so I was thrilled to *finally* finish my school-themed award certificates over the Labor Day weekend. There are 12 different awards for various subjects and school events. I listed them in my TpT store if you could use them too. I have to say, I think they're pretty cute!