Happiness is... Building Vocab with Class Books!

Hi, Teaching Friends!

Do you remember the Peanuts cartoon, "Happiness is a warm puppy"?



I didn't know until today that the "Love is..." cartoons by Kim Casali are still being drawn. My sister-in-law drew one on a cake for us when I was first pregnant back in (gulp!) 1978! Our newspaper doesn't carry "Love is..." , so I haven't seen those sweet little things in years.

 

I was thinking about both of those cartoons today, and how they can provide a format for class books. What a great way to extend your students' understanding of new vocabulary!

 

 

Let's say you're teaching one of these words.

 

 

 

Not the easiest words to explain, which is why we usually resort to using examples. Creating word pictures to define these terms makes them memorable for us, and writing & illustrating based on their own experiences makes them even more vivid for students. Think about examples like these.

 

 

" Independence is tying your shoes by yourself."

 

 

"Ambivalence is deciding whether to have chocolate or strawberry ice cream."

 

 

If each of your students writes a sentence to define the word and then illustrates it,  you've got a great bulletin board display. But why not keep the learning going by making a simple cover and binding the pages into a class book? You might like to use this template. Or, keep it even simpler and just give your students  a half sheet of picture/story paper.

 

 

 

 

Think of the great examples your students will come up with for these adjectives.

 

 



 

 

" Optimistic is believing that it will snow today."

 

"Inquisitive is when my little brother spread butter on the bottom of his shoes because he wanted to know if he could skate with it."

 

 

This could easily be carried over into content area vocabulary. Science words, math terms, and how about character education?

 

 

 





Can you tell that I was having fun making these word collages?

 

 

I hope you'll find a new way to incorporate this writing experience into your vocabulary instruction.

Please leave a comment to share your idea with us!

 

 

Happy Teaching!

 

December Class Book FREEBIE!

Hello, Teaching Friends!

Teaching the December holidays is a lot more complicated than it used to be, and also a lot more interesting, for us and for our students, too.

As the world becomes increasingly diversified, there are more holidays and traditions, unique to each culture.  It's kind of hard to strike a balance and to fit it all into a short and busy month, but so important. It's not only so that no one is excluded or offended, but also because it's such a wonderful opportunity for our students' lives and our own to be enriched by better understanding the lives of the people we work and learn beside every day.

I'm thinking about the title of a book I used to enjoy with my class, We are All Alike...We are All Different. So very true! One way to help our youngest students understand this is through exploring the things we all have in common as we celebrate holidays.

Food seems like a good place to begin. (Hmmm...come to think of it, isn't food always a good place to start anything?)  Think of the variety of foods that would be on the table if all of your students' family traditions were represented!

Getting all that food together may not always be an easy thing to accomplish, but here's a much easier way to help your students share and appreciate each others' December celebrations. Plus, there's some bonus literacy learning involved - hooray! - and you'll have a new class book to add to your collection.

 Click here or on the picture to download from Google Drive.

The set includes a book cover, student templates for writing, and a data collection activity. Because you'll need just a bit of support from your class families, there's even a letter included to fill them in on the project and give you the information you'll need to complete the book.


Holiday Treats are Fun to Eat! is a sample from a set of 5 class books, "Making Class Books for December and January". In addition to Holiday Treats are Fun to Eat, this set includes class writing experiences about giving gifts, Chinese New Year, snowmen, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy Teaching!

Meet the School Helpers... & Make a Class Book!

Hello, Everybody!

Do you take your students on a school tour on the first day of school? The great big school building with its turning halls can be so confusing to little ones ... and all those doors look pretty much alike! Whether your students are new to the building or returning after their break, they deserve a chance to get used to the place where they'll be spending their days.

There are lots of great ideas on Pinterest and blogs for making the school tour fun. Here's a way that you can turn this fun experience into some ongoing literacy learning! In addition to meeting school helpers, your students will engage in shared writing, practice reading and writing six early sight words, and have a class book for the classroom library that will continue to build their fluency as they reread it throughout the school year!

As you take your tour, bring along your camera.  If you plan your route ahead of time, you can write a list of the school personnel you want your students to meet, in the order you expect to see them. Put the list on a clipboard with a marker and give them to a student to carry.


Then, as you meet and introduce the staff member who's next on your list, the next 2 children in line will come up and have their picture taken with the adult (group picture). The clipboard carrier finds the name on the list and checks it off. The two students move to the end of the line, and the tour continues.


Of course, you'll want to have enough photos planned to include all of the children. But just think of all the school helpers they'll get to meet:  principal, office staff, special area teachers, speech and occupational therapists, cafeteria workers, custodians, classroom aides, etc. Your students will be feeling more confident and right at home... and even more so each time they reread the book!


Here's a cover and template you might want to use to make the project simpler.

Click to download the template from Google Drive.

Here are some further suggestions:

* Complete only one or two writing templates at a session to keep attention and interest high.

* Before you begin each shared writing session, reread the previous pages.

* Scaffold the experience for beginners or strugglers by displaying the included word cards nearby.
   Students can find the needed words to help them write, if necessary. "The" and "This" are the only  
   two visually similar words in this set -  a great opportunity to practice looking beyond the first 
   letter!

* After the book is completed and has been reread several times, use the word cards as a pocket chart activity , building sentences from the book.  Here's a very cool tutorial for printing sentences on sentence strips .

* To put your photo with the writing:  Mount both photo and writing on a larger piece of construction paper, and laminate. Use the same size mounting paper for your cover.  Or save yourself some work and print each picture on the back of a template page. As you turn to a new page spread, the photo will be on the left and the writing will be on the right. This takes a bit of planning, but will save you time, ink, and paper.


I think you'll find that this project was harder for me to explain than it will be for you to complete! Have a great time with it!

Happy Teachng!

"New Friends" Back to School Freebie

Do you work with your students to fill your classroom walls as they learn, rather than having your charts, posters, etc. already displayed when your class first arrives? Then this is a project you'll love!

 Today I'd like to share a project that has lots of learning opportunities for you and your students!

• Build classroom community by helping your students get to know each other's names quickly AND match names to faces
• Practice writing their own names and those of friends, and then read the names
• Practice early reading strategies like one-to-one match, directionality, return sweep,  monitoring with known words, and fluency.
• Practice reading early sight words
• Fill an empty bulletin board easily in the first week of school.  Plus, when you take the display down, you'll have a ready-to-go class book.  We all know how many times class books are read and reread are when they're filled with students' pictures and names!

Lots of time is spent on student names in the first weeks of the primary grades, and we all know that there are so many clever, cute, and worthy name-related activities to do ... just look at Pinterest!
This activity/display is also centered on students' names, but it puts them in the context of simple, repetitive sentences to strengthen your students' control of early sight words.

There's a little bit of pre-organization involved, just to make sure that each child's name is feature on two different writing templates, and that the correct students are paired for your photos. The free download has suggestions to help you organize this.

Here are the writing templates you'll receive.

"New Friends" will be a classroom display that's a big hit on Back to School Night and also as a component of your Read the Room center activities.  Just offer a choice of cute pointers and they're off!!

Four different grade-specific display headers are included. When you take the display down, use the header as the cover for an instant class book!

The "New Friends" project is posted as a freebie at my TpT store. Click here or on the picture below to get it!

Happy Teaching!

Class Books... on the playground!

Hello, Teaching Friends!

A playground break is awesome for the first days of school, when we're struggling to get everyone back into gear, including ourselves! I always have hopes of making those playground trips happen more often during the year, but time usually squeezes it out of my plans... until the last days of school, when it again becomes a lovely (and sometimes desperately needed!) treat.

Here's a way to combine a trip to the playground with your literacy instruction. Take your camera along to capture some clear photos of your students in action.

During the first weeks of school, use those pictures as the basis for some shared writing. It's easy to incorporate verbs like "run", "jump" and "slide" when there's so much happening in your pictures. Depending on the level of your students, have them independently attempt a caption (hey, there's a non-fiction Common Core standard in it when you use that word "caption"!), share the pen for some interactive writing, or do some modeled writing as your students dictate.

Sorry that I don't have any photos of the delightful "kid writing" that resulted when we shared the pen. We displayed the finished photos as a wall story - supply a cute pointer and you have a great opportunity for reading the room!

After a few weeks , the pictures came down and were bound into a class book. This is a fun and simple project that yields lots of ongoing practice with the rereading of the class book. All young readers love to see themselves in a book!

Here are a few ways to change it up a bit but still keep a literacy focus to your playground photos for the end of the year.

-  Have your students add speech bubbles of the characters (aka classmates) in conversation as
   they play.

-  Use the photos as a basis for a shared reading book for next year's class.  Your current students
    write, you type it up, glue on the captions, and bind it. Now it's ready for you to use during the
    first week of school, and a good springboard for discussion about playground behavior.Guide this
    year's group of writers into including some repetitive language in their writing, and next year's
    students will benefit even more!

-  Make multiple copies and have each student plan, write, and edit a creative story based on the
   picture of his or her own choice. This is a great project for writing buddies, whether for the 
   students in your own class, or partnering with an older or younger child.

-  For younger students, generate a shared list on chart paper, writing some of the words you might
   use to label the photos (climb, swing, girl, clouds, dirt, etc.)  Give each child a copy of the photo
   of his choice, have him choose the words he needs for labeling it, copy them on self-stick labels
   or sticky notes, and put them on the photo.

Do you have some other ideas for using playground photos? It would be wonderful if you'd share
them  below!

Hmmm... I'm thinking hard to come up with a playground-themed freebie that you might enjoy... aha!
Here's a differentiated making words set. At the first level, the target word "playground" is supplied.
Challenge your more advanced students with the second level, in which the students must discover on their own the word that uses all of the letters.
 

 

Happy Teaching!

Free T-Shirt Class Book

Don't you just love making class books?  No books in your classroom library will ever be as popular with your students as the ones they've worked on together to write and illustrate. (well, at least until they fall in love with Mo Willems' books ...)

Starting to build a collection of class books right from the first week of school has several advantages.

* You're getting an early start on building a classroom community. Your students will get to know one another and you will learn more about them, too, from their likes and dislikes to their handwriting and spelling strengths and needs!

* As your students contribute to a whole class project, they will see that you give equal value and importance to each of their contributions, bolstering the confidence of the less secure little ones.

* Class books can help you quickly build a collection of books that will be readable for every student in your class.

* Reading class books is a great way to introduce buddy reading procedures. Because the text will be very familiar to both of the readers, neither will feel at a disadvantage, and your teaching focus can shift to appropriate student behaviors for buddy reading.

The earliest class books can be built on common experiences, such as responses to a read-aloud:
" I see a ____________  ______________ looking at me" is a favorite we've probably all done.
How about the experiences your students bring from ouside the classroom? Families, homes, and personal favorites are all the basis for many class book ideas.

There are a number of ways to bind your class projects into books. I used to think that laminating every page was kind of wasteful. but I changed my mind.  These books will get lots of use and need to last all year! Once laminated, one of the most durable ways to bind is with a binder (like a GBC) and plastic combs. Pages can also be holepunched and then secured with looseleaf rings, chicken rings, or even with string or pipecleaners. Another idea is to use portfolio folders, widely available at ridiculously low prices for back to school. Cut the cover page to size and tape on the front, holepunch
each student page, and simply put them in the folder as if you were assembling a report.

After you've assembled a large enough collection, you may want to start sending books home with a different child each night to read to their families. I staple a page inside the back cover for  parents to write a short comment. The kids all get to bask in the praise! :)

Here's a free book to help you get started on your first class book project.

If you're looking for more books for your class to make together, I hope that you'll consider this collection of five back to school class books at my TPT store. Each book includes a cover, student template (printable in color ot grayscale), and a related data collection activity.

                                     

Happy Teaching!