Getting Personal - In Style: We Are Back!

We are aware... there has been a lapse in time since our last post! Sheesh! Talk about life changes! But don't worry- they have all been GREAT changes that have occurred within the past 2 years! New homes, pets, schools and biggest- new work positions! However, we are adjusted and feel better than ever to make our return to the blog! But for now- we have just returned from the beach where lots of talk about future posts, ventures and opportunities were discussed! We are super committed to posting regularly and are looking forward to sharing tons with you! Thanks for following along! :)

~ Sara & Megan

Do you want to make learning awesome?

Start using Kahoot!

Click here to check it out!

 I came across Kahoot this summer at the IB Conference of Americas. Several of the presenters used it in their sessions and I immediately fell in love. Kahoot appealed to my competitive side, it keeps track of participating response times and responses and displays a leaderboard after every question. In addition, the fun and quirky music was an instant mood booster. I was immediately engaged in the session after the presenters used a Kahoot. I was hoping it would have a similar effect on my students.  

I just started using Kahoot with my kiddos last week. I’m not sure who had more fun! I created a short little 12 question quiz about decimals. It took no more than 5 minutes for my kiddos to complete, but that is all they talked about for the rest of the day. They couldn’t get enough of it.  As a teacher, I loved that my students were super engaged in a learning activity, and I loved that Kahoot gave me meaningful data on my students’ mastery of decimals. It is a win-win.

 It is a super easy and it’s free. It’s a web-based program and allows you to completely customize the Kahoot. For someone like myself who isn’t very tech-savvy, it’s very user-friendly.

In order to respond to your Kahoot, your students will need to have a device they can use to respond to the questions. If you have a class set of laptops, tablets, or if you do a Bring Your Own Device to school day, than I would highly recommend incorporating a Kahoot into your lesson plans! The website doesn’t lie, it does make learning awesome!

I’d love to hear if you try it out!

-Sara

LRA Conference Recap

Yesterday we had the honor of presenting at the LRA state conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was a blast! This was our first time presenting at a conference together and I think it is pretty safe to say that we are both hooked. We are looking forward to our next conference appearance.

Here is a quick summary of the sessions.

Show Not Tell: How to transform your students into expressive writers

During this session, we talked about how to help students find their voice.

We shared several strategies that address each of the components of voice and gave teachers resources to help them get started. It was our goal to empower teachers to help their students incorporate rich vocabulary and beautiful language into their writing.

Rethinking Reading Responses: 10 effective strategies that go beyond the reading journal.

In this session, we shared 10 response strategies that we use to support our students reading comprehension.

1.    Turn and Talk
2.    Comprehension Roll
3.    Most Valuable Phrase
4.    Comprehension through Music
5.    Response Stems
6.     Wordless Pictures
7.     Classroom Chatter
8.     Text Coding
9.    Mapping
10. Technology

We will be posting more information about the specific strategies we shared in the upcoming weeks.

Happy Teaching!

-Sara & Megan

R.I.P. to words we use over and over!

My students enjoyed having a funeral during class today- only because we were able to say, "Goodbye!" to words we continue to repeat in our writing! In exchange, we explored a new way to find better words that will enhance the voice in our writing!

We learned how to use a thesaurus… searching for words by using the guide words at the top of the book can be tricky but once you get the hang of it, it’s a great resource to find synonymous words! The Dollar Tree sells useful thesauruses for only $1.00! THEN… we explored using the thesaurus on the computer! This sparked a huge interest in my kiddos as they love using technology! 

Once I taught a couple of students how to use the online thesaurus at www.thesaurus.com, I then had a student ask me if she could teach the class! YES!!! This is, of course, any moment that a teacher hopes for! 

She taught the class how to pull up the thesaurus through Google and then taught them step by step directions to searching for a word and writing down all of the new words that could be used on the R.I.P. paper template!

Upon her finishing, I had seven students run to me asking to use the thesaurus! Oh! One quick requirement- you must show me the word you use over and over that we want to say, “Goodbye!” to! :)

Click here to see this product in my store.

~Megan

Writing Camp - Day 5

Today was the last day of Writing Camp for our campers. There was NO better way to celebrate all of their awesome writing than to have a… PUBLISHING PARTY! A publishing party means chips, juice, candy and other sweet treats, along with awesome pencils and cool story writing paper! This was a valuable time for our campers to share their personal narratives with others. The kids were so excited to have completed a written piece by using the writing process!

If you would like attractive writing paper to get your students excited about writing, check out the writing template paper using the link below! 

Click here to see this product in my store.

Enjoy these pictures from our Publishing Party!

Such a great experience, and turn out, for our first annual summer week-long Writing Camp!

~Megan

Writing Camp - Day 4

So… now we are nearing the final days of our 4^th Grade Writing Camp and as sad as we (and the kids) are to see it come to an end, it’s so exciting to see all that they learned… in just 4 days!!!

Today was an exhilarating day of writing camp! The campers became true authors… of a personal narrative story! As we know- there is NO telling what products would be created without them SEEING what it is that they are expected to accomplish, so the process was very structured: I modeled vivid storytelling and then showed them what my story would look like through using illustrations. (P.S. If you can never think of a “good” story to tell… pets make great stories! 34 children now know how sneaky my cat, Rumble, was!)

Then I used each picture to capture the moment using words (just a few sentences of the main idea). After each section was written, I read it aloud and made sure it 1- made sense and 2- told a pretty good summary of my small moment. When my short paragraphs checked out okay, it was time to do what every incoming 4^th grader loves to do- REVISE AND EDIT!!! What a way to feel all grown up!

We all know revising and editing is a tricky skill so my revising was primarily linked to the parts of speech- how could I enhance a sentence by giving it more detail and creating a mental image? The children helped me revise and edit my story (What better practice for preparing them to do it on their own in just a few more minutes?!?). Soon, it was time to put my writing into its final stage and publish!

After I modeled the task, students began their personal narrative writing process! 

Check out their hard work!

If you are interested in these BME graphic organizers, you can download it using the link! 

Click here to check out this product in my store.

Tomorrow will be our Publishing Party!! Yay!

~Megan

Writing Camp - Day 3

We are having a great time with our “campers” this week! They get a kick out of us calling them campers, considering in just a few weeks we will refer to them as students. I’m actually pleasantly surprised at how much fun the kids are having. We have been trying to make the activities fun and engaging, but we weren’t sure how the kiddos would respond. We are getting excited to walk this group through an entire year of writing. 

Like I mentioned on Monday, one of our goals for the week is to help our campers become familiar with the eight parts of speech. One activity I developed to assist with this goal was a sentence building activity.

Click here to see this product in my TPT store.

Students were given color coded word cards for each part of speech. The goal was for students to add one word at a time, so they can see a very basic sentence grow into something complex. 

They started with the formula noun + verb = complete sentence and quickly realized that by adding in adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions they can give more information to their reader. They had a great time with this activity and came up with some very creative sentences. 

I can't wait to use this with my students during the year!

-Sara