Now that I've been jobsharing longer than I've taught full-time, and now that I've worked with three different partners at three different grade levels, I've started to notice a pattern in how I've settled into each new situation. It looks a little something like this:
Year 1: Wide-Eyed Ignorance
I know nothing about this grade level, and my partner/team knows a lot. I will do what they do and try not to look like an idiot in the process.
Year 2: Shake Things Up
With a year under my belt, I suddenly have a billion ideas of my own, and finally feel comfortable trying them out. (I have a sneaking suspicion that this hits my partners like a ton of bricks: "Where did all this come from?? What happened to that clueless copycat who barely spoke??" It kind of hits me that way, too, by the way.)
Year 3: Settle In
We've got some of my partner's/team's ideas, some of my contributions, and some of our collaborative ideas to draw from, and my partner and I start to work like a well-oiled machine. I start to think, "Hey, I kind of have the hang of this grade level!"
Year 4: Change Grade Levels and Start Over
At least, that's how it went when I ventured to kindergarten a few years ago; before that, I did a one-year jobshare in 3rd grade and never made it past Stage 1 (but I did learn a ton from my partner!), and before that, I'd pretty much gone through that 3-year process teaching 5th grade full-time. So, I'm smack in the throes of Year 2 mania, where my brain just won't shut off and I'm scouring books and blogs and (clearly) Pinterest and talking to colleagues and there is practically smoke coming out of my ears from all the pondering and planning going on in there. It's mostly fun and feels great to have a job that inspires so much enthusiasm in me...but I gotta say that when it's 4am on a Saturday and I'm laying in bed considering how to apply Marzano's summarization strategies to our rocks and minerals unit, I start wishing my brain came with an "OFF" switch!
Anyway, here's some of the stuff I've been trying out:
Synonym Rolls activity (original source:
First Grade Parade)
This is a total Pinterest find, and I'll admit that it's not necessarily my style--I tend to be a bit of a "standards Nazi" and am immediately skeptical of anything that's overly cutesy or gimmicky. Having taught almost every elementary grade level now, at three different schools, one thing I've noticed
**WARNING: STEREOTYPE AHEAD!** is that upper-grade teachers in general tend to be great at the content stuff and maybe a bit lacking in the presentation (as a 5th grade teacher, I did little more than staple notebook paper to the wall with a title above it most of the time), while primary teachers are experts at making things cute and engaging, but sometimes the rigor gets overlooked. And of
course that is a generalization, and of
course I know plenty of teachers who don't fit that generalization at all, but I'm just sayin' that's what I, personally, have noticed in my years as an educational nomad; and because of that, I'm hyper-aware of the need for balance between cuteness and content. But, synonyms and antonyms are one of our 2nd grade standards, and kids mix them up so often that when I saw this idea, I thought, "Here's a way to make the definition of
synonym memorable, expose them to using a thesaurus in a non-boring context, and create a bulletin board that they can refer to later on." And, to be honest, I
also thought, "Plus, here's an excuse for me to bake
cinnamon roll cookies for our exceptionally cute and well-behaved class. And to eat some."
So, I pre-made about 100 paper cinnamon rolls and wrote a word on each one that could be found in our thesauri.
I lightly wrote the page number from the thesaurus on the back, just in case this was a terrible way to introduce thesauri and it turned into a " 30 kids yelling 'I can't find this word!'" disaster--that way, I could fall back to "flip over your roll to find the page number" and do a more in-depth introduction to the thesaurus another day. We didn't end up needing that safety net, but I'm glad I had it, anyway!
I also pre-made the hats, which took approximately 649 hours...but I didn't want to waste class time making them AND didn't want our parent volunteers to make them because then the kids would've seen them in advance. The day before, I told the kids we'd be doing some pretend baking--and some real eating--tomorrow and that they were invited to bring an apron to wear, if they wanted to. I brought in a bunch from home, too.
When it was time to "bake," the kids worked in pairs, using their thesaurus to look up the word and write its synonyms around the swirl on the roll. Once I checked their work, they traced over it with Sharpie, turned in their roll, and got another one (switching roles so that the looker-upper became the writer and vice versa). (Don't think I didn't notice that roles/rolls pun potential. I left it alone. You're welcome.)
I'll admit: it was a decent amount of prep work. However, the payoff was huge! The kids LOVED it, they did amazingly well working in pairs and using a thesaurus, they really understood what synonyms are, and as a welcome side effect, I got a cute bulletin board and some cute photos out of it. Plus, I saved the hats to re-use next year. See? Content plus cute. That's good stuff. Thanks,
Mrs. Carroll!
This isn't my actual bulletin board because I forgot to take a picture of it, but it looks something like
this:
Phineas and Verbs
It doesn't happen very often that I come up with an idea entirely on my own--I am an expert blog crawler, google image searcher, and now Pinterest scourer--but I was taking a shower that morning and trying to think of a quick activity to practice identifying verbs, that didn't involve dragging out the Dreaded Reading Practice Book. (To be clear, I'm the one who dreads the reading practice book. Someday I'll blog my rant about how completing an inch-thick stack of worksheets, no matter how carefully designed, does not a good reader make...and, in fact, often a very reluctant, bored reader makes. A few here and there can be useful; busting that sucker out every day and plowing through it is my idea of torture, both as a teacher and a student. But, I digress.) I'd seen all kinds of Angry Verbs stuff online, but was pretty sure at least one of the first grade teachers had already done something like that...so, here's what we did:
I had them take out their spiral notebooks and showed about 10 minutes of "Phineas & Ferb" from the
Disney website. As they watched, they wrote down every verb they saw somebody doing, or even verbs they heard the characters use. We compiled our list, checking to be sure each one they'd written down was, in fact, a verb, and then each student wrote one down for our display. (I just projected an image of Ferb onto white paper and traced and colored it. It probably needs to be bigger. Oh, well.)
It's not Earth-shatteringly brilliant, but it gave them practice identifying verbs, brought in a little novelty, got the kids excited, and (like the synonym rolls) provided a mnemonic device to help them remember what a verb is. And, it did not involve the Dreaded Reading Practice Book. Score!
Reading Bulletin Board
I've always wanted to set aside a huge board for all of the reading activities we do throughout the year, so our strategies and interactive writing could be easily referenced. I've seen focus walls before, and those are useful, too, but I don't really think this qualifies as one. Whatever you call it, I love it! There's space for the kids to sit in front of it, so this is where we do read-alouds. I had Staples blow up a simple story map I made for fiction (which includes a place to mark whether it's realistic or fantasy, a 2nd grade standard, and a section for students to evaluate the author/story so that we remember to bring in those higher-level thinking skills) and laminated it. For non-fiction, we've been using various graphic organizers depending on what we're studying in science or social studies; right now, we're working on animal research projects, so we have
this one (credit:
A Year of Many Firsts) blown up and laminated. Kids can write directly on them with Expo or overhead markers as we discuss each element after read-aloud, and we can erase and re-use them whenever we want.
The
reading strategy posters under "Don't Let the Hard Words Win!" go along with a
video a friend and I stumbled upon at my previous school, when we were looking for a simple way to teach older students to be reading coaches for little ones. Even though the video is aimed at K/1 kids, I show it to our 2nd graders as I introduce the strategies, and then we refer to them when we talk about decoding those hard words intead of letting them win by getting scared and skipping them.
Next to that are the drawings we did to sort examples of realistic and fantasy story elements. One half of the room had to draw a character or setting that was realistic, and the other half did fantasy; then we labeled them, and finally we sorted them as a group (because some of their drawings didn't actually fit the definitions!). My poor jobshare partner--I left some of these for her to finish sorting with the kids, and she got the "Tooth Fairy" one! The student had drawn it as a realistic character, but then some kids argued that fairies are fantasy, and others insisted she's real...and being an absolute genius, my partner decided to put Tooth Fairy right smack in the middle and change the subject ASAP! Whew...that was close.
Our Class Motto
I'm pretty sure this idea came from Ron Clark. (If you're a teacher or a parent of a school-age child and haven't read
The End of Molasses Classes and/or his other books, you're missing out! This guy definitely has more time and resources than most teachers do, but his ideas and philosophy always leave me feeling inspired and humbled, and then motivated to improve in my own small ways.) It's inspired by the Notre Dame football team and the "Play Like a Champion Today" sign each player touches on the way out of the locker room. Our sign is a printable from
Technology Rocks. Seriously. and pretty much sums up everything we ask of our students in one simple statement. They each tap it on their way into the classroom to remind them of that goal, and sometimes if a student is off-task or being inconsiderate, I'll say, "You know, you're really great at working hard...but are you being nice to people right now?" or vice versa. I love the way it sets the tone for our classroom!
Bucket Filling
This is another Pinterest find that we've tweaked so it works for us. The basic idea here, which is introduced by two read-aloud books, is that everyone has an invisible bucket that we carry around to hold our positive feelings. We can fill each other's buckets with kind words or actions, or we can "dip" from other people's buckets by being mean or inconsiderate. It's totally cheesy, but the kids really connect to it, and parents tell us that their children accuse each other of being "bucket-dippers" at home sometimes! (One student last year politely pointed out to me that I was being a bucket-dipper by having a classmate take a 5-minute recess time-out for misbehavior. As Phoebe Buffay would say, "I have tasted my own medicine and it...is...bitter!")
Some teachers create pocket charts where each student has a pocket for others to put bucket-filler notes inside, but we decided that's way too much to manage. What if some kids get 20 slips a day and some never get any? Are we going to keep track and try to supplement to balance it out? Do we have time for that? (NOOOOO!) So, I used slips like
these but pre-wrote one student's name on each one to make a master set for our class; then I copied 10-15 sets and cut them up so that each paper-clipped stack has one for each student. We shuffle them and pass them out once every week or two, just as a morning "to-do" or a brain break activity. Kids fill out the compliment for whatever classmate they get, and when everyone is done, they deliver and receive their slips. Quick and easy! Lots of the kids save all of their slips in a folder or pencil box, which is sweet and goes to show how much those kind words mean to them.
As an extention that's actually standards-based, I started having the students write a friendly letter to the Student of the Week every Friday. Their goal is to write 2-3 sentences to fill that person's bucket with compliments, praise, or kind wishes. We learn the friendly letter format in the process, review writing skills through quick mini-lessons, and then I collect the letters and make a copy to keep for a grade. The originals are stapled into a construction paper cover with a simple cover sheet and sent home with the Student of the Week so s/he can keep them.
Here's a photo of our Class Bucket, which I just traced on red butcher paper using the projector and then laminated. There are 30 sticky shapes on it, and 30 laminated "drops" that hang from a binder clip near the bucket. We stick on a drop each time our class as a whole is filling our Class Bucket by being kind, responsible, and/or hard-working. Once we hit 30, a student draws two slips from a jar of whole-class rewards like "movie and popcorn," "shoes off day," "no homework tonight," etc. and the class votes on which reward they want. Both slips go back in the jar to remain possibilities for future rewards.
The Daily Five
One eternal teacher struggle is how to find time to work with small groups and individual students while keeping the rest of the kids busy doing something that a) is worthwhile and b) doesn't require hours upon hours of prep work beforehand and grading afterward. The Daily Five is, I think, the answer to that problem! It's a simple structure created by two teachers who weren't satisfied with giving kids a pile of worksheets OR with creating dozens of centers to keep them occupied while they did guided reading. Instead, they came up with five basic activities--word work, reading to self, reading to others, listening to reading, and working on writing--that are all valuable uses of students' time, and then figured out a systematic way of helping kids become independent at doing each of the activities while the teacher worked with groups.
The funny thing about The Daily Five is that so many teachers take this idea--the whole point of which is to eliminate the need to create a bunch of centers--and basically turn the Word Work section into centers! The idea is to introduce 4 or 5 tools (Play-Doh, keyboards, stamps...) that stay the same all year, so that kids aren't distracted by the novelty of new "toys" all the time and focus on actually practicing spelling words with them. Yet, the Internet is full of Daily Five blogs where teachers have spent hours creating individual Word Work activities for compound words, contractions, silent e's, etc. Stop the madness!
Anyway, this is the first year we've implemented The Daily Five, and we've started with Read to Self. It AMAZES me that it had never occurred to me to build stamina during independent reading time; I always just told kids the rules and expected them to read quietly for X amount of time, and then spent the entire time managing off-task kids instead of working with groups. The idea of starting with 2-3 minutes, constantly reviewing the rules and self-reflecting afterward, and charting our progress while gradually building up to a full block of time totally blew my mind. Simple genius. And it works--in about 6 weeks, our 2nd graders went from lasting 2-3 minutes before the first kid started losing focus, to reading for 30 minutes straight with (almost always) ZERO intervention from us. Can I get a WOOOOHOOOOOOO?!!
Here are our kids' Book Boxes. They're magazine files from Ikea, which are way overpriced online but are something like $3 for a pack of 6 at the actual store, so it was worth the drive! Each student got a white strip of paper to write and decorate their name, and then a parent helper used packing tape to tape them to the boxes with a construction paper mounting. The Book Boxes live on the countertop under our windows, and each student is assigned a day for book shopping. Every morning, 6 kids grab their boxes, put the books they've finished in our "Go Backs" basket (putting them away ourselves just makes for a neater library, and we just have baskets sorted by level, so it doesn't take long), and shop for 5-7 new books.
We were worried that this system would be a hassle, but it has actually saved us a ton of hassle with kids constantly asking to trade in their books during independent reading time (or, you know, while we're in the middle of teaching math). They know that their book shopping day is their only time to trade books, and it's not a problem. Another WOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO!!!
So, now you can see why I haven't blogged in over a month, and why I can't turn off my brain...there are just too many great ideas out there in the world! I'll probably never be the kind of expert teacher who makes up tons of creative stuff to blog about, but I love to see what effective ideas other teachers come up with and then put my own spin on them if I need to. The key part for me, in wading through all the books, blogs, websites, and Pinterest pins out there, is taking the time to ask myself...
Is this going to help my students achieve a grade-level standard?
If "It makes a cute bulletin board" or "It ties in with a movie I can show" is the main reason to do a particular activity, I think the answer is no.
Is the amount of prep time involved worth the payoff?
I'm not about to spend 4 hours on die cuts and materials for a center that kids are going to spend 10 minutes doing!
Is this the BEST way to achieve the result I'm looking for?
And by "best," I'm thinking, "most effective," "most relevant," AND "most engaging for the kids." No point re-inventing the wheel, as they say, if there's a perfectly good option already in the curriculum...and no point doing a super-cute, fun activity that barely skims the standard!
Of course, by the time I sort through all of this and really start to master 2nd grade, I'll probably find myself somewhere else and starting over again! At the very least, I've gotten to work with TONS of different teachers and have been exposed to a huge variety of teaching styles and ideas. My partner and I are both hoping to keep sharing a contract for at least another couple of years, and then we'll see where I end up once Ellie starts school (!!!) and I go back full-time. In the meantime, I'm savoring every second of this cushy jobshare gig...which has turned out to be the best education I could ever have gotten!
