Teaching With Style: vocabulary

Showing posts with label vocabulary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vocabulary. Show all posts
We all have our go-tos, right?  Go-to coffee mug, go-to comfy sweatshirt, go-to favorite teacher pens.  Well, today, I'm sharing my absolute favorite go-to Teachers Pay Teachers products that I use in my classroom!
First up, I am so thankful for Tanja from Journey of a Substitute Teacher!
Not only are her seasonal sub plans amazing and her Reading Activities for Any Book, but she also has easy prep and super fun Mad for Math dice and domino activities! 
These are perfect for my math center bins!  You can see that I decided to do the 3 digit expanded form, greater or fewer with double digit numbers, and fraction activities.  I copied the direction pages on colored paper, slipped them in plastic page protectors, and made enough copies of the recording sheet.

I placed everything, along with some fun foam dice in my math center drawers.  I currently have 8 drawers that pairs of kids rotate through.  

These girls were pumped about those big dice! And look how engaged they are! Teacher heaven!

These girls were also excited about the colored foam dice.  The smiles on their faces say it all!

Here are two more math products that keep me afloat!

Since I'm not a fan of my school's math program, I would be struggling without Denise's Common Core math assessments!  They are straight forward, minimal reading, and really assess what each standard is asking.

The other one is Corinna's monthly word problems.  I have the whole year bundle! They spiral skills and really help the kids with critical thinking and problem solving skills.

You can see that these are great for using Singapore Math-style visuals.  And the written component is perfect practice for my kids who struggle with articulating how they solve problems.  

To partner with these word problems, I use my Math Problem Solving Strategy posters everyday! The kids have gotten really good at figuring out how to solve problems!

Here they are up in my room.  We refer to them every.single.day! I ran out of wall space, so I stuck them up on some window louvers that I never open anyway.  Perfect way to maximize the wall space! 

And my latest product upload is also a life saver that I've been using all year, but just finally got up on TpT - Math Vocabulary Dictionaries! 

We all know that math vocabulary can be hard and that's what trips kids up on tests and exams - especially state tests.  Since my kids are in 2nd, it's part of my job to help get them ready for the state test they'll take next year.  Keeping these math vocabulary books all year long help us build on previous knowledge and have a valuable resource to use in various lessons.  

There are three ways these can be organized - Common Core, quarterly, or alphabetically.  There are also 3 ways to bind them - copy back to back and staple in the middle with a long-armed stapler, cut in half and bind with a book binder, or cut in half, fold the cover over, and staple with a heavy-duty stapler.  

Now, hopefully I've given you some good ideas for the upcoming TpT sale! 

***** GIVEAWAY TIME!! *****
To help make a smaller dent in your pocket, I'm giving away one item in my store (under $10) to one lucky reader!  Leave me a comment below and let me know what your go-to classroom item is - maybe it's your Mr. Sketch markers, or your favorite Pandora station - it doesn't have to be a TpT product (but maybe it is!)  Make sure you leave your email in your comment and that you follow my blog some way (Bloglovin, email, or Google Friend Connect).  Good luck!

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My school does Marzano's vocabulary program and kids have notebooks with close to a hundred words that they learn each year.  The notebooks move with them from year to year, so they can also serve as a nice way to gauge progress in handwriting through the years.

In these notebooks, the kids have to rate how well they understand the word, on a scale of 1-4.  It was so hard to teach them the differences in the range of numbers!  Kids would rate it a 1 if they didn't really get it or a 4 even if they didn't get it at all!  I needed a clear way for them to show me their understanding!


I made this pack, complete with a parent letter, grading rubric to staple to papers that go home, exit slips for students to complete after any assignment or lesson, a student sheet that can slip inside a data or vocab notebook, 4 little posters to hang around your room, and one large poster to cut and glue together.  Now my kids know exactly what the number represent, I can write the numbers on their papers and parents know what they mean, and I even have kids show me their number after a whole group lesson!  I'm loving it!

After I shared this product with the K, 1st, and 2nd grade teachers in my building, the K teachers mentioned how they like using smiley faces with their kids.  They felt that the younger kids could connect the faces to a feeling when talking about their own learning.  I went ahead and duplicated my pack with smiley faces, too!  Now everyone is happy!

But of course I couldn't find the right smiley faces, so I whipped some up on my iPad and they are available for free in my Teachers Pay Teachers store!  Go grab yours today!


How do you like to informally assess your kids?

I'm linking up over at Classroom Freebies:

Classroom Freebies Manic Monday
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Congrats to my Versatiles winner, Lorina!!  I'll be sending you an email to make sure you get your prize!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I'm almost at 600 followers!  So exciting!  To celebrate all of you, I would like to share with you my poetry book cover.

I love teaching poems, chants, and songs to my class.  We sing songs about social studies content, chants about science conent, and read poems about reading strategies.  We sing songs before we leave the room, and songs about the days of the week.  We say chants abot the plant life cylce and chants about our home state, Hawaii.  We love it all!

I make my students a poetry book each year.  Each book has about 50 blank white pages in it with a cardstock cover and back.  I use a heavy duty stapler to adhere it, but a comb bind would work, as well.  Kids keep these in their book boxes so they can read them during Read to Self time to build fluency through repeated reading.  I also try to find recordings of the songs and chants or record my own students singing or chanting them to put on out class iPods.  Kids love listening to the songs and chants during reading centers.

I introduce one poem a week by doing call and response for each line.  We then practice singing it altogether.  I copy off the poem for each student so they have it in front of them as we are learning it.  Some need that visual cue.  We then talk about what the poem means.  Did we learn a new concept?  We we learn a new poetic element (rhyme, alliteration, etc), did we practice a skill we already knew?  Then the students sketch and label their pictures of what the poem taught them.  This is a OCDE Project GLAD® (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategy, but it also ties in nicely with Marzano's vocabulary program.

Speaking of OCDE Project GLAD®, I love to use academic poems when I can.  Here is a freebie I made for you to help you get started with poetry books in your classroom.  Have so much fun!


What poems would you put in your poetry book?

Freebie Fridays

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I teach in a school with a very high ELL population, so teaching highly academic vocabulary is a must.  I use many OCDE Project GLAD® and structured language strategies to help all students learn the words.  We use poems, chants, anchor charts, and practice using the language with guided sentence frames.

Another way I enforce that vocabulary is by tying into my action word.  I used to say, "When I say go, you can..." When I started my OCDE Project GLAD® training five years ago, I started using a highly academic vocabulary word from my current teaching unit as the action word.  Now it sounds like, "When I say evaporation, you can..."  A couple years ago, a colleague learned from a workshop about Total Physical Response, TPR.  We incorporated this by saying the action word and having the students repeat us, say a quick definition and do a gesture or body motion to help them remember the word.  This action is always taught to the students at the beginning of the day or week (how ever long you use the same word) so that everyone does the same action.  For example, when I was teaching a weather unit earlier this year, when our word was precipitation, the students repeated me by saying, "Precipitation means rain."  When they said rain, they moved their fingers down in front of them, similar to the Itsy Bitsy Spider fingerplay "Down came the rain." 

I also like to reinforce highly academic vocabulary by changing my cooperative table names to vocabulary words about every 3-4 weeks.  When I taught Kinder my tables were named after the 2-D shapes.  All of my kids knew all 6 of the shapes that were required to learn by the end of the year!  When I looped up to 1st a couple years later, I changed the tables to 3-D shapes to go along with our new standards.  When I moved up to 3rd this year, I was searching Pinterest and found the perfect idea: Pom Poms! I made colorful tissue paper pom poms and hung them above each table.  I then attached a vocabulary word to the bottom of each pom to hang above the table.
See this pin for making pom poms
You can see that each table has a different color pom.  The first table has a blue pom, so their vocabulary word is also mounted on blue construction paper.  I put the word on one side, then the kid-friendly definition of the other and laminated it.  Table two has a green pom, so their word is mounted on green construction paper.  I planned the colors of the tables around Lesson Plan SOS' freebie table signs, since I use those on each table's "math crate" of folders, packets, and such.  

To attach each pom to the ceiling, I put a step ladder on top of each table (any safety professionals out there - stop reading here!) then climbed to the top and screwed a cup hook in the ceiling directly above the center of the table.  I then tied some clear fishing line to the cup hook and looped it around the pipe cleaner I used to attach all the tissue together.  See the link above for how to make the poms.  To attach the word card to the bottom of the pom, I punched a hole in the center of the card, tied some clear fishing line to it, then tied it to a large paper clip.  I then threaded the paper clip through the pipe cleaner inside the bottom of the pom.  Now I only have to kneel on the tables in order to change out the words each month and never have to get on that step ladder until the end of the year when it all has to come down.

What other strategies do you have for teaching vocabulary?  Do you have table/group names, too?

I've linked up with Charity from the Organized Classroom Blog and declared myself a 5 Star Blogger!  head on over and check out all the other amazing bloggers and their unique ideas!
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