Teacher Appreciation Day Sale

Just a quick plug that I will be participating in the sale May 7th and 8th on Teachers Pay Teachers. 

You will find EVERY item in my store for 28% off! That means that every item in my store is under $3.00. Yahoo! Hope you feel appreciated :) 

It's a great time to stock up on some new math stations....

Or morning work packets...

Or every a content pack to help out with upcoming science testing (or maybe that's just in NYS?)

Hope you can find something that will help to make planning these last few weeks a bit easier! 

Workshop Wednesday- The Evolution of Guided Reading!

Linking up again this week for Workshop Wednesdays with Ideas with Jivey. This week the topic is guided reading groups.

Right now I am actually pretty happy with my reading groups BUT this is the 3rd or so iteration of reading schedules this year! If you want to skip ahead to the system we are using now just scroll down and read the part in bold. 

It's not that I'm super fickle (although I may be) and it's not that the other versions of reading groups didn't work but needs change and I change with them! If you want to read about the first version of reading groups this year you can go back and read this post. It was based on the daily 5 and allowed me to have 2 whole group mini-lesson sessions (one for reading and one for writing) and a combination of 4 leveled groups and 1 strategy group daily.



Everything was all well and good until about a month later when I got more support in the form of push in from our speech teacher and another reading instructor. I was thrilled to have so much additional support for my kiddos but their schedules both revolved around 30 minute groups and so I needed to revamp the WHOLE schedule.

Unfortunately,

This meant I only had time for 3 groups... which was fine... because I had found that I had 3 distinct types of readers in my room. Kids who needed phonemic awareness instruction and intense basic phonics work, kids who could read all of the words in the books at their levels but struggled with their comprehension and lastly kids who were comprehending but needed support in decoding. And so, we moved to a schedule were these three groups rotated and I juggled up to 3 different books per group and kids were learning and we were all happy.

Fast forward a few months....

The kids who were struggling with comprehension started to really come along in their skills... and my highest two girls who were in two different groups before (one needed decoding and one needed comp) were really ready to fly and work on some harder material. Soooo I needed to go back to a 4 group system but didn't have the time. I sliced and diced the day and mixed around when we were working and lo and behold we ended up with the system that we are working with today.

So now, we have 4 30 minute sessions. I meet will all 4 of my leveled groups daily. Each group has 2 students in it. Students also spend 30 minutes with the speech teacher working on comprehension or vocabulary strategies or the additional reading instructor daily. My kids spend 30 minutes with my TA on sustained silent reading. We tried to do this whole group and they could reach about 15 minutes. With the TA most of them are able to sustain a full 30. Lastly, students spend 30 minutes on the computer either listening to books on Bookflix or AOL Bedtime stories, going to directed websites to practice phonics or other reading skills, or researching a topic of their choice or an animal on PebbleGo. 

We also have 30 minutes of intervention at the end of the day where kids do additional short passage and multiple choice/short response, sight words or phonics intervention, or other reading or math intervention activities.

Throughout all of these different versions of reading groups this year, I have used the same tracking sheet to track student reading behaviors and goals. In fact, I have used this for the past few years. If you want to read more about my tracking system you can read this post.
 

Now head over to Ideas by Jivey and read all about how others structure guided reading!

Tried It Tuesday - Multiplying Fractions

I'm linking up for another week with the Tuesday Tried It with Fourth Grade Flipper! This week it was a lesson plan idea for using manipulatives to connect what students already know about whole number multiplication with fraction multiplication.

My math lessons have reached a peak for the year. Up until about a month ago I had students in skill based groups. I teach 3rd through 5th grade in my class of 8 kiddies but as of the beginning of the year student skill sets ranged from kindergarten to 4th grade ability. I had 3rd, 4th and 5th graders on Kindergarten and 1st grade standards, and combinations of other students working on 2nd through 4th grade work. It was a mad dash to fill in the gaps and build understanding of numbers, place value and operations. With such a range of abilities across the grade levels I still knew that come April the state tests would assess each of my students on their grade level material.

 At this point in the school year my groups have flexed and bent to a point where students are all working (successfully!!) in their grade level groups doing grade level work. 3rd graders are working on 3rd grade standards, 4th graders are multiplying two digit numbers by 2 digit numbers and my 5th graders are knee deep in adding, subtracting and multiplying fractions with different denominators. It's been a long and bumpy ride but I'm so proud of the growth they have made this year!

 It's almost luxurious at this point teaching the "right" work to the "right" grade level. Soooo with that LONG introduction, I leave you with a lesson I tried on multiplying fractions by whole numbers that worked really well with my 5th grade kiddos!

 We started with a review of whole number multiplication and what multiplication really means. Equal groups! It was sooooo easy peasy and they laughed and laughed at how ridiculous I was being doing itty bitty multiplication problems.

I wrote out a related problem that used a fraction instead of a whole number. I asked the girls to draw the groups and things were going swimmingly when one of the girls exclaimed "Uh, how are we going to put a HALF of a tile into a group???" So I did the unthinkable. I got out my scissors and cut the little foam manipulative in half. They couldn't believe it. DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY. This lesson was getting really good :)  It's the little things. So then, we added up the unit fractions they were able to solve the problem and they were pretty proud of themselves. 

 So we did it again. With even littler pieces. And at this point it was a manipulative massacre. We sliced and diced those fourths. And we solved the problem. And now they were starting to feel pretty confident. So I threw them a curve ball. What if we multiply a whole number by TWO fourths!?!!?!

What if we don't have a unit fraction?! But they were old pros and they drew their groups and put two little pieces in each group and added them up and even talked about how to simplify the fractions. But then it happened. One of my girls noticed "Hey, I don't have to count all of those little pieces, you just have to multiply the number by the numerator!  "
Hall-e-freaking-luia.

They got it.

And so we did more problems that I didn't take pictures of and solved them on paper and then modeled them on the board... you know, just to make sure. And then it was time for computer lab and they skipped off happily to line up.

 Every once in a while don't you do a lesson that just clicks with the kids and you WISH that this would be the moment of a spontaneous walk through or unannounced observation? I was hoping and wishing and hoping and wishing, but it didn't happen. But my kids learned and I'm a happy camper so I guess it's a happy ending after all!