Weekend Reading - October 27, 2012

Here are some of my favorite teacher blog posts that I read this week:

• Donna posted a great way to organize a classroom parking lot/answer board over at Math Coach's Corner. When I make a dent on my overwhelming to do list, I will absolutely be making one of these.
• One of my favorite teacher authors, Emily Kissner, shared an amazing story synthesis activity on her blog In My Classroom: The Forest and the Trees. I'm disappointed that we're done focusing on literary texts in my class until January because I want to try this activity ASAP!
• Stephanie at Third Grade Thoughts had a great anchor chart for narrative writing. I teach narratives in a very similar way with Beginning, Middle, and End and the rollercoaster analogy, but I haven't done nearly as well putting it together in an anchor chart. Now I have some inspiration!

While I wish I had some grandiose and fun plans for this beautiful fall weekend, I will be sitting home at my desk grading papers, writing report cards, and preparing for next term's units. We have 6 six-week terms, and therefore six grading periods throughout the year. Most of the time, we have a week long break between each term (which I LOVE...), but this term, we don't have a break until Thanksgiving. We did all of our end of term assessments last week, and I now have until Halloween to grade them all and write report cards for my 25 darlings, as well as prepare for entirely new units in all of the subject areas. To say that I'm a little overwhelmed by the prospect would be an understatement. 

How do grading periods and report cards work where you're at? How much time do you typically have between the end of the term and the completion of report cards? I'd love to hear about it in the comments section!

Weekend Reading - June 23, 2012

From the blogosphere...

I was about a month behind on my blog reading. It seems that the reading and writing go hand-in-hand for me, but I'm getting back in the groove of things. Here are some of my favorites from this week...

• Christi at Ms. Fultz's Corner had some great tips for dealing with classroom paper clutter. I'll definitely be using her "rainbow" idea when I go back to school.
• Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics shared her experiences with KidBlog -- one of my favorite tools for writing with students. 
• I'm completely jealous of the book sales available at Nancy's public library. She gives several other great tips for stocking the classroom library over at Teaching My Friends. 

From the bookshelves...

I'm giving a lot of thought to how I'm going to be teaching writing next year with the Common Core, and I'm pulling this book off my bookshelf.

I read it a long time ago, and it's time to revisit it. Hopefully it will give me some new ideas and inspiration to share next week. I'll also be attending a three-day conference about The Written Curriculum in International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme. Who knows what creativity that will inspire?! :)

Have a great weekend!

Weekend Reading 4-21-12

Ok, I'm going to be honest. I wasn't reading as much as I wanted to be this week. I had a little craziness at work and family staying with me from out of state, so my reading list is a little bit sparse. I must say, however, that I have lots that I plan to be reading in the days ahead given the long list of fabulous bloggers participating in the Charity Preston's Five-Star Blog Challenge over at the Organized Classroom Blog. I'm participating as well because prior to this post, all of my posts have included original content. And given how little I've been able to read so far this week, this post may ultimately be original content as well. :)  If you're a teacher blogger and you haven't already investigated the Five-Star Blog Challenge, then you should definitely do so.

Books!

While I haven't been reading blogs as much as I wanted to this week, I've been chugging through a couple of books. I'm still reading How to Assess Higher Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom, and I still think that it's got a lot of fantastic ideas, but I'm rarely a one-book-till-I'm-done kind of gal. There are just so many other amazing books out there that catch my attention, and then I find myself halfway through five different books until I force myself to finish.

The latest book to catch my eye is Raising the Standards through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach by Sarah Collinge.

It was recommended to me by @annottmar on Twitter, and I love it. It's a new book, so it takes the Common Core standards into account, and it's written in such a teacher-friendly way. The C.I.A. approach stands for C - Collect Critical Information, I - Interpret the Text, and A - Apply the Text to Other Areas of Life. I'm only 38 pages into it so far, but I've really enjoyed everything that I've read. The first chapter was about implementing research-based classroom routines such as instructional read-alouds and building authentic practices. It had very practical suggestions on how to start these in the classroom, and the author included lots of pictures, charts, and directions about what materials to use for each step. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot as I get my classroom organized next year. 

And look what Amazon delivered to me yesterday...

A Lucy Calkins book about Common Core!!! I'm so excited to start reading this. I'm going to start training some of my colleagues on the ELA standards in a couple of weeks, so I will likely be a Common Core junkie for a while. 

I also picked up this book:

One of my colleagues recommended it to me as I was whining about how much my students are struggling with mechanics this year. I might give some of the ideas in this book a test run in these last few weeks of school.

Have you found any books lately that have inspired you? Please share in the comments section!

Happy reading!

Weekend Reading

Every Saturday, I'll be sharing my favorite reads from the previous week so you can meet some other fabulous bloggers that you may have missed or find some new teaching resources.

From the Blogosphere

• On Sunday, 5th grade teacher Nancy over at Teaching My Friends posted some fabulous suggestions for how to use all of the plastic Easter eggs that are undoubtedly on clearance these days.
• I've been following Emily Kissner's blog for quite some time, and she's been blogging about teaching inference this week on her blog In My Classroom: The Forest and the Trees. She's the author of two upper elementary resources that I love: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling and The Forest AND the Trees. 
• I loved hearing about this collaborative writing initiative using Google Docs over at Free Technology for Teachers
• Misty over at Think, Wonder, & Teach has been having guest bloggers all week. It's been a great way to discover some new blogs!
• Stephanie at Teaching in Room 6 shared a fantastic lesson that used a Revolutionary War-themed snowball fight to teach about independent and dependent clauses.
• Sandi, the media technology specialist at my school, posted a great collection of resources about teaching students to check the validity of online sources over at her blog, Teacher Technotopia. 

Off the Bookshelf

I'm preparing to redeliver a workshop about the Common Core English Language Arts standards to the teachers at my school, so much of my reading is related to that. One of the big topics we'll be talking about is assessment of the new standards, so I'm reading the How to Assess Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom book by Susan M. Brookhart. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I really like it so far. It's an easy read, but it has lots of practical ideas and suggestions for planning for and assessing each level of Bloom's Taxonomy. I can tell that this will be a book that I revisit several times even after I finish reading it.

What have you been reading or writing this week? Feel free to share links to your own blogs or those of others in the comment section below as I'm always looking to find new blogs to read throughout the week!


Have a great weekend!