How to Cope with Too Many Snow Days

Ice and Snow, Go Away!

This has been the worst winter since I moved to Atlanta eight years ago. We have six-week terms, and during these last six weeks, we lost two days to extremely cold temperatures (by Southern standards), three additional days because of the "snowpocalypse" that buried Atlanta, and now I'm home again due to Winter Storm "Pax" that will likely shut us down the rest of the week. That's nearly one-third of our term lost!

Adding to my dilemma, our calendar builds in week-long breaks at the end of each six week term. So we won't be back in school next week either. It's a serious wrinkle in my plans.

I talked to my fourth graders about this yesterday, and we worked out a plan so they could continue to work from home during these inclement weather days. It's a really rainy, dreary day anyway (we're at the "wintry mix" stage of the storm), so it's not like they'd be outside sledding today. I also suspect that many parents are welcoming the activities at this stage of the winter!

Here are my suggestions for telecommuting with your class during winter weather.

Building a Virtual Classroom

1. Choose a mix of activities that can be shared with parents. I knew early last night that we'd be off today, so I found some activities that aligned with what we're studying right now. While many of the activities require computer access, I purposefully included some that do not. For example, we're building weather instruments out of household items, writing stories, continuing our reading, etc. But we're also using some online resources.

2. Take advantage of online instructional videos. Two of my favorite free resources are LearnZillion and Khan Academy. I selected videos that align with the math and ELA content we're working on now.

3. Stay accessible through your Learning Management System. We use Edmodo in our class, and it's a great tool for turning in assignments and having class discussions. I'm checking in throughout the day to answer students' questions and participate in the discussion questions I set up there earlier.

4. Take advantage of the resources students have at home. I teach in a 1:1 iPad classroom, so we're constantly on iPads. There are lots of flash-based games that we can't run on our iPads, however. I'm fortunate that all of my students have computers at home, so I'm incorporating more of those activities for students to complete. I'm also choosing some really fun and engaging simulation games that we just don't ever get to in class. Two examples:

Law Craft - For the record, all of the games at iCivics.org are worth checking out. In this particular one, students work to craft a law and take it through the legislative process. They have to build support by making concessions, work out the details through committees, and ultimately get the president to sign it. It teaches a lot about how a bill becomes a law.

Edheads Weather - This aligns with the weather forecasting aspect of our weather unit. Students will work through different weather maps to report the weather and predict future weather events. It's another great interactive game. I highly recommend the activities at the Edheads website. The only downside is that there are lots of ads, and sometimes pop-ups.

5. Be flexible - I can't really help students troubleshoot tech issues on their home computers, and I can't make them do the activities at home. I'm not making any of the activities mandatory, but they're still available. I'm hoping that with the good mix of opportunities, parents and students will take advantage of the resources I'm offering. But I won't punish a student who doesn't. If even a few kids do the activities, it's better than writing off the weather days as a complete loss.

Preparation is Key
It would be impossible to implement this plan with fourth graders if a lot of our technology norms and routines hadn't already been established. My students are familiar with my class website, Edmodo, and my expectations. Integrating technology in the classroom makes the transition to our virtual classroom seamless.

How do you handle inclement weather days with your class? Do you have any plans resources to keep students engaged while they're away from the classroom? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments!

On an unrelated note, I have been MIA from the blogging world since October. As I've mentioned before, I've started working on a PhD in addition to teaching full-time and managing my toddler, so I've been insanely busy! I have an amazing student teacher this semester, however, so I'm starting to delegate more. I'm hopeful that will free up a little more time and energy so I can get back to blogging and reading all the stuff I've missed. Perhaps these weather days will also assist with that!

Now on Instagram!

I've joined in the Instagram love! You can now find me at Eberopolis on Instagram.



I started using it on Wednesday, so I'm still new, but I'm making it a goal to post something (usually) classroom-related every day. Be sure to follow me so I can find all of my teacher-friends who are already there!

Have a great weekend!

Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo?

I plan to encourage my students to participate in NaNoWriMo again this year. For those of you who aren't familiar, November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. It's the month where tell your inner-editor to hush so you can just let the ideas flow on to the page. It's about getting something done without worrying how perfect it is, because you can always go back and revise in December.

Last year, as October drew to a close, I introduced NaNoWriMo to my class. I explained the premise, and gave them the option of taking on the challenge. We talked about word count goals and commitment to writing outside of the classroom. Then the fun started. Student after student signed up, each cheering each other on as they dedicated themselves to writing a book. In the end, I think all but two students decided to participate. We had weekly lunch meetings where students could eat and share their writing with friends, and although not all students met their goals, they definitely started to find their voices as authors.

The Young Writers Program for NaNoWriMo has some great teaching materials to get your students psyched for NaNoWriMo and to teach them about narrative writing in general. You can check out their website at http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/. In addition, there's still time to order a NaNoWriMo classroom kit which comes with a student goal setting poster, NaNoWriMo stickers to track progress toward a goal, and buttons for those students who participate or finish. The classroom kit is free (and awesome), but they request a $10 donation for the materials -- a small price to pay to get your students excited about writing.

In honor of NaNoWriMo, I'll be hosting a month-long link-up that will start on November 1 and run the duration of NaNoWriMo. Whether your class officially participates in NaNoWriMo or not, I hope you'll join me in sharing the great writing work that's happening in your class. Grab the button, spread the word, and meet me back here on November 1st for a writing extravaganza!

In the meantime, check out the Educators' section of the Young Writers Project. I'm sure you'll find plenty to get you (and your students) excited for a month full of creative writing!

Who's in?

The Best Text for Teaching How to Write and Revise Leads

My fourth graders hate revision. They're often offended by the mere suggestion that they hadn't nailed the perfect lead to their stories in their first draft.

I'm used to this. I see it every year in writer's workshop, especially at the beginning of the year when we're writing in a genre for the first time.

And every time I see this, I become more determined to break them of this thinking.

Today, we were working on the Common Core State Standard W.4.3a - Orient the reader by establishing a situation and introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally.

My favorite story to use for this is standard -- especially with fourth graders -- is The Teacher's Funeral by Richard Peck.

This book, set in a small Indiana town with a one-room schoolhouse, has the best opening line of a children's book ever.

If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it. 

Richard Peck keeps it going from there, building an incredible introduction. You can read the entire first chapter here.

Today, I started our writing lesson by reading this chapter to them. I have the Kindle edition of the book, so when I read it, I can project it on our ActivBoard so the students can follow along as I read. They laughed throughout the intro and were immediately hooked, begging me to choose this as our next chapter book read-aloud. Score one for the objective of "hooking your readers!"

I then asked them how many of them thought that introduction was the one that was in the first draft of his book.

One or two hands went up.

Richard Peck shared in an article called "In the Beginning" (Horn Book Magazine, September 2006, pp. 505-508) that it normally takes him 24 drafts of his lead before he's happy with it. TWENTY-FOUR!

And here I'm asking my students to take a second pass at their writing.

I shared that little nugget with my students before we reread the first chapter. As we read if for a second time, we focused on the characteristics of his writing that made it such a great lead.

Here's what my students noticed, compiled into an anchor chart:

Once we finished the chart, I had them go back to a piece of writing they've been working on and try to write a different introduction. Some students tried changing the point of view, others jumped into the action or started with dialogue. Whatever the strategy, all of them managed to produce a new version of their introduction, and all were at least a little better than what they'd started with.

We'll get this revising thing down eventually...

What are some of your favorite books to use to teach students how to hook their readers? I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

Authors Are People, Too!

Oh, bloggy friends, I have missed you! This year is kicking my behind! I had high hopes that I'd still be blogging with great regularity this year, but alas...between my 28 awesome fourth graders, the start of my PhD, and my incredible two-year-old daughter, time is an oh-so-precious commodity. By the time my little one makes it to bed at night, I. am. wiped. out. And then I usually have textbooks to read and papers to write. But not today.

Today, I wanted to share with you the very awesome author visit we had at my school.

Granted, it's old news by now. It happened during the Decatur Book Festival on Labor Day weekend, which, by the way, is one of the coolest things you can do in the Atlanta area if you're ever here for Labor Day. But my experience was cool enough that I still wanted to share...four weeks later...

Every year as part of the book festival, 1 or 2 children's authors come and talk at our school. This year, the fourth graders got to listen to Chris Grabenstein. If you're not familiar with him, you should seriously run, not walk, but run to get his new book, Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library.

This book is the story of Kyle Keeley, an avid game-player who wins a contest to spend the night in the new library built by master game-maker Luigi Lemoncello. As Kyle explores the library, however, he realizes that winning the contest was just the beginning, and a whole new game with high stakes, twists, and turns is starting. It reminds me a little of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and Roald Dahl is just one of many authors referenced in the book. It's very clever, fast-paced, and entertaining. I started it as a read-aloud when we found out that Mr. Grabenstein was coming, and we seriously couldn't put it down. It was one of those books where I've had multiple students go out and buy it on their own because they couldn't handle waiting for us to read it in class. It's way up there on my recommendation list.

Mr. Grabenstein definitely inspired the students as writers. He shared a lot about his writing process, but his overall message was to just let it flow without editing yourself. To illustrate that, he modeled writing a story for the students. Prior to starting, he gathered 5-6 random words that students had written on sticky notes. He stuck those in his back pocket. Then, he projected a crazy picture.

He explained the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist, and he encouraged students to "Ask yourself, 'what if...?'" He said that there are always a few questions you need to think about when planning a story.

• Who is this guy?
• What does he want?
• Where is he?
• Who wants to stop him?
• Why?

He then took student suggestions to answer those questions and plan his story.

Next, he had students come up with a starting sentence: "My face hurts," and an ending sentence: "He ate radioactive iridium isotopes" so we would know when his story was starting and ending. And then he just started telling the story. It was hilarious! At various points throughout the story, he would pretend to be stuck and pull a word out of his back pocket, and no matter what it was, he just rolled with it. He has a background in improv comedy, so I suspect that helps. Still, it really hit home the message that you shouldn't censor yourself while you're drafting -- you can always go back and change things later if you need to. When you're drafting, you should just let it flow to wherever creative place you're led. 

 We were pretty inspired by his presentation, and we went back to the classroom to a) write, and b) read more of his book. The kids were so excited! We were totally unprepared, however, when he came into our classroom about an hour later. (So unprepared, in fact, that some of my students were still working on their vocabulary tests on Spelling City!) 

Usually when authors have come to our school, they've given their presentations, signed a few books, and then split. Mr. Grabenstein went above and beyond, happy to spend his day engaging with the kids and taking an interest in what they were doing. They barraged him with questions, and he answered openly and honestly, encouraging the kids the whole time. Needless to say, Mr. Grabenstein has secured quite a fan base in Eberopolis.

In the weeks since his visit, we've had countless conversations in writing about some of the little tidbits Mr. Grabenstein shared with us, but more than anything, I loved that my students got a chance to see that authors are real people, too. They have good ideas and bad, writer's block and inner editors just like the rest of us. But they power through those hurdles, and we get some fantastic books as a result.

Thank you for visiting us, Mr. Grabenstein. It was definitely a highlight in our year.

Back to School - Math Edition

It might be time to think about renaming my blog, because I'm really excited about teaching math this year! It all started when I read the book Number Talks over the summer.

I've always understood the importance of mental math and computation strategies, but I'd never really understood how to teach it. It felt like something kids either had or they didn't. This year, however, I decided that we'd start doing number talks from day #1, and I'm already blown away by how my students are developing as mathematical thinkers. They're able to solve complicated addition problems in their heads -- no paper allowed -- and they're articulating their strategies well. I've been introducing a new strategy every 2-3 days, and it's been awesome. We'll be moving on to subtraction strategies in a few days, and I have high expectations for that to.

To help students with the mental math strategies, I made a set of posters that describe each strategy with an example of how it works. There are 20 posters in all -- one for each strategy described in the book.

The complete set is available in my TpT store, and they'll be on sale for 28% off this weekend as part of the Teachers Pay Teachers back to school sale if you use the code BTS13.

As I've been working on order of operations and number sense with my fourth graders, I also introduced the four fours problem. The premise of the problem is this:

Using some arithmetic combination of four 4's, can you write an equation for each of the numbers from 1-100? Here are the rules:

• You may use any combination of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and/or division
• You may combine numbers, e.g., use 2 of the fours to make the number 44
• You may insert decimal points
• You may use a four as an exponent
• You may use square roots
• You may use factorials, e.g., 4! is equivalent to 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24
• You may use overbars to make a decimal repeat
• You may NOT use any digit other than a four
• You MUST use all four 4's in each solution

Before I go on, let me give two caveats. 1) I didn't expect all of my students to be able to handle all of these rules. Square roots, exponents, and factorials are WAY above my fourth graders heads generally, but I did have a handful that could handle it. And there are plenty of solutions to be found that don't require those operations. 2) This problem freaked out the parents more than it scared the kids, I think. I had a few panicked parents that I had to talk down while we were working on this, but in the end, it was well worth it. My students were so excited about math and problem solving as we worked through this problem. It was homework each night to try to find a few more solutions, and then we'd add to a chart during math class. Look at all that my students accomplished after just two days!

We've filled in a bunch more solutions since then, but of course I left my camera at school this weekend...

Finally, in honor of the big back to school sale on TpT, I've bundled four of my favorite math resources into a back to school math pack for this weekend only. 

Sold separately, this is $17 worth of products that I'm selling this weekend for $10, but after Monday, the bundle will no longer be available in my store. So if you've had any of these on your wish list...

Hope everyone had a great week! I'm still learning how to juggle grad school with teaching, but I'm hopeful that I'll still be posting at least once a week.

Off to start catching up on blog reading and filling my cart for the TpT sale! Have a great weekend!

Classroom Tour 2013

Whew! It has been a crazy week and a half. I have completed 7 school days of my year already! SEVEN! Now that things have settled into a more normal-ish back to school routine, I'm finally sitting down at my computer to share some of the gazillions of pictures I've been taking lately and share more about my first week-plus of the school year.

First, I reorganized my classroom library using the Ready 2 Number Customizable Library Labels from Ladybug's Teacher Files. I adore all of Kristen's work (as you'll see in later parts of the classroom tour!), and I was so excited to reorganize my classroom library this year.

I decided to use the Booksource Classroom Organizer tool to manage my classroom library this year, so this was really quite the overhaul -- scanning all of my books, sorting them, and labeling them. And like so many of my projects, what I thought would take me 1-2 days of work this summer ended up being closer to 5, so that really ate up a sizable chunk of my pre-planning. But it's so worth it. My books are now impeccably organized.

 And when I ran out of shelf space, I spilled some of my larger nonfiction books into drawers.

Those used to be drawers for students to store their many notebooks and folders. One of the benefits of going to a mostly paperless classroom is that I can reclaim those for other things.

Here's a view of the library as a whole, with my "Welcome to Eberopolis" pennant banner and iPad cart in the middle.

In addition to reorganizing my classroom library, I created a better small group space for my classroom this year, courtesy of Ikea.

 Last year, I used one of my 6 student tables for small groups, but with the number of students I have, I didn't feel right about packing them into 5 tables and leaving open a table that we'd only use some of the time. I also had a shortage of chairs, and I hated having to wait while students hauled over chairs from their tables to my small group space.

This year, I bought 2 small white tables from Ikea (each about $20) and 6 teal stools (about $5 each). I already had the blue swivel chair for me, but that was only $15 at Ikea. So in the end, this is a great small group space for less than $100. Well worth it to me.

I'm trying to do Daily 5 and CAFE this year, and I came across the very cute CAFE letters from Terri over at the Creative Apple.  (I think she's updated them since then, but I'm not quite ready to return to my printer and laminator just yet!) I also finally hung up my cursive letters from Ladybug's Teacher Files.

On the other side of the wall I have my class job chart, an explanation of my class economy, and my Standards for Mathematical Practice posters. I also made something new that I'm trying out this year for exit tickets, but I'll share more about that in a future post. 

Here's our class meeting/carpet space.

I have some new buckets for holding clipboards at the front of the room, and I brought in a new chair for read alouds. I like that the chair easily folds and stores away so that we can move it out of the way when we don't need it.

The view of my desk is perhaps the least inspiring section of the room, although I'm loving the new paper lantern lights that I've put in my room. They really affect the ambiance, especially when it's early in the morning and we're all settling in.

 And then in front of my desk are all of my students' book bins, numbered 1-27 (so far!). That's where students store the few notebooks, books, and papers they have in my classroom. They're also keeping their headphones in there for now.

Finally, I acquired a few Ikea desks from a friend who was leaving our school at the end of last year. They run about $20 each, and they're a total pain to put together, which is why he left them with me rather than disassemble them for his move. They're awesome because they fit under the lip of the table and act as an extension for the 3 tables of 5 students, and they also give a little extra space to some of my students who need it. They're getting well used this year.

So, that's my classroom tour for this year! It's the happiest the space has ever felt to me, and I really need that happy space -- especially given how many hours I spend there each week. It feels a bit smaller now that I'm packing 27 bodies in there, but bit by bit, it's getting very organized.

I hope that everyone is having a great transition back to school -- or is enjoying those last few weeks of summer before heading back! I start classes for my doctoral program on Monday, so I don't know how often I'll get to blog this year, but I promise not to drop off the face of the blogosphere anytime soon.

Can't wait to see everyone else's classrooms!