The Secret Knowledge of Fourth Graders

As I was reminded in reading all of the June Currently's, not everyone is on summer vacation yet. So for those of you who are not yet enjoying time off, I wanted to share a fun creative writing activity that works well for the end of the year.

One of my favorite books to share with students is The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups by David Wisniewski.

In this highly-entertaining book, Wisniewski takes several "rules" that children often hear -- like "eat your vegetables" -- and explains the real reason that rule exists. For example, we don't eat our vegetables because they make us healthy. The real reason we eat them is to stop them from rising up and taking over the world! Or, we don't brush our hair to help us look neat, we do it to stop the hair from growing back into our heads and crowding out our brains. The book is filled with hilarious examples and colorful illustrations that my students loved.

I read excerpts from this book over the course of a couple days, and several of my students looked at it in their free-time. We then set out to write our own examples for a class book entitled "The Secret Knowledge of Fourth Graders."

Here are some of the "rules" students wrote about:

• Why you need to read "Just Right Books"
• Why we use number 2 pencils on tests
• Why you can only check out 2 books from the library at a time
• Why we take AR tests
• Why it's important not to be tardy
• Why we return library books on time
• Why we have homework
• Why we use pencils instead of pens
• Why we don't bend the pages of a book
• Why we stack chairs at the end of the day
• Why we take standardized tests

The creativity in the "real" reasons why we do these things was fantastic. Here's an example from one of my students:

We wrote our final drafts on our iPads in Pages using the Visual Report template. That helped tremendously with the formatting.

I'm planning to share several of these examples with my students next year, and I will definitely do this activity again. My students enjoyed it so much that several of them were talking about making other "spin-off" books such as The Secret Knowledge of Minecraft Players or The Secret Knowledge of Readers. I'm sorry that I didn't get to see how those turned out as well.

If you've never read The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups, I highly recommend it. It's great for sparking creative writing ideas, and it can provide a fun writing activity in the late stages of the year.

What are some other school rules you can envision your students writing about? I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments!

Free Lesson Planning Resources

In ELA this term, we're studying poetry and figurative language. I have a few resources for this that I've used in the past, but I always spend some time at the start of a new unit exploring what's available online to see if it sparks my interest. There are two free sites that I always start with:

Thinkfinity - This site, sponsored by Verizon, allows you to search several different websites at once by keyword or state standard to find lesson plans or resources rather than going to each site individually.

I really like a lot of these sites individually -- especially readwritethink for reading and writing, and Illuminations for math, and I'm always curious to see what hits I'll pull up from the other sites. I've found some great lessons from this site, and if you're not already using it, I highly recommend it.

My newest favorite site, however, has to be The Teaching Channel. I could spend hours watching the videos of the fantastic teachers there! I like how so much of the site is aligned to Common Core, and they have a lot of supporting resources to accompany the videos.

Here's a great video that I found that's inspiring my poetry unit, for example!


It's a very classroom tech-friendly site, and the content is growing rapidly. I also like how professional the videos are, so I feel like I'm watching high quality documentaries that would justify all of the time I've been checking out the upper elementary classrooms there. Honestly, it's a fantastic resource, and if you haven't visited it yet, I highly encourage you to check it out. No, really...I insist! You won't regret it -- ample fodder for great pins on Pinterest! :)

Of course, I also find lots of inspiration from Pinterest and TpT as well, but I thought I'd share these potentially less well-known resources.

What resources are your "must visit" sites when you start a new unit? I'd love to hear about your finds in the comments!

Ordering Adjectives and Other Obscurities

This is the first year that we are implementing Common Core at my school, and one of the first surprises to me was the specificity of the list of language standards. Take this one for example:

4L1d. Order adjectives within sentences according to conventional patterns (e.g., a small red bag rather than a red small bag).

Okay, fair enough. I know that we don't say red small bag, but I couldn't articulate why. And if I couldn't articulate that, it seemed like I would have a hard time teaching it. Hence began one of many research projects for this year.

As it turns out, there are actual rules for ordering adjectives! Whenever you have a list of adjectives, according to most sources, they should be put in the following order:

• Number - e.g., many, few, seventeen
• Opinion - e.g., beautiful, silly, annoying
• Size - e.g., big, small, gargantuan
• Age - e.g., old, young
• Shape - this one is tricky! It can be shape like "round" or shape like a condition - e.g., dusty
• Color - e.g., red, blue, yellow
• Origin - think countries, directions, religions, e.g., Canadian, northern, Catholic
• Material - e.g., plastic, wooden
• Purpose - e.g., sleeping as in a sleeping bag

The wheels started turning with this new knowledge, and slowly the lesson plans came together for this topic.

For the first day, I made a PowerPoint about the order of adjectives and my students made a foldable to record their thinking. 

On day two, we looked at some examples that I pulled from the books they were reading in their book clubs, and I gave them the task at looking for more sentences that used multiple adjectives together. They recorded their sentences, and we shared some of the examples as a class.

Days 3 and 4 involved some word sorts. I made some cards with adjectives on them, and they sorted them by what type of adjective they were. Then they put some together to make sentences. 

On Friday (day 5), we took a short assessment that had students identify the correct order of adjectives in some multiple choice questions, and then write their own sentences.

Overall, I was happy with how the unit turned out, and we all learned a lot about adjectives that we hadn't known before. By getting the students to play with adjectives more, I also noticed them using more interesting word choices in their writing. Win-win.

I've put together all of the resources that I used (and then some) into a unit over at Teachers Pay Teachers. It's one of many units I've been working on to deal with some of the more obscure standards introduced by Common Core, and I hope you'll check it out.

It will be on sale Monday and Tuesday for 28% off with the TpT Cyber Monday sale if you use the code CMT12. 

What are some of the more interesting/challenging standards you've encountered with the Common Core? I'd love to hear about it in the comments section!

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!

Bananas about Scientific Writing

One of the things that's really exciting to me about Common Core this year is how well it integrates with content teaching for Science and Social Studies. Now that I'm a working mom, I really appreciate anything that allows me to hit multiple subjects and standards at once, and last term, I found myself pushing a lot of informational writing into science.

During our first week of school, I was covering science process standards before launching into our first unit on ecosystems. One of the first activities that we did involved writing about bananas.

In the few days prior to this lesson, we spent some time looking at and talking about science notebooks and the importance of recording our thinking. We took a look at some examples of real science notebooks kept by actual scientists (Note: as I write this blog, the sciencenotebooks.org website appears to be down. I really hope this is a temporary thing because it was a tremendous resource!). For this day's lesson, I asked my students to get out their inquiry notebooks, and I gave each student a banana. They were instructed not to eat their banana, but instead, they were to observe and describe their banana in their notebook.

During this first wave of writing (3-5 minutes), students gave very similar descriptions such as "long, yellow, brown spot," etc. 

We shared descriptions at our tables, and then I asked the class how many students felt like they could identify their banana based on their description if I collected all the bananas from the tables and mixed them up. Only a couple of hands went up. We then talked about what kinds of information and details would be helpful to do that and started a list.

What really came out of this discussion was the idea that we needed to focus on unique characteristics. Everyone had a general idea what a banana looks like, but details such as having a brown spot in the shape of a heart approximately 2 inches from the end of the banana sure went a long way in helping us identify the banana in comparison to "long and yellow with brown spots."

I then gave them time to revise their descriptions. Some students traced their banana in their notebooks and then added details and markings from their banana.

Other students asked to get out tape measures to be even more precise in their details and descriptions.

At the end of this revising time, I had students mix up their bananas between two tables and trade notebooks with another student to see if the other person could identify the correct banana based on the description. It was a great check to see if the details were descriptive enough so that others beyond the writer would understand them. If the correct banana wasn't identified, the students made suggestions for additional details that could be helpful.

What I loved about this activity was how it really got us thinking about interesting details. It's the kind of anchor lesson that we can refer to in all types of writing when we talk about spicing up our writing and good word choices. The bananas were inexpensive, and of course, we ate them at the end of the lesson. 

Do you use science or inquiry notebooks in your classroom? What are some strategies you use to help your students write in science? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section!