NaNoWriMo

Did you know that November is National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo)? During this month, crazed writers all over the world band together and commit to moving their stories from their noggins to the page. It's 30 days of saying sayonara to your inner editor and focusing on quantity over quality. The goal is to just finish that first draft, and let the editing happen in December. For those who are inhibited by their inner critics, it can be a fun and liberating experience to meet daily word count goals and just be creative with the writing. There are tons of online communities to support the experience, and many writing groups meet face-to-face to cheer each other on. I've participated in NaNoWriMo twice, and while I lack any published novels to show for it, it was a fantastic experience that really helped me grow as a fiction writer.

What does this have to do with teaching? Well, let me tell you. Every year, the Office of Letters and Light -- the lovely group that came up with NaNoWriMo -- sponsors a Young Writers Program to encourage kids to write. They've developed a whole curriculum to help students plan their novels, set writing goals, and overcome writer's block. They'll send out inspirational emails from published authors throughout the month of November (and these are authors your kids will have heard of. I seem to remember getting emails from Jerry Spinelli last year) to keep the kids chugging through their novels. They also have a free kit that you can order with goal tracking posters and cool pins for the kids who participate. You can access all of that information through the Young Writers Program website.

In the past, I have been blown away by what my kids have accomplished during NaNoWriMo -- not so much in terms of the quality of their writing as much as their confidence and enthusiasm as writers. I've had many kids walk away from the process thinking they could be "real authors" when they grow up because of all of the writing they were able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. Parents have been overwhelmingly supportive of it as well. I'm super excited to try it again this year because I think I have many students on the verge of finding their love for writing, and this may be just the right thing to make it happen.

I'll be sharing weekly updates here throughout November, but I wanted to get the information out about NaNoWriMo in case anyone else wants to get in on the fun. There's still time to sign up and prepare before November starts, so you can kick off NaNoWriMo with everyone else in the country on November 1st.

Have you ever participated in NaNoWriMo or are you interested in participating this year? I'd love to hear your thoughts or questions in the comments section!

Happy writing!

Tech Tuesday: Show Me

Of all of the iPad apps that I could not live without, Show Me would live high up on the list. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it is basically a whiteboard app that allows you to record the screen with accompanying audio. Ever seen the Khan Academy videos? Similar concept.

I'm working on my K-5 math endorsement this year, and one of my assignments is to create a presentation about the Chinese number system. Here's a simple video I made using Show Me to demonstrate computations with Chinese numbers (warning to those who can actually speak/write Chinese -- my calligraphy with the Chinese numbers is not very good!):


The app is very user friendly, although it does require a sign in to be able to save your videos. Once videos are saved, they can be deleted (unlike ScreenChomp -- my former go-to app), and there's a download feature in beta so you can download videos and embed them in things like Prezis. You can also adjust the sharing settings of videos to keep some private should you so desire.

In my classroom, we use this app to make math movies to explain different math concepts. I'm outsourcing video creation to my students this year, and I plan to post some of their videos on my class website as homework help for future years. It's also a great way to assess student understanding because I can really learn a lot by what they're able to explain or not explain, but that's a different post...

Do you use Show Me or similar apps in your classroom? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Managing Online Resources with Symbaloo

This topic has been on my "need to write about..." list for a while now, and this week, I'm all about crossing things off of my to-do lists!

Have you ever used Symbaloo? If not, you're missing out. I know I blogged about this in April, but it truly is one of my favorite sites for differentiating online tasks for my students.

Symbaloo is functionally a bookmarking site, but it organizes the bookmarks visually in a very user-friendly/kid-friendly way. Websites are saved as "tiles" and put into "webmixes" organized by topic or purpose. They can be kept private or shared and searched. For example, I'm looking for resources to help with our upcoming unit on the Revolutionary War, and I found this webmix through a search:

The tiles look like icons for apps, and the webmix designer can edit them to change or upload pictures, give titles, change colors, etc. The tiles can also be dragged and dropped and rearranged to help with organization. I always like having sites already bookmarked for students so that we don't have to waste time typing in web addresses (and subsequently figuring out where the spelling went wrong...), and I like that this site lets me bookmark sites with visual cues in addition to the text.

Pretty cool, right?

But let me tell you how I really use this site.

At the beginning of the year, I create a tile for each of my students with their name and a generic subject-specific icon on it. For example, for reading, my webmix looks like this:

Then, I go through and edit the links associated with each person to differentiate instruction. For example, if I want Josh to read something from one website and Zack to read a text from another, then I'll link the tiles to those two sites. But then on the next assignment, if I want them to read the same thing, I'll link both tiles to the same site.

The initial setup can be a little time consuming (about 20-30 minutes), but it's very easy to use once it's set up. It really takes the guess work out of what assignments my students need to be working on when we do differentiated activities online since they just click on their name.

Another perk: the site is iPad compatible, so we're able to access these webmixes through Safari or other web browsers. One downside, however, is that you can only link to websites, RSS feeds, and audio sources -- not actual apps on the iPad.

Should you decide to give it a try, check out the education version at edu.symbaloo.com.

Finally, here's a link to my original tutorial as well as brief tutorial video about Symbaloo that I found to help you get started.


Do you use Symbaloo in your classroom? If so, I'd love to hear how you use it in the comment section!

Have a great week!

Weekend Reading

Here are some of my favorite blog posts from the week!

• Lindsay, over at My Life as a Third Grade Teacher, shared some fabulous anchor charts for poetry and grammar. I just love the way she introduced her poetry unit.  
• Farrah at Think * Share * Teach found a great new free app for the iPad that she's using to make instructional math videos for her students and their parents. I'm anxious to give EduCreations a try!
• Farley at Oh' Boy Fourth Grade shared a fantastic idea for teaching about prepositions with a pumpkin activity. The student work samples that she showcased were awesome! 

This week in Eberopolis will be the last week of our second term, which unfortunately means that I'll be doing a ton of assessing and grading to get ready for report cards. These are the units we're wrapping up:

• Narrative writing - students are putting the finishing touches on two narratives -- one historical fiction set in Colonial America and another on any topic of their choosing
• Literary reading - we've been reading novels and really digging into theme lately
• Multiplication, Division, and Algebra - it's been a busy 6 weeks in math. Most of my darlings are getting multi-digit multiplication and division, but there are still several that are struggling with their basic facts, so this is always a challenge. We'll be working on this the rest of the year, I suspect.
• Forces & Motion and Simple Machines - this was a fun science unit, and I definitely think my students understand many of the concepts. 
• Thirteen Colonies - aside from our Colonial America narrative, we'll mostly be done with this by Tuesday when we take the test. But a former student did drop off a pile of books she had borrowed last year and forgotten to return, including several of my favorite Colonial America read alouds that I'd been missing this year, so I may need to sprinkle those in throughout the week.

 What activities and topics will you be studying in your classes this week? I'd love to hear about it in the comments section!

Management Monday: Displaying Student Work

This year, I'm trying something new for displaying student work in my classroom, and I just wanted to share. Meet my new classroom wall display:

I printed each student's name on a piece of card stock, and then had the students color and decorate the page however they wanted. I then laminated them and punched a hole in the corner so I could attach a 2" ring clip. Next, I used Command hooks to hang all of the students' cover pages.

 

At the beginning of the year, I displayed the cover pages because it was a good way to get to know more about the students and their interests based on what they had drawn or written or how elaborate their illustrations were. Now, as the year has gone on, I'm letting students choose what work they want to have displayed. They can just attach a finished piece to the ring and turn to that page of work.

Here's why I like this system:
- It creates a portfolio of student work. We're constantly adding things behind the cover page, and it's easy to pull it down when I need to have parent-teacher conferences or find work samples for students.
- It gives students some control over what work is displayed. Rather than have one uniform cute bulletin board with all of my students' work on it, my students are able to choose lots of different things to put up, and they can showcase the work they are most proud of even if there are other things in the pages behind that work.
- It's easy to change out. I don't have to deal with stapling anything or removing staples to change out the display. I can hand the students their ring and cover, and they can change it out themselves and hang it back up when they're done.

There's no question that it takes up a lot of wall space in my classroom. That's one definite downside of it, but I feel like it's a good use of wall space, and it definitely helps me do a better job with displaying student work and rotating it out more frequently.

Are you trying anything new to help display student work this year? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Bedtime Math

Just a short post to share one of my new favorite websites: Bedtime Math. The premise is simple: each day a real world math application is presented in a short and lively informational text. The information is then followed by three leveled story problems -- one for "wee ones" (counting on fingers), one for "little kids," and one for "big kids." The solutions are explained at the end of the post. It's a great way to incorporate real world math at home with kids of all ages as part of the bedtime routine just as we typically have a bedtime story. And since solutions are provided, even math-phobic parents can participate! If you haven't already checked out Bedtime Math, I highly recommend it. I learned about through my K-5 Math Endorsement class after we read a very interesting Wall Street Journal article about the impact of math-phobic parents.

What are some ways you promote math at home? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Writing in Math

One of the reasons I opted to be an elementary teacher instead of a middle school or high school teacher is because I love teaching and learning about everything. I couldn't commit to just one subject. My passions change from one year to the next, and this year, I'm very passionate about teaching math.

This is the first year we're working with the Common Core in my district, and it has been a fun challenge to get to know all the new standards. It has been a big transition for my students, however. Many of them seem to be used to finding answers and being done with problems -- not persevering through challenges, representing their thinking in multiple ways, or explaining their thinking. As a result, the first 6 weeks were tough for some of my students.

I saw this quote in my math endorsement class this week, and it really struck me as exactly what my students needed to hear. We've been doing a lot of work on problem solving lately, and some of my darlings are all too willing to give up if they don't immediately know the answer to a problem. We had a great class discussion about what this quote means, and how it applies to the work we've doing.

We've also been talking about the Standards for Mathematical Practice lately, and connecting those to our process work in class -- especially when we write about math. The SMP's are pretty abstract for fourth graders, so I tried breaking them down into questions for students. For example, when we deal with the first standard to "Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them," we use these prompts:

Breaking it down into questions makes it a lot easier for students to know what they need to do to apply that standard to their work, and it has really facilitated our conversations. I've made posters for each of the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice, and I often see students refer to them when they're working on their problem solving and explanations.

Another thing that I've done to help with the SMP's is share student work in class discussion. On Thursday, we worked on a complicated story problem involving multiple factors of a number. Students had to solve the problem and write their explanation on a sheet of white paper. I covered up the names of the students, and displayed 5 or 6 with a document camera. Students read the explanations and were asked to name one thing the mathematician did well and one thing that could be done better. I was really impressed by the suggestions that students were giving! They were commenting about the efficacy of different number models, the organization and labeling of work, the thoroughness of the approach, and the need to have both numbers and words in a good explanation. It was some powerful feedback, and I'm excited to see where we'll go with this next. I can tell my students' confidence with math is increasing, and I really think they're becoming much more competent in their writing about math. Next week, I'll be giving them more writing prompts in math to include in their math journals, so we'll have to see how that goes.

To get your own freebie copy of the math quote poster, click here.  My Standards for Mathematical Practice Posters are available in my TpT store, or by clicking on the image below. They're on sale this weekend for $2.25.

Are you teaching Common Core math in your classroom? What challenges, if any, have you been facing this year? I'd love to hear about it in the comment section!

Have a great weekend!