Day 39 Lessons From the Middle

Here is one you don't run into as often....a middle school teacher.  I know teachers who love teaching middle school.  I am so thankful there are some of you out there, because it just won't ever be me!  I spent about 10 years teaching 5th and 6th graders and that was plenty of time for me.  I did my time :) I will stay, hopefully, in my happy place...1st grade.

Krystal Mills started this blog one year ago, yesterday! Happy blog birthday to you!  She has a big birthday giveaway...but you have to hurry because it ends this coming Monday!

Krystal is from Canada...so occasionally you will see references (like province) that give that away...but otherwise teaching is teaching and teaching 7th grades is well...a difficult task.  But Krystal's blog has lots of great tips, strategies, resources and of course humor as well.  (If you can't laugh...then you shouldn't be a teacher...and especially if you can't laugh at yourself!)

Stop over and visit Lessons From The Middle and enter her giveaway.  If you aren't a middle school teacher, I'm sure you know one.  They are the ones that carry the small bag home from work...not the huge rolling tote that you see the primary teachers dragging behind them.  Just kidding :-)

Day 35 Common Core Classrooms

Today I am continuing with the theme of Common Core.  I found Common Core Classrooms.  This is a collaborative blog that brings you Common Core resources from other teachers and resources.  Their 'goal is to provide educators with classroom tested resources and ideas by grade level and subject that apply directly to the new standards.'

It's a cool idea.  I don't think the grade level links at the top work...or at least not the way I thought they would.  If they are only for comments at your grade level...it works.  But I thought it would be for looking up grade level resources...for that it doesn't work yet.

Instead, if you go to the right column and choose from Blog Archive you can see older posts.  You can also go to the Labels listing and look up a standard and find resources that way, which is helpful.

There are lots of freebie resources linked to this blog.  So that is always fun.  I found a contraction link with lots of resources.  Next week is a contraction week for spelling, so that would be awesome to have.

I already do this with my 1st graders....

And I already do a word sort. But this one is nicely formatted and in a nice clean font for them to read...although I'm not sure why all the words start with a capital letter.

Now this was the new twist that I love, love, love!  I look for ways to make my 1st graders accountable for their work all the time!  This will be very useful next week.

Happy contracting everyone!  

See you tomorrow...35 down and 330 more to go!  

Day 33 Common Core Saves the Day!

Today's post is not really about an actual teacher blog.  This one is a link to some Common Core 'blogs' that are a helping teachers and probably some administrators keep up with the dialog about Common Core.

The district I have been working in has been very tied to the adopted curriculum for many, many years.  Fidelity is the word that came up all the time.  Now that would be awesome if the developers of the curriculum we are using were actually people who taught in classrooms.

But there have been holes in the curriculum and children who have been falling in these holes.   It's a bummer that these developers haven't sat in a 1st grade classroom and haven't sat and watched the eyes of a 1st grader haze over as you read the scripted language they have provided in the teacher's manual.

The kids look at you and think and sometimes have actually said..."you don't sound like yourself teacher."  No, I sound just like the robot that I try to not have you be when you read to me! lol

Granted, the scripted material is very helpful when you have an inexperienced teacher as a sub, but for the real world teacher? not so much!

I stuck to the text for awhile....a short while. But with Saxon and Houghton Mifflin's Reading Street...they just don't include the terms, expression and just downright fun that I know I can add to teaching the skills.

So...I swayed from the manuals.  Sometimes a little and sometimes a whole lot.  And you know what happened?  My students learned!  I felt like I had to do it undercover and I felt like I had to fib a little.  Perhaps many of us fibbed and that is why the fidelity word stuck for so long.  Everyone was afraid to admit that they actually used their ability and skill as a teacher to teach their students rather than doing the scripted lesson in the book.

But with the adoption of Common Core, we have been given more liberties with how we fill the academic holes in our students' knowledge.  It's a lot of work to tie everything to the new standards...especially in a state where these standards are increasing what our kids need to know in a year.  For me I have already been teaching at that level because I have worked in another state where we were already there...saves me some learning curve time.  But for some, it's going to take a bit longer to catch up.

I think Common Core is a good thing and I'm glad it came into our state and our district.  It will only benefit our students.  Now, one thing I do believe is that there will be a second wave to this tsunami.  I think that once we get comfortable with Common Core, my district, and eventually our state will think the next step is to come up with our own power standards to fill in where the Common Core is kind of loose.  I think we will have more standards that address what wasn't addressed by Common Core...for first grade it will be things like; actual words read per minute, perhaps specific fiction books, and more details in what a first grade writer looks like...to name just a couple.

The question is...will we be allowed to get comfortable with the first changes before our state or districts throw the next step at us?

Here are some Common Core Blogs I've found.  There are some interesting articles and debates on some of them.  These are not classroom teacher blogs...but blogs with lots of research, resources, strategies, and some debate.  I particularly like #5....if for no other reason but its subtitle! :-)

1.  Core Knowledge

2.  Common Core 360

3.  Common Core

4.  Tools for the Common Core Standards

5.  Teaching the Core (subtitled: How to not freak out about teaching the core)

6.  All Things Common Core

Day 13 Teaching with Love and Laughter

I found Lori Rosenberg's blog this morning and I can hardly tear myself away from it to blog about it.  She is amazing and her resources are amazing and her writing ideas are amazing and it looks like her school is amazing -- she gets to teach writing to k, 1 and 2.

Wow, what a concept, getting to teach something you really, really love A LOT and getting the quality time to do it!  I bet that school must have the most awesome writers.  In my school we have such a push on math and reading  that we just don't get as much time with writing as I would love to have -- and that I need to have to do it well.

Plus there is the planning time.  Planning every subject and teaching them is so time consuming -- at least right now with all the aligning to the common core standards now.  I am just starting to feel comfortable with knowing the standards...and it's January!  It's like a new pair of shoes that are a struggle to break in and you keep having to wear them to school! :-)

Back to Lori's blog:  Teaching with Love and Laughter

She has amazing writing ideas and she shares them on TpT as well as on her blog.  She also has some fun freebies.  She has a fun Winter Rebus Story on her blog and TpT store right now.  (Yet another Florida teacher with creative winter/snow themed activities -- ha ha!  Makes me think I should be doing tropical rain forest activities with my students -- It's warmed up to 11 degrees outside right now and it's 9:30 in the morning!)

The other thing Lori has are some great giveaways and contests.  Right now she is giving away a fun Learning Resource game called Sentence Buildings.  Head over to her blog and enter to win.  I know my firsties would love this for a center!

Here is what I'm drooling over right now!  Grammar Review Sheets for First Grade.  There are 30 review sheets and they cover Common Core skills.  The skills are the same on each day, but they get progressively harder.  I can't wait to download this one from her TpT store!

Constructing some Deconstructing

I gave up my valuable report card day to attend a district level workshop about creating effective assessment.  It was a good workshop for getting my brain thinking, but I didn't walk away with more answers than questions.  Good formative assessments are in important to have  in light of new Common Core State Standards (CCSS).  Unless you teach on the moon, or perhaps Texas or Alaska, you have to have been impacted by the CCSS by now.

Most of the states, except for the two mentioned above plus a few more, are in the process of changing their state standards and state testing to follow the guidelines of the CCSS.  So far they have ELA and Math.  The CCSS are a new set of universal standards that follow a scope and sequence throughout the grade levels, K-12.

Quite a few states have been swimming in the sea of CCSS for a few years now.  Our state, Idaho, has been a little shy of jumping in.  Our state sat on the sidelines for a bit just to make sure they really had to jump in.  They decided at the end of last school year to dive in....head first...with no flotation device and pretty much no swim trunks either!

The frustrating part is that Idaho doesn't have an ESD (education service district) or a COE (county office of ed) to help oversee this process of changing over.  In states like Arizona, Washington, California, Kentucky, and North Carolina (among others) there is a 'middle man' --the county office of education--that helps organize the big stuff.  In Idaho, the individual school districts deal directly with the state.  Which means they administration passes the buck to the teaching staff.  I suppose there is a positive side to that, but when it comes to huge tasks like new state standards, it would be nice to have some education organization to help unify the districts so we are all doing the same thing.  It also means that we have to take time away from lesson planning and our students to come up with new learning targets and new assessments.

As it is now, each school district has been left to interpret the standards and create local assessments to measure student growth.  Don't get me wrong.  We will still have an annual common state test through The Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium.  I don't know what those of us in K-2 will be seeing.  I personally won't miss the IRI (Idaho's state reading test for k-2).  It is an assessment tool that can only be improved upon in my opinion.

For those of you new to education, or maybe teaching in a school district that is dragging its heels...here are some sites to visit for more information about Common Core and creating assessment.

Arizona Department of Education -- they have been working on this for quite some time and have a lot of information on their state's website.

North Carolina has come up with Extended Common Core State Standards.  They took the CCSS and added to it.  They aren't exactly Learner objectives or deconstructed standards.  It looks like they just added things that they thought CCSS was missing at each grade level.

Here are some sites with lots of support information about the CCSS:

Common Core State Standards Initiative
Achieve the Core -- I like the name of this one although it's not my favorite resource.
Education Northwest --Great resource for finding some meaningful assessment tools, both formative and summative.  Dig around the site...it's full of lots of treasures!

School Improvement.com Here is a free webinar to help you learn how to create learning targets from the common core standards.

I could go on forever listing resources...but these are a good start.  I now have to put the whole assessment piece on the back burner for now and complete my 1st quarter report cards!  If you have a great resource that you find to help wade through common core, please share!