Helping Children With Anxiety in School with Splat the Cat

Anxiety among children is on the rise.  We, as teachers, don't need a study to tell us this because we see it every day in the classroom.  Splat the Cat is a great book to start a conversation about how we can handle anxiety.  Watch the video below to see how to tie this book into standards.  Be sure to  check out my post on teacher anxiety if you think it will help.

If you are experiencing teacher anxiety, check out this post.

Substitute Creacher

Substitute lesson plans are an unwanted necessity for teachers.  Every year I put it off until the emergency rears it's ugly head because who has time for that, right?!?!?!? Well this year I dug deep down inside and decided to come up with a lesson that we can get ready and have on hand for when the dreaded emergency arises.  If the emergency never arises, I suggest you take a mental health day, (ok say take one even if you have an emergency).

So what's more fun and engaging than a book about monsters? How about a substitute teacher teaching about a substitute teacher monster!  You could leave the anchor chart below with the book and even a link to my descriptive video.  For social studies the substitute can use the book to set classroom expectations for how to behave when substitute teachers are in the classroom. The substitute can work with the class to find key details and locate the lesson.  When the lesson is over students work independently on retelling the story and explaining the lesson in writing. For writing students can write a narrative piece about what they would do if they were changed into a monster.  As an added bonus I have written the reading long lesson out along with a graphic organizer.  You can find it here.  Have you signed up for my newsletter yet? Subscribers receive free resources with every newsletter including print and teach lessons on Dolphins.    Have a great week!
 

Celebrating Differences with Giraffes Can't Dance

Gerald the giraffe is good at lots of things, but not at dancing. Each year at The Jungle Dance, he's a bit of a laughing stock. Embarrassed and hurt, Gerald leaves the dance, but finds someone who may just be able to help.  This book is great for teaching acceptance, bullying,  loneliness, resilience, kindness, compassion, helping others, and self-reflection.  It's perfect for launching problem and solution in reading.  Watch the video below to see 

other tips for using the book to teach.

Acts of Kindness with Ordinary Mary

Ordinary Mary's Extraordinary Deed is a fabulous book that really illustrates for children how they can make a difference in the world with simple acts of kindness.  It's great for any time of the year! This book is a perfect tie to citizenship in Social Studies.  It's also perfect for all elementary aged students.  We always start the year off with the beginning portions of standards.  For this book we tied it to retelling or recounting stories.  Students are directed to retell the story in just three sentences using text evidence.  Before you start worrying about having older kids retell with just three sentences, please know that we are setting the precedence for the year.  Students must write quality sentences that use text evidence and transition words.  Once they have this mastered with three sentences we can build on.  It's important not to jump ahead and have students writing thesis statements when they can't write a proper sentence.  Watch my video below to see more ideas on how to bring quality literature into your reading block and how to use this book in your teaching. Have an amazing day!

Cafeteria Rules Lesson Plans

The cafeteria can be a huge problem for teachers everywhere.  They can be noisy, messy and students can get in trouble.  If you spend time in the beginning of the year setting expectations and allowing students to take part in creating rules and procedures, you are much more likely to have a successful lunch each day.  This year I was ecstatic to find the book "Seven RulesYou Absolutely Must Not Break If You Want To Survive The Cafeteria".  It's a cute book written on an upper elementary level.  However, I used it with two first grade classes and it's great as a read aloud lower primary as well.  To differentiate the book I left some parts out and shortened it to hold their attention span.  We know we barely have any time to teach extra  lessons so I taught the students how to partner up with partner pair cards and show respect by thanking their partners.  This way the class culture was being formed, students were having fun all while learning how to act in the cafeteria.  Above and below you will find the two different anchor charts that the classes created while taking part in the lesson. Basically we mixed and partnered up to discuss what we love and don't like about the lunchroom.  Then we read the book while keeping track of the main character's actions. When we were done we worked together to make an anchor chart.  

As a back to school celebration my newsletter subscribers will receive the lesson plan and partner pair cards this month for free.  It's not too late to sign up now if you want to receive the extras that I send out each month!

Setting Library Procedures

Everyone loves Curious George! He's engaging and reading his book is great way to set expectations for your students or children when it comes to the classroom, home or public library.  In the book George takes a trip to the public library and learns that climbing shelves and riding carts are not the best way to behave in the library.  This picture book can be read before discussion takes place about the "do's and dont's" of the library.  I have provided an anchor chart  with touching points for my classroom library above. It's important for you to keep in mind what and how you want your library to look before you wrap up the lesson and finish up your chart.  One important point that I always make with my students is that they need to explore books that they LOVE.  No boring books allowed! The reason this is so important is because it leads to authentic reading.  If students are taught how to find books they love it's hard to get them to put the book down. Watch my video below for more ideas and standards to tie the lessons into.

Celebrating Diversity with Yoko

Hi everyone! I hope that you have been enjoying my Back To School Blog Series.  If you haven't guessed it by now, including books that represent all of my students in my classroom is very important to me.  Just scroll back through my posts to see examples.  When I'm introducing standards for the first time in class, (which happens naturally during the first 9 weeks), I try to focus on engaging books that have a more simple story line.  This way the students build their foundational knowledge of the standard without confusion or frustration.  Yoko is a great book for looking at how character's react to events and actions in a story.   The story line is relatable to students and carries a theme of empathy which is so vital to our community.  This book lends itself to teaching reading skills while also teaching a social studies or character education lesson.  Thanks so much for stopping by!

Celebrating Diversity with Amazing Grace

It is very important to children that they are represented in the classroom curriculum.  It's also important to represent quality diverse books in class.  These reasons are why Amazing Grace is so perfect for your classroom.  Every year my students fall in love with Grace, she's resilient, smart, creative and relatable.  One of my favorite parts of Amazing Grace is that it is a series that has at least another picture book and chapter book.  This is just perfect for 2nd and 3rd graders! Once the kids are hooked with Amazing Grace they love to read on their own during independent reading.  I love to teach this book with the standard -finding the story's lesson or central message.  Make sure to watch the video below for more information!

Teamwork with It's Mine

Hi there and welcome back! It's Mine is a wonderful story about teamwork that works great for primary grades.  One lesson that is a must for every reading teacher at the beginning of the year is teaching response to reading. We want students to be able to organize their thoughts in their heads and write them out clearly in response to a particular question.   In order to do this it's important that we start with a simple story with a clear answer.  In this story the characters have a clear change in behavior from the beginning to the end.  This makes it ideal for teaching students how to write proper sentences in response to how character's react to events or change throughout the story.  You will see an example below.

Thank you so much for stopping by today! We hope to see you tomorrow.

Launching STEM with Rosie Revere & The Most Magnificent Thing

Hi and welcome back! Hopefully you have read a few posts prior to this one and are planning to teach your students how to work in cooperative groups.  Once that is established, consider launching inquiry-based science in your classroom.  What better way to launch science then to read Rosie Revere Engineer and The Most Magnificent Thing. There is a little more information about how I use the books in reading below in the video.  I plan on reading the books and comparing and contrasting them during shared reading.  Once the students are excited about engineering we will practice working in a group and creating bug homes.  Read below to see what we have planned.

Research shows us that students perform better overall in school when they take part in inquiry-based science investigations.  Inquiry-based science allows students to explore questions and problems, develop explanations, elaborate on findings and concepts and assess their understanding.  To launch inquiry based science in younger grades consider starting with a simple yet engaging question.  Your question must have a measurable outcome.  For this project consider this question:  Do bugs prefer to live in hard or soft materials?  It's a simple question with a measurable outcome that can spark a number of follow up inquiries.  

You can use whatever materials you have on hand.  Here students have the choice between cups, trays, straws, pom poms, pipe cleaners and plastic tubes.  I also considered using paper tubes, paper egg trays, and strings, but wanted to keep it simple.

Students will work with their group to develop a hypothesis.  Once they have their hypothesis they will create homes with only one variable.  So if they want to put straws in a cup for hard materials, then they would put a soft material like pom poms in a cup. Once they build the homes they put them outside in a safe place.

You will then decide how long the investigation will last.  One suggestion would be to do this investigation on two Mondays, but record data every day in between during transitions.  Students will observe the homes at predetermined days and record their findings in their science logs.  When the investigation is over they will make a conclusion and then you can determine if they will come up with another investigation based on the first or if you will move on to another topic.  Before you move on, make sure students have plenty of opportunities to explain the findings of the investigation.  

Teaching Teamwork with Tops and Bottoms

Tops and Bottoms is a quick read that would work for grades k-5, but is best suited for grades k-3.  It does an awesome job demonstrating how teamwork and hard work are much more effective than laziness.  In the story the character Bear inherits property and wealth that he is way to lazy to take care of.  Down the street from Bear is a family of hares who got into a little trouble and have a hard time getting what they need to survive now.  So the father hare tricks Bear over and over again to feed his family.  At the end Bear wises up and starts to work his land and the Hare family no longer has access to food because they tricked Bear so many times.

If you have been following along to our Back To School series then you might have read the post "Say Hello" which showed how I introduce Think-Pair-Share to my classroom.  Now that students have been practicing and know how to work with a partner it's time to launch expectations and procedures for group work.  It's really nice reading a book before hand that demonstrates so clearly what benefits might come from teamwork.  After reading the book we fill in a Venn diagram as a class that explores the character's traits in the book.  Then I pose the question:  What would have been a plan that worked best for all of the characters?  After we have a class conversation I then pose the question, "What's the best way for everyone in our class to work together?" We fill out a Do's and Don't anchor chart that can stay up all year.  Once our anchor chart is filled out, students need a break and we move onto something else.  After the students have a break I will teach another lesson that requires group work and we will develop our procedures from our expectation chart. Then I will have the students work together in a group.  The lesson that we use for practicing group work really doesn't matter.  It's so nice to be able to teach standards, procedures and character education all in a 30 minute lesson.  Be sure to check out the video below and come back tomorrow for another post!

Behavior Management Expectations for Back To School

Hello there! Welcome back.  Make sure to check back every week day because we'll be taking a look at more than 20 different books that are perfect for the k-5 classroom and we don't want you to miss anything.  If you have a question that you need answered, make sure to send me an email at amylabrasciano@yahoo.com and I'll see if I have an answer for you.  A big thank you to my Instagram friends for sending in so many questions already! (@amylabrasciano)

This is the second post that discusses behavior management.  I'll explain my thoughts in the video below, but because I'm so uncomfortable on camera I thought I would put it in writing for you here too.  One of my Instagram friends asked what I recommend for behavior management.  So here's the thing, I've implemented a lot of different behavior management plans.  Each one has been just about as effective as the other.  My two favorites are clip charts that go up and down and Dojo.  Both have their benefits and drawbacks.  There are a lot of teachers who are very vocal about not using the clip chart, while I support their feelings I think if they are done in a consistent respectful way clip charts  are just fine.  Dojo works nicely because kids get and lose points.  The downfall for me was that parents didn't click to see if their children were losing points and why.  Dojo shows a total so if they lost a point for being disrespectful, but gained two points because you needed to encourage them to produce work, the parents never saw this behavior and didn't follow up with a conversation.  I will use Dojo again, but I will also be sure to have students write how many points were lost in their binders for a parent signature.

More important than consequences and rewards for behavior are ENGAGEMENT and EXPECTATIONS.  You can have the best reward system in the world but if you aren't engaging your students in lessons they are going to play around while they should be learning.  You can have the best lessons in the world, but if you aren't consistent with expectations then your kids won't know what to do and you will lose them.  So instead of worrying about clip charts, you should be planning awesome consistent lessons and an expectation procedure for your classroom.  If you want to add engagement to your classroom, check back in my blog.  I have published my lessons for free here for over a year.  You might also want to give a student interest survey to see what your kids want to learn about.  There is a free interest survey here.  It is super easy to teach reading and writing standards while using books that your kids love.  While it's a bit more difficult, you can also do it with math, science and social studies.  Let's talk about expectations now.  You should have a procedure for everything in your classroom.  We'll talk about what those procedures are a little later in this series.  To set expectations for every lesson consider using CHAMPS.  It has worked brilliantly for years in my classroom.  It tells students what conversation level you want them on, how to get help, what activity, what movement is allowed in the classroom, how to participate and if they are successful or not.  You can buy the book on Amazon used.  I have yet to find a program that helps set such great expectations for kids. (Again, they did not pay me to say this I just love them that much!)

For a reward system, I allow students to turn in their Dojo points for a classroom store on Friday.  The classroom store sells mostly things that didn't cost me money like:  socks in class, change desks, super supplies, lunch with teacher, hat in class, read with a stuffed animal, etc.  Before Dojo points we gave out classroom cash and the premise was the same.  A lot of emphasis is put on the reward system, but we also have a consistent natural consequence procedure.  If students break a rule or procedure after clear expectations have been set and practiced, then they lose a Dojo point.  The natural consequence is that they won't get their Friday reward if they don't have enough points.  There are also consequences that encourage students to do work.  If they don't finish written responses or certain assignments, then they don't get to do center work or other fun learning activities.  If there is an ongoing issue with behavior, then you have to dig deeper and connect more with your student.  At this point we implement a personal system that works for the student.  If by chance you end up with a student who does not respond to your efforts, you just have to keep trying until you reach them. This can be very stressful and wearing, but you can't give up.  Just make sure to take care of yourself and take your breaks as needed because your health is very important.

So hopefully you found some value in our post on classroom rules, consequences, expectations and rewards.  Make sure to come back every week day to read more.

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  If you are looking for a way to increase engagement in your classroom, check out the video below in my TPT store.

Class Cheer with The Pout Pout Fish

Character education is so important to teach in the classroom.  We are very lucky to have millions of books to choose from to help us with this.  One cute book that's an easy read is "The Pout-Pout Fish Goes To School".  The lesson is that everyone learns at their own pace in their own time. Who doesn't love that lesson?  What's really fun about this book is that you could use it to teach your class a cheer.  

Fact One:  You are smart!

Fact Two:  You can get it!

Fact Three:  You belong!

Four:  Don't forget it!

If you want to tie it to a standard you could teach it along with a story's central message or lesson.  I hope you are as excited about teaching this cheer as I am!!! Maybe I'll even teach it to teachers at my school?