Thankful for 30

Sorry I’ve been MIA all week…. You see, it’s Christmas and my mom’s here visiting all the way from America, so that’s my excuse. Anyway, I wanted to share this little thing that I did in class over the past month.

I got the idea from some facebook friends of mine in November. Basically, it’s a daily post about something that you’re thankful for and why. What better time for reflection than the holiday season, right? I thought this was the perfect morning task for my students in the month leading up to Christmas, so I printed out some blank ornament templates and made a “Thankful for 30” board on my door.

Check some of these out:

 

Hope you had a great Christmas with your loved ones!

Online Book Reviews

Well, we made it through our final assessments, survived our last service learning fundraiser, and wowed parents at our Christmas concert… now it’s time for a break. Trust me, there were several times over the last couple of weeks where I didn’t think we’d get here, but I’m so happy to be on the other side of it.

Back when I was mentally preparing for how to keep my students busy over the break, I put together a reading competition through Google Drive and linked it to our class edmodo page to keep track of their progress and keep them motivated to read. I got a couple of prizes for the winner(s) and got the students pumped up before school let out. Winners will be announced when we return from break… Stay tuned.

If you’ve never used Google Drive, you should try it out. Google Drive is such a great tool for digitizing your classroom, AND it free! From creating surveys, sharing presentations and documents, to keeping your students accountable for their assignments, this allows you to do it all- and with ease. Here’s the online book review form that I made for my class.  

Here’s what I did:

1.      Log in to your Google account and select the Drive tab at the top of the menu bar.  

 

2.      Go to Create and you will see a drop-down menu with a few selections.

 

3.      Click on Form and this will take you to a form where you can add questions to fit your form.

 

4.      Upload the link to your form as an assignment on your edmodo page and it will automatically tally the forms for you as the students fill them in.

 

 

And there you have it, folks. Have a great vacation!

Service Learning Slideshow

The semester is just about over, but there’s still a TON of work to be done. I have no idea how this seems to happen every year, but it does. No matter how prepared I try to be or how much I plan, Christmas seems to hit me like a Mack Truck. It doesn’t help that I’ve picked up one of the kids’ bugs and have been sick all week. BUT… we’re almost there, that’s the good news.

To finish the semester strong, we decided to create a slideshow to showcase all of the work that we’ve done this semester for service learning. It was a great way to look back on all of our hard work, and feel good about how much we’ve helped the community. AND, we got to learn how to use some new technology in the computer lab. We used imovie to create this one, but you could also use MS Movie Maker to make something similar.

The teachers haven’t decided if we’d like to continue with the service learning program in the spring, but I have a feeling the kids won’t give us a choice. They really enjoyed it and learned a lot ( I think) from it. Here’s our finished slideshow:

 

Happy Christmas, everyone!
 

Teaching Imperatives

Don’t you just love it when you get to teach an easy grammar lesson? I was thanking my lucky stars for this week’s super simple grammar chapter because I needed a little reprieve from the chaos of the week before break.

So here’s how I “do” imperatives-

We reviewed our procedural writing from last week, paying close attention to the verb forms we used. Then we determined that all of the steps of our writing piece began with the infinitive form of the verb without the “to”. After that, we put some examples on the board of common orders we hear either at school or at home… it wasn’t hard for them to come up with a handful of nags that they get every day from me and their parentsJ Once they understood what I was after, we did this fun activity where each student (could be group of students though) got a character and they had to write what imperatives that person would use. They LOVED it! Feel free to use them with your classes here.

Here are the notes we came up with for IMPERATIVES in English:

Purpose- Imperatives are used to give commands/orders, advice/suggestions, or directions.

Structure- Use the infinitive form of the verb without “to”

Examples- “Clean your room”, “Raise your hand to speak”, “Do your work”, etc

Deck the hallways

Even though it’s not beginning to look a lot like Christmas here in Vietnam, we are doing our best to get into the holiday spirit around school. In my class, we’ve been practicing our performances for the Christmas concert, delivering donated gifts to a local hospital, and even writing letters to Santa. Aside from trying to wrap up the academic side of things for the semester, there are also a lot of things to physically prepare around school like hanging hallway decorations, making props for the concert, and, of course, transforming your door into something Christmas-y themed. I have to admit that I’m not excited about all of the extra work that has to be done this time of the year, but it is really neat for the kiddos.  

This year, I don’t have an assistant so when they announced that we had to start putting up decorations, I panicked. Over the next two days, everyone’s doors were decked out in snowmen, reindeer, and every other imaginable holiday icon. I was officially the last one to tackle the door project, leaving me with limited options. That meant 2 things; 1- that I’d better hurry up and get something on the door, and 2- that mine had to be better than the others. Challenge accepted! I grabbed my kids on Friday afternoon and we came up with a few ideas about what we could do to win the unspoken door decoration competition that I’d created in my head. Luckily, I had an hour and a half block for art on Friday and was able to get my students to do the brunt of the work during that time. They were just like elves, working away all day to help make our class door the best in school. Here’s a picture of the (nearly) completed masterpiece…

Book Report Timelines

Every month I require my students to read a free choice book in addition to our normal course book. Thankfully, my kids all enjoy reading for fun so it’s not the fight that it was last year. Anyway, every month I have them do some sort of book project to present to the class about what they read. Since standard book reports are so boring, I usually like to try something more fun. I’ve tried everything from making an animated video to story sandwiches to movie posters. I just love how creative my students are when I give them a project like this. So, in true Ms. Reyna fashion, I was perusing Pinterest in search of a new book report idea and found this little number on creating a timeline of the major events in the story. The idea was so simple, but I hadn’t ever thought of it. It’s so nice to still be learning new things every day!

I adapted the idea so that it worked better for my students, but that was easy. Then I created the guidelines and rubric for my students to access on edmodo. Finally, I made an example of what I was looking for so that they had a better idea of where to start. Here are a few pictures of their work and the guidelines and rubric if you want to try it. Have a great day!    

Timeline Book Report Guidelines

Timeline Book Report Rubric

 

 

 

 



Procedural Writing

Concert performances, assessments, exams, oh my! We’ve been so busy wrapping up the last couple of weeks before break that I haven’t had a chance to post any updates. My apologiesL

Anyway, this week we’ve been doing procedural writing in Language Arts. I love teaching procedural writing (especially right after information reports) because there’s so much fun stuff you can do with it. Last week one of my students had a birthday so I thought this would be the perfect introduction to procedural writing- how to make a birthday cake!

We started with a quick brainstorming session as a group to review what we knew about procedural writing including purpose, examples, and organization. Here’s the list we came up with:

 

Then we watched a short cooking video about making a cake and took notes on what steps to take. We compared notes as a class and then edited and simplified our directions. Finally, we baked a cake of our own to celebrate a classmate’s birthday! It was a lot of fun, and the students were completely engaged- always a plus. Here are a couple of pictures from our cake baking session. Stay tuned for a couple more extension lessons with procedural writing.