Color Acrostics

With a million and one things to still do before school lets out next week, I completely forgot to post these bad boys, but I definitely like how the lesson went, so better late than never… I think that’s my slogan these days.

Anyway, as part of our introduction to poetry last month we did acrostic poems with colors as a theme rather than the traditional name poems. I like doing acrostic poems, but I find that they are generally too easy for my 6^th graders. I decided this year to try to challenge them to come up with something more abstract. Each of them drew a color from the hat, brainstormed words to describe that color, then scoured a stack of old magazines for items to match. Here’s what we came up with!

Parts of Speech- Notebook Activity

Here’s a fun grammar activity (if there is such a thing) that we did last week when we were reviewing parts of speech…

Now, I have to admit that grammar is not always my strongest subject to teach for a couple of reasons; a) I learned it well over 20 years ago, b) I don’t know all the rules by heart yet, c) it doesn't always make a lot of sense in my brain, and d) there’s always a thousand different ways to say the same thing in English. It can be really frustrating and confusing for me so I can only imagine the torture it must feel like to my mostly ESL students.

I started the lesson by playing this catchy little number to hook them in and then we listened a second time, making sure to pause and jot down notes in our notebooks. Once we made our way through the 8 parts of speech, I turned them loose with a stack of old magazines in the craft corner and sent them on a scavenger hunt for all the different parts of speech we just learned. Here’s a copy of the simple table I made for their notebooks and a few examples from my students so you have a visual. 

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•     They didn't get them all accurate, but they really tried. Guess we’ll be revisiting these again this week J

    If you have a different method that’s been more effective for teaching parts of speech, please leave me a tip. I’ll take all the help I can get!

Sensory Poems

This is the second year that I’ve done sensory poems, and possibly one of my all-time favorite lessons. The kids love it, and it’s such a great way to teach rich, descriptive writing… something that most of my students struggle with. By isolating the senses one by one, they are really challenged to find words to describe how something sounds, feels, smells, feels, sounds, or tastes and then find ways to convey that to a reader. It’s truly phenomenal what they come up with during this exercise.

Last year I used a couple of different stimuli than this year, but it was just as successful. In fact, that’s the beauty of this lesson; you can use whatever you have access to, to bring this to life. Here is what I did:

First, I introduced the word “sensory,” which most of them were unfamiliar with. I wrote it in caps in the middle of the white board and asked what they thought it meant. Give them a minute with this because you will usually have one brave soul who offers up the word “senses.” Once you've got that, they generally know the 5 senses. Add the five senses to your mind map on the board around your middle “sensory” word. Then, one by one, add adjectives under each of the senses until you feel like they get it. Then explain that you’ll be making poems using these 5 senses. You will see the excitement start to rise when they realize they will get to eat something. Naturally, you have to keep that one for the finale to hold their interest, but you get the point here.


I started with "sound." I played this youtube clip for them from my desk so they weren't able to see the screen. After the clip, I told them to write down words or phrases in their writer’s notebook that they think of when they hear this sound, and to go beyond naming it.

Next, I played this clip on the overhead projector without sound and asked them add it to their writer’s notebook page under “see.”

The next sense I did was “touch.” For this one, I got a boa from our drama room and told them to close their eyes while they held and squeezed it. Last year, I used sand and ice for touch- all were good.

The next one was “smell,” which I did with a eucalyptus scented essential oil. This one was hard for them, so I might suggest a strong smelling flower or more recognizable smell like cinnamon.

Lastly, I sent around a bowl of freshly popped popcorn for them to take a handful of for “taste.”

As a class we went through some of the descriptors that they came up with and I shared a poem I wrote about apples. Then, I turned them loose to choose one of the 5 stimuli we just experienced and create a sensory poem about it.

I’ll post a couple of their finished poems when I get back to school tomorrow. Until then, enjoy what’s left of your weekend, and go indulge in a good meal with all your senses! 

Book Page Art Poems

I've seen variations of this project floating around on pinterest for quite some time now and thought it would be a perfect addition to our poetry unit (although it could be adapted to other areas of language arts). We all have a book or two that is beyond salvageable our classroom or library right? Well, don’t be so quick to throw them out because they can be turned into these beautiful works of art quite easily.

For ours, I had a really old, worn out copy of The Wind in the Willows that I used as a course book last year. I picked this particular copy up at a used bookstore when I was home for Christmas last year; I think I may have spent a whole dollar on it. 

Anyway, it was in rough shape so I tore several pages out and told the students to take a couple of pages and search for words that stood out that could make a poem and circle those words lightly in pencil. It was not an easy task for everyone, but I liked watching them struggle a bit with the challenge. Is that bad? Of course I was there to help them along, but I really wanted them to start thinking about poetry in a different context. Some of them are stuck in the it-has-to-rhyme stage and I wanted to help them see beyond that.

Once the words were found, I showed them a few examples of recycled book art and let them choose the style they liked best. I put a basket of glitter pens, black fountain pens, and chalk out for them to experiment with on their pages, and here’s what they came up with.

Pretty awesome, right? I highly recommend this one!

Restaurant Math Project

It’s hard to believe the end of the school year is less than a month away now. This time of year is always met with a mix of feelings, from exhaustion and burnout to excitement and pride. I have the pleasure of teaching the oldest bunch of kids at my school so it always feels doubly emotional. It’s going to be difficult to say goodbye to this group in particular because they’re such a small class and we’ve gotten very close throughout the school year… It’s how I imagine a parent feels when they wake up and realize their baby is all grown up. Kind of.

Anyway, I wanted to end the year with a fun math project, but wasn’t struck with any bright ideas. I searched all of my favorite teaching blogs, pinterest, and even google, but nothing stood out. Eventually I came across this cool restaurant math activity that was a bit below my students’ abilities, but still helpful for introducing real-life math. Doing this activity with my students gave me the idea to have them design their own “restaurants” complete with menus, pricing, and even a 3D design in Google Sketch-up. The kids are SUPER excited about this because they love all things food related.

The project starts with a proposal to me about which type of restaurant they’d like to open (coffee shop, deli, pizza parlor, taco stand, etc.). Once approved, they have to put together some delicious menu items with descriptive language and appropriate pricing. Now, we’re in Vietnam so I let them choose which currency they’d like to use, but this is easily adaptable for any location. In fact, for an added challenge, you could tell students where their restaurant location is and have them work with currency conversions to complete this project. Later, after the menu and pricing is set, the students will make a corresponding worksheet with word problems that relate to their menu. Each student will need to submit 10 problems (addition/subtraction, multiplication/division, discounts/percentages, rounding, and estimation) that classmates will have to solve. Finally, each student will bring in one menu item and a printed copy of their menu to share with the class. This will be our final party of the year, and one that I hope they remember for a long time.

Here’s the slideshow that I made with the project guideline if you’d like to use this as a model in your class. Happy Monday to all my stateside friends!

Here's another helpful site for more restaurant math!

Haiku- Mixed Media Art Journals

Well, we’re a couple weeks into our poetry unit here, and things are going great. We covered the elements of poetry and have now ventures into the thick of it with acrostic, concrete, and haiku poems. I wanted to share our haiku project from today because I was really impressed with their effort on this one.

It’s not every day that your students can grasp a concept like subtlety, and then show you that they GET IT. It is a beautiful thing, my friends. Anyway, so after we learned a little about the history and structure of haikus, we split the class into different seasons and started brainstorming ways to describe nature in those seasons. Then, once we felt like we had enough descriptive words down, they went to work making their own seasonal haikus.

Later for art, we looked at some really great examples of mixed media and art journal pages so they could get a visual of what our goal was, and started exploring with texture, color, and technique. I allowed them to use any medium that we’d worked with this year, including drawing/sketching, painting (watercolor & acrylic), doodling, collage, stenciling, and sponging. I had to keep reminding them that mistakes could be covered, and that layers were what make mixed media so cool. Once they got that, the awesomeness started to emerge… Check out s couple of them below. Have a splendid weekend!

Spring!

Summer!

Winter!

Fall coming soon!

Mother's Day Poems

Happy Friday, everyone! Well, at least for those of us living in Asia. It’s May and the rainy season is upon us once again, which means I’ll be sporting wet shoes and a poncho for the next couple of months. It really makes me miss having a vehicle with doors and a roof, but hey, it’s just water, right?

This weekend is Mother’s Day, and coincidently, we’ve just started our poetry unit, so I thought- what better way celebrate mom than with a beautiful poem? In language arts we’ve been learning about figurative language, specifically similes and metaphors, so we read some poems that use figurative language just to get some ideas. Then, we brainstormed a list of adjectives that we use to describe our moms.

Later for art, we created a watercolor floral border to publish out poems on… I got the idea for this project here. Here’s a few snapshot of our pieces today.

Happy Mom’s Day to all you fierce females out there. Hope you have a great weekend!

Start with watercolor- be sure to leave a space for your poem!

Any color combo will do...

Once it dries, draw over it with a fine-tip permanent marker or fountain pen (0.5mm)

It's up to you how light or dark the flowers.

Add the final draft of your poem.

Voila! Mother's Day Gift, boss status.

Back in Time- Class Museum Project

WOW, what a week it has been over here! We’ve just finished up our final unit project on ancient civilizations with a way too big museum exhibit for the entire school. It was a heck of a lot of work, but we’ve received some great feedback from all of our visitors- we even made it onto the school website, so I thought I’d share it in a post here.

For this unit, we’ve been focusing on the ancient Egyptians and their daily lives in class. Additionally, the kiddos chose their own ancient civilizations to research about to create a FULL-BLOWN history museum exhibit. They had to find relevant details about the history and culture of their chosen civilizations and display their findings in the form of a museum exhibit, complete with ancient artifacts. Here are the guidelines that I gave to them weeks ago. Last Wednesday, each class in the school was assigned a time slot and given admission (raffle) tickets to visit our newly remodeled classroom that was transformed into a museum!!!

Here are a few snapshots of our big day… If you have any pointers or want to know more in detail what I did, feel free to leave a comment.

Hope you are surviving what’s left of the school year. 6 more weeks on this end, and the official countdown has begun. Cheers- Happy Friday!

All dressed up and ready to go

All about the Egyptians

Minh Chi reporting live from ancient Rome

Winnie in ancient Greece

Nhu teaching about ancient China

Children's Book Project

We are wrapping up our earth science unit and getting ready to go on spring break here in a week, so I really wanted to give my students a language arts project to tie it all together before they go on vacation and forget it allJ It’s been quite a few weeks since we’ve done any sort of narrative writing because we’ve been in our expository unit, so I wanted to give them the option to do some creative writing for a change.

For this assignment, the students have two options- 1) Create a storybook that relates in some way to earth science, or 2) make a picture dictionary that relates to earth science. In either case, students will be responsible for creating a 20-page book for a young child audience. This is great because it forces them to think about their word choice and eliminates the “copy & paste” method that they may be tempted to use. Plus, it gives both right-brained and left-brained students the opportunity create something cool.

On my search for a digital option for this project, I remembered storybird.com. I’d used it last year, but completely forgot what a great site it was for creating stories. Since that really only works for the storybook option, I also gave my students the choice to create a wikispaces page. Here’s the rubric and guidelines that I created for this project along with a really great storybird story. If you haven’t used this site, I suggest you check it out. It’s awesome, and better yet, it’s free!
Happy Saturday, folks!

Children's Book Project Guidelines
Children's Book Project Rubric
 

Dr. Seuss Week

To celebrate one of history’s most influential children’s authors, we’ve been reading a Seuss story each day in class this week. Of course the kids love it, but it also offers so many teaching and learning opportunities too. Here are a couple of the things we did with Seuss week this year:

Story Elements-

Dr. Seuss books are the perfect tools for teaching key story elements like characterization, plot, rising action/climax/falling action, conflict, and the hardest one of them all- theme. All you need is a mini-lesson to review story elements and then you follow it with a Seuss read-aloud or even a youtube ebook, and BAM, they get it. With books like The Lorax and Star Bellied Sneetches, this stuff literally teaches itself. Below is a copy of the prezi I found on story elements along with the story map that I created to go along with The Lorax. I’ve also added the ebook that we used in class so you won’t have to go on a hunt for it.

 Seuss Story Map Worksheet

Figurative Language-

Everyone knows that Dr. Seuss is a master rhymer, but sometimes we miss the chance to show other figurative language techniques that he uses to our students. I had one of those ah-ha moments about 2 weeks after Dr. Seuss week last year and could have kicked myself for not seizing the moment. This year, I was ready though, so today we watched this killer video put out by the folks at flocabulary.com on figurative language and again, followed it up with a Seuss story to see what kinds of examples we could find. If you haven’t seen this already, it’s well worth the 3 minutes.

 

Idiom Task Cards

I’ve been looking for some fun language arts task board activities for March and I came across these GREAT cards on Teachers Pay Teachers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to access my account to log in, so I took the idea and ran with it. All in all, I think these were a success… grab a copy of this activity below!

Idiom Cards-1
Idiom Cards-2
Idiom Recording Sheet
 

Taboo- Geography Edition

Looking for a fun way to review science or social studies concepts? Students seem bored or uninterested in lessons at the end of a unit? Fret not my fellow teacher friends, a solution is here. The answer- PLAY A GAME! I can’t stress enough how much more my students seem to retain when they are forced to know it in a friendly competition among classmates. Sweeten the deal with reward points, a free homework pass for the winning team, or their name on the superstar wall… it’s a winner for sure.

This week’s review came from a game we used to play when I was growing up and is still fun as heck to play- Taboo. If you’re not familiar with this game, here’s how it’s played:

During their turn, each player is forced to describe a word or phrase to their team without using certain words. For example, you have to get your team to guess the word “circle”, but you can’t say shape, round, sphere, or square. This is such a great exercise for second language learners because it forces them to really think about what words to use. Plus, it’s an incredibly funny sight to watch as your students struggle to find the words they needJ

If you have time at the end of a lesson, you should give this one a try- it’s a riot!

Here’s a copy of the cards I made for our geography review, but any word or phrase will work.  

Word Clouds- 100 days

As the 100^th day of school approaches, I’ve been brainstorming all of the different ways that I can incorporate 100 into my lessons. I’ve seen about a million ideas online, but they all seem to be a bit too young for my 6^th graders. I’ve been looking for an excuse to have my class play around with tagxedo.com because I just love word clouds and have been using the site to make one for each week’s spelling words and hanging on our word wall.

So… I decided why not have the students come up with 100 words that they would use to describe themselves and put it in the form of a word cloud. I found that the task was just the right amounts of challenge and fun to make it a 100-day-worthy activity. Plus, this makes for a great computer task board station. Try it out with your class or play around with it just for fun. Enjoy!

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

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

 

 

 

 



Life Science- Information Reports

What a busy couple of weeks it has been! I tell you what, it’s going to be a miracle if I survive until Christmas break. This semester is kicking my bootyJ

I’m going to make this one short and sweet, but I just wanted to share a prezi that I made for one of our life science projects. I got the idea from a webquest that I saw on zunal.com a few weeks back, and what’s great about webquests, is that they are a creative accessible and way to engage your students in projects. Since I’ve never made a webquest and I’m a complete geek for prezi right now, so I created this little number and posted it on edmodo for my students to have access to at any time. It includes my detailed expectations, some video clips, and even my rubric. Check it out:

 

The final reports are due tomorrow, so we’ll see how they do! Happy Wednesday.

Broken Sentences

Let’s face it, grammar stinks! There, I said it. It stinks to teach, it stinks to learn, it just plain stinks. Whenever I even say the word, my students cringe. But there’s no denying its importance in English. It is vital to the development of writing and oral skills and it’s something that needs to be practiced daily in a mostly-ESL environment. I tell my students that practicing good grammar is like flossing or working out; you don’t have to do it, but it’s always a good idea (although that doesn’t seem to sell them).

I wanted to try something a little more, well, fun for this week’s grammar lesson so I introduced them to the broken sentence. I’m sure this is not an original idea, but basically it’s a sentence that has been scrambled and the students have to “fix” it. The way that I did it requires a few minutes of extra prep time, but trust me, it was totally worth it. The kids were INTO IT! Here’s what I did today:

I printed a few questions and sentences on a piece of paper (large font/bold works best) then cut them into strips.

Cut each sentence up into individual words and mix them so they’re out of order.

Set up numbered stations around the room and had them copy the sentences into their grammar notebooks.

For an added bonus, I offered 10 cool points (our sticker system) if they could correctly answer or ask questions to match the broken sentence. For example, we’ve been studying second and third conditional and one of the broken sentences was:

·         If you met Justin Bieber, what would you say?

They would have to answer:

·         If I met Justin Bieber, I would …

This is a really great activity to trick engage students in grammar. J If you have any fun grammar activities, please share them. Thanks, and have a great night!

Writer's Notebook

I was first introduced to the concept of a writer’s notebook last Christmas when we were back in Georgia visiting family. Jeff’s (my partner) dad is a retired English teacher from a wonderful private school there and was nice enough to arrange a school tour AND put me in contact with a colleague of his during our visit. She told me about one of the tools that they use in language arts called a writer’s notebook and right away I loved this idea. I  wanted to learn more about it so I bought the books she recommended and have been using them in my classroom ever since.

The idea  behind the writer's notebook comes from research done by RalphFletcher and it just makes sense. Here's what we know about writers:
* Writers are different.
*Writers use different processes.
* Writers need time and tools to develop their writing skills.
Although these ideas are basic, we tend to forget to take them into account when planning our lessons at times. Ralph Fletcher gets to the heart of these challenges and makes it make sense... if that makes any sense. His books are brilliant and have totally changed my approach to teaching writing. I highly recommend them if you are struggling with teaching writing.

Anyway, like most things in my class, I wanted to provide my students with a real-life example to help them better understand my expectations and get them started with creating their own writer's notebooks. Here’s a short video that I created for you to see my example and a slideshow of some of my pages. If you have any suggestions of how you’ve used the writer’s notebook in your class, please share them. Happy Writing!

 

 

 

 

 

Scary short stories

Halloween has always been one of my absolute favorite holidays. As a kid, I usually had my costume picked out by my birthday in the summer and couldn’t wait to go trick or treating with my friends. The amount of loot we made out with every year still blows my mind… I mean, who really needs 86lbs of candy? It’s insane. I’m pretty sure that’s when my sugar addition and subsequent tooth decay started, but that’s not what this post is all about.

Beyond the costumes and candy, Halloween is the official kickoff of the holiday season. It’s a time for haunted houses and ghost stories. A time for FUN. And that’s what this week is all about.

In language arts, we’ve been working on narrative writing so I decided to shake things up with some good ol’ scary stories. I’m not a huge fan of horror in general, but the students love them and they’re great for teaching elements of good narrative writing.

We started the lesson with a couple of spooky tales from this AWESOME website. I read the first one aloud in our reading area while we pretended to be around a campfire at night. Then we brainstormed together on the white board about what elements make up a scary story. Here’s a look at what we came up with:

Excuse my messy board

 

Here's the PDF if you want to download it.

Later, I turned them loose to start drafting their own haunted stories that they will share later in the week with the class.

Because I’m trying to find new and interesting ways for my students to present their work with 6 + 1 traits, I am going to have them voice record their stories and use editing software to add creepy sound effects to the background. I’m really excited to see the finished products. I promise to post more on these when I have them completed. Until then, enjoy some Halloween candy for meL

Idiom Collages

It wasn’t until I started teaching that I found myself analyzing language and trying to find creative ways to pass language on to my (mostly) ESL students. What I’ve realized is that todays’ speech is full of figurative language, idioms, colloquialisms and slang. These things make English seem complex, confusing, and difficult to learn for students. But the students aren’t always the only ones struggling with it; teaching English can be just as daunting.

In an effort to bring fun back into learning English, I decided to try something new with teaching idioms. We started the lesson by looking at some common idioms and their meanings then broke down the difference between literal and figurative meanings. Later we chose our favorite idiom and made a contrasting collage from magazine clippings to explain the meaning of the idioms. Not only did they learn some new expressions, they had a blast bring those expressions to life. Once the collages were finished, each student shared what they created. If you have any other ideas of how you’ve taught figurative language, feel free to leave a comment for me. Thanks and have a great weekend!