Tackling BULLIES in School! A Teaching Resource and a FREEBIE!

Your school year has begun, and you have a new crew of students that you are working to learn more about every day!  You have created a seating chart, learned student names, taught those first lessons, and things seem off to a successful start.  Then out of no where, you get wind that things aren't as copacetic as you thought, your students are having issues and bullying behavior is under way.  What do you do?

I have found the first days of school to be magical, but quickly learn that negative peer interactions and strained friendships can derail a school day for my students before they have even gotten started in the classroom.  So I have armed myself with a few tools that I can utilize on the fly.

I have found that many of the novels I LOVE to share with my students incorporate bullying, which inspired this teaching resource. I want my students to 1) recognize bullying behavior, and 2) have tools to respond. These CHIT CHAT cards will encourage both of those goals.

While you don't have to read these novels, I have found various scenarios of bullying from popular novels and shared these scenes in order to generate discussion with my students through these CHIT CHAT CARDS. I want them to be able to identify bullying behavior and determine how they would respond if they were a witness or observer. Students will simply: read the scene shared on the card, discuss the scenario, and respond based on the focus questions on the chit chat cards.  You can utilize these with partners, small groups, or for whole class discussion.  You will have nothing to grade, but everything to gain in the positive peer relations you will help develop in your classroom environment.

 As a language arts teacher, bullying is a topic that also inspires strong feelings in writing.  Capitalize on that with these FREEBIE journal prompts.  

If you are looking for novels that incorporate bullying into the plot, check these out...

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis

Crash by Jerry Spinelli 

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

The Lottery Rose by Irene Hunt

The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo

The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman

Wringer by Jerry Spinelli

We can't change that bullying exists, but we can do everything in our power to help our students see the impact and work to change a bullying culture in a positive way.

Best of luck this school year!

Celebrating Veteran's Day-Upper Elementary to Middle School

It is Monday and the perfect day to find an ideal mentor text to share with your students.  This week's focus is Veteran's Day.  Whether you have a special veteran in your life or not, this is one of those holidays that is essential to share with our students.  We must help them understand all that our veterans have sacrificed for our country and continue to do so in order to maintain our freedoms.  So here is my idea for you...

While there are a number of great reads and read alouds, this is one that is most meaningful to my upper elementary students because it involves a dog.  I am not sure about you, but the majority of my students are pet owners and animal lovers.  This text is engaging because it is about a feral dog who forms a bond with Major Brian Dennis, a Marine fighting in Iraq.  When Dennis' troop is relocated, Nubs travels over 70 miles to find his special human friend.  It is a story about the kindness of a soldier and the strong-will of a dog who is seeking the perfect owner.

Read more »

Do you have reading pals? Interactive Notebooks for Reading Pals...Summer Stock Up on this perfect tool!

Each year my sixth graders are teamed up with the first graders as a way to connect our diverse groups of learners.  The idea began about six years ago when I realized that many of my sixth graders needed practice to enhance fluency, and my first grade teaching pal, Mrs. Eshman, had students that really needed practice listening to reading.  We decided it was the perfect match!  We brought the students to the cafeteria with books in hand, paired them up, and prepared for them to sit together and read.

My 6th graders have always loved reading with their reading buddies.  It is a treat each week to see a special little person that looks just as forward to spending time with them.   For the first few weeks it is a novelty and everyone seems to be on their best behavior, but as the first weeks of school turn into months, focus eases up and merely reading is no longer an activity that keeps everyone’s attention. 

Over the last few years I have found that the reading time seems to go very quickly and my sixth graders are trying to find the best way to fill up the rest of their time.  The little ones can get off task easily, which can be a challenge for my sixth graders to manage.  In addition, my sixth graders that are supposed to be the role models can have issues of their own at times.  Despite teacher re-direction, the time wasn’t being utilized the way we had envisioned.

After one week of far too much re-focusing of our students, we began planning and coordinating what was read from that point on.  It was ideal.  The sixth graders were armed with more than a book, and wanted to take ownership over not just reading, but also helping their first grade pal develop a skill.

Teachers are busy and have minimal time for extras, and so this interactive notebook was born.  Instead of having to plan each week for reading pals, this is the tool that will allow your older and younger students to thrive when working together.  The work is done for you!  Simply print, grab student book boxes/baskets, cut, glue, and go!  Your students will be more than excited to work together and there is enough fun to keep your reading pals engaged.  There is nothing like seeing the older students guiding the younger learners.

Check out this tool in action and grab this sampler...any summer time you had scheduled to plan for reading pals is no longer needed.  Grab this sampler and get back to some fun in the sun!

Here is a pic of one of the activities that helps the old pal and younger pal get to know each other.  It leads into the perfect tool to enhance understanding of compare and contrast and Venn diagrams.

Here is the entire Reading Pals Interactive Notebook Tool Kit for Grades 1-6.

Top 5 Ways You KNOW State Testing is OVER...and what to teach now!

State testing is one element of teaching that is so very tricky!  In the one sense it is a data tool that holds teachers accountable for student learning, but in another sense it is THE tool that is the focus of the success or failure of the school year!

Sadly, I have heard some of the best teachers I know say things like, "I have been practicing my 'Welcome to Starbucks, what can I get for you?' in preparation for the results of my state evaluation."  These are some of the best of the best, I might add!

Testing is stressful for teachers, overwhelming for students, and the moment it is completed, there is a change in atmosphere in EVERY school building.  Here are the ways you know testing is over.

1. These books are now back on every library shelf because no one wants to see them!!!
   
   
   2.  The shelves at Walmart and Target!  If you are in need of bags of mints, boxes of Goldfish, and #2 pencils, it may be awhile!
   
   
   
   
   
   3. This madness has halted on You Tube!
   
   
   
   
   
   
   4.  Every field trip and assembly for the year is crammed into the remaining days of the year!
   
   

   

   
   
   5. There is a whole lot more of this!
   
   

   

   
   

   
   

   If you are looking to have a little fun with your students for the times when you are not in an assembly, on a field trip, or spending some extra minutes enjoying recess, here are some resources you might find both helpful and useful at keeping students engaged.

 I have also teamed up with Educents and Buy Sell Teach with of instant downloads for you! It includes printables, activities, readers theaters, close reads, and much more!  It's a mixture of reading, math, and social studies so you are sure to find a great mix of items to teach in May!

My products included will surely be loved by your students!

   

Two of my products are: Baseball Close Reading Bundle to enhance reading comprehension with fun, high-interest passages that will engage your readers.  Extension activities included will have your students begging to read more informational text.  

Reader's Theater is an essential tool that builds both fluency and reading comprehension. By including Reader's Theater into your middle grades and middleschool classroom, you are allowing for your students to transform into enthusiastic readers of text. This Reader's Theater MEGA Bundle includes 15-high-interest selections that will have your students begging to perform. In addition, each comes with clear directions for keeping students focused and on-task, reader response questions, word work activities using context clues, journal topics, graphic organizers for post-reading exercises, and other extension activities. Each NO-PREP, PRINT AND GO script can be used independently from the others.

For a limited time it is $10.99 from Educents which is about 80% off!  

You can also take peek at some of the other products included in the bundle at any of the links below!

An InLinkz Link-up

Have fun teaching everyone!

May the 4th be with you...My Top 4 Novel Units

In the teaching world it can feel like you are standing on an island at times.  Despite all of the work that happens in the classroom, the interactions you have with other teacher and staff during the course of a day, and the numerous meetings attended each day, it can sometimes feel like we are fighting an uphill battle all by ourselves.  

As the only 6th grade reading and language arts teacher in my building I am at a loss at times to find the perfect learning tools for my students.  One size does not fit all in my situation, and our Reading Street 6th Grade Level resource is not always the perfect tool for teaching my learners.  With students at such diverse levels-believe it or not-from kindergarten-tenth grade level, I have quite a span of readers. 

What's a reading teacher to do, but work to find the tools or MAKE them in order to make sure everyone is learning and growing.  So that is what I do!

Novel units are a huge part of my instruction.  While I do utilize Reading Street, I do believe that students need to read WHOLE texts and NOVELS.  I can honestly say that there are some students that arrive in my classroom is the fall and have never read an entire novel cover to cover by themselves.  I take this sad reality, and turn it into a positive goal.  In order to make ensure my students leave me as better readers, I help them find texts that they won't want to put down and help them to navigate them successfully.

A few novel units I have created for my students have become hits with others on my TpT store.  In fact, my top selling four products are novel units.  I want to share them with you today.  Each unit is common core aligned and comes with an answer key in order to make your life as easy as possible as a teacher...something we all need.  Take a look below at how I utilize each of these tried and true tools with my 6th grade learners...

     

Crash by Jerry Spinelli is the novel I love to begin the school year with in order to model a few of the different elements of the Daily 5-listen to reading when I read aloud, read to someone for partner read, and read to self when reading independently.  Because it is a high-interest, realistic fiction text that my students connect with so well, it is one that they can't seem to get enough of reading.  In addition, a theme of the novel is bullying, which I believe to be a perfect issue to tackle right at the start of the year.  The rich discussion that comes from this novel is incredible.  I find that students think some of the bullying in the beginning of the novel by Crash toward Penn is humorous, but by the end, no one is laughing when Penn is getting mistreated by Mike DeLuca.  Lastly, this novel makes it easy to enhance student understanding of setting, point of view, antagonist vs. protagonist, and flashback.

How do I utilize these novels? I make each student their own novel folder with the novel unit inside.  We do share books because I teach 60+ students and only have 22 novels.  This is one that I bought for my classroom library, but the public library does have a teacher collection that can be reserved. The chapters are incredibly short in this novel, so I will always read aloud at least one chapter each day.  We will answer a few of the novel unit questions and engage in discussion about what has been read.  Next, the students will partner read or work independently on the remaining chapters and corresponding questions assigned for the day.  I will also pull students in small groups and work with those that might need more assistance.

I created the Chocolate Fever and The Boxcar Children novel units for my intervention crew this past school year.  They were 6th graders that were eager to achieve as learners, but struggling readers.  I wanted them to have success with high-interest novels that they would enjoy reading.  also, it is imperative that students have success reading complete novels.  Both of these texts made that happen for my intervention students.  Each of these units were incredibly well-received. 

 

My intervention group read 3 more of The Boxcar Children novels after tackling this one.  Many of the students in that group had never read a mystery and loved trying to infer how things would turn out.  They loved reading these novels aloud, which really improved their fluency.  In addition, our discussions were terrific.  If you are looking for books to read with upper elementary intervention kiddos, this is the perfect series.

I am a Jerry Spinelli fanatic.  I just adore the novels he writes because I feel they really make an impact on my male readers.  His main characters tend to be boys dealing with various issues of which my male students can relate.  Wringer is the same way as Crash, but deals with peer pressure and how we sometimes go along with something just because others are, not because we agree.  Palmer LaRue really battles that in this novel with the idea of having to become a wringer.  Like Crash, this novel makes it easy to enhance student understanding of setting, point of view, and flashback.

If you are looking to enhance your classroom library, these are perfect books for your upper elementary students!  Grab these discounted novel units to save you some planning time and money!

Happy Reading!

Common Core Novel Based Questions for Crash by Jerry Spinelli

One of my favorite novels to teach at the middle grade level is Crash by Jerry Spinelli.  In fact, it is the perfect text to begin the school year with because students will be able to make personal connections as the characters begin their school year as well.

The story begins with the narrator, John Coogan, explaining through flashback how he got his nickname, Crash.  He then goes on to share how another major character, Penn Webb, came into his life.

Flash forward to the first day of seventh grade, and the story takes off for student readers.  While I love this book as a read aloud, it is also a perfect literature circle text.  Chapters are short, holding student attention, and each chapter ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, begging for readers to continue on.  I can't tell you how often I HAVE to stop reading due to needing to switch classes and students are shouting, "ONE MORE PAGE!"  It is that good.

Over the years I have taught the novel in different ways, but I have utilized the same 67 questions for student response to check for understanding.  I generated these questions with the idea that students would read them before reading the text, list page numbers where they could go into the text to find their answers, and respond in complete sentences with correct capitalization, grammar, and punctuation. In addition, I wanted my students to answer both literal, inferential, short answer, and extended response questions.

If you are looking for a novel to teach with common core based questions that go chapter by chapter, check out this 18 page resource in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.