First Week of 3rd

hello everyone!

Last week was our first full week of school and it was as insane as ever. But I survived! 

Isn't that basically the only goal for the first week? 

I have an amazing group of kiddos this year. They are super sweet. However, I always forget how long it takes new 3rd graders to pick up routines and gain that independence (is this just us or an overall thing?)

So, while this week was mostly filled with procedures, community building, set-up (1-1 iPads is amazing but also the bane of my existence, ya know?) we actually did a few content-related things as well.

I am always so intrigued about how people plan/organize themselves for each week (or other unit of time if you don't do weeks) so I am going to show you a bit about how I do it. I can never seem to keep up with a paper planner (they are beautiful and I so wish I could) so digital is the way to go for me. I just use Keynote on my MacBook to do all of my planning. I create a Keynote for each week and keep them in a folder on my desktop. The Keynote has a schedule for each day followed by the resources I might need and slides I will use while teaching. Having everything in one place makes it easy for me to access everything I need.

On Monday, I had my kids start their home reading routine. When they enter the room, students must go to the leveled library and find a book on their current level to take home for reading. This is the only "homework" I am doing this year. 

The rest of our morning routine includes students doing something on their iPads. I use several different apps (quizizz, kahoot, that quiz, etc.) to do quick reviews of things we practiced the day before. 

Then, we go onto morning meeting. This is usually one of my favorite parts of the day. I love getting to know my students and watch them getting to know each other. We do morning meeting in our central library area. The leader gets to sit on the couch with me and will eventually run the meeting. 

We played a would you rather game, reviewed and practiced some procedures, and went over our schedule (again) (anybody else get so tired of the schedule questions the first few weeks?!) 

We did a writing lesson over friendly letters and have my kids write letters to anyone they want. I also tell them if they write to someone in the school, I will do my best to deliver it. This is an awesome first writing project because everyone wants to write to their old teacher.

Then, we start our practice for Daily 5. I set up my classroom for students to choose where they go for each Daily 5 round. They also have a lot of open choice for each option (read, write, word work, listen). This helps my kids have agency, keeps them engaged, and is less planning for me. Having open ended choices keeps people from "finishing" and my kids really love it.

But it takes a lot of work up front. We spend a lot of time talking about how to make choices and practicing. The first week we do reading stamina and practice all of our writing choices. I can write more about the choices my students have in another post. Toward the end of the week, we still start practicing word work. 

Daily 5 set-up is always the one thing I wish to get through as quick as possible. It's important but painstaking and I long to start seeing guided reading groups and diving into books. 

After Daily 5 we will do another reading mini-lesson and then go into stations. In our room, stations is much more rigid than Daily 5. It's how I choose to break up our curriculum instead of doing it all whole group. I see kids twice a week in this station time. The first time I see them, we do vocabulary. My kids learn & remember their words so much better when we go over them in a small group. Each group's vocabulary charts turn out so different and personal to them. The second time I see them, we do a comprehension activity with our story. Sometimes I use the curriculum story and sometimes I use a trade book. This week we are using Do Unto Otters (perfect back to school book). 

In other stations, students practice words on spelling city, do an explicit writing project, and listen & answer questions about our weekly story on a Nearpod.

For math, we did a place value review and spent time setting up station expectations. I introduced my students to our Buddy Math routine (see more here) and we all practiced. 

The next day, we practiced our game and then finally we practiced what to do on the iPad. 

By Thursday, we were doing math stations. My students absolutely rocked it. Hands down, favorite part of our day. 

Looking back, we packed a lot into our first week! We also did some visualization, types of sentences (four corners is their new favorite!), and reviewed synonyms (I have, who has is their new favorite!)

I cannot wait for the rest of an incredible year!

What did your first week look like? Leave your link below because I love to check them all out!

Math Stations!

Hey! A blog post! This is a post dedicated to how I run math stations in my 3rd grade classroom.

Math stations is definitely a favorite part of my day but it took me a long time to figure out a way to run them that I really like.

In case you are new to my blog/social media, math is my favorite subject to teach. I was fortunate enough to have some amazing professors in college that opened my eyes to the beauty of mathematics. I immediately knew that the way I had learned math had done me a huge disservice. Because of that, I maintain some very important ideals about math in my classroom. I run a classroom that focuses on problem-solving, conceptual understanding, and student-led (no algorithm) strategies. I care very little about my students answers in comparison to their level of understanding and ability to explain. Because of this, I rely heavily on interviews. It's simply too difficult to get to every student and probe them deeply when I am teaching whole group. It's also very difficult to help students hone their specific strategies and help them make those critical connections when I am with the whole group. Stations allow me to speak to individual students, differentiate in an authentic way, and give my students choice.

In my room, we have 4 stations:

Teacher table

iPad

Games

Buddy Math

I see all of my 4 groups each day. I feel like I have such a diverse range of needs in math that it better serves my kids to have a large chunk of small group time. I cut whole group down to 10 minutes in order to get this time. I do not regret it.

Teacher table is where I do my small group instruction.

iPad is where my students can do math apps - our favorites are Prodigy, MathRun, and Slide Math (this one is really cool and collaborative). My remediate students (who are usually in a group together) have a Reflex math account from our district and they will do that at this time.

Game station is as structured or loose as I want it to be. I will usually spend each Friday afternoon teaching my students the game for the next week and giving them time to practice. At first, I would make them very content specific games but as I transitioned into a more problem-centered classroom, I started using card and/or dice games. By this time of year, I just leave the cards and dice out and let my students choose the game they want to play from all the ones we have learned. I love listening to this station.

Some of our favorite card games are Salute, Golf, War.

Some of our favorite dice games are Pig!, Farkle, 101 and out, or Yahtzee (Place Value Yahtzee is also good).

Buddy math is the station I spent a lot of time perfecting. I knew my students needed to do some "math work" for practice on certain skills but I also wanted it to have a lot of choice and for them to be able to work with friends.

This is the routine we settled on and it works so well for us. Each week my students get a buddy math sheet. There are 8 squares on the page. They MUST complete 5 squares. If they complete 5 before Friday, they keep working toward all 8. IF they get to all 8 squares with extra time, they are able to get on their iPad (like extra iPad time) (VERY few of them do this)

On Fridays, my students turn in. We have this weird block of time in between specials and lunch that's just 30 minutes. They bring me their sheet and what they've completed. I use my computer to check any digital work and record scores on their sheet. If they've completed 5 they get the rest of the time free. I use this time right then and there to call kids back to go over a concept they missed, individually or in small groups (if needed). If students didn't work hard that week, they have to work through that time. Whatever time is left when they finished, they get free. Everyone turns in at the end of that time.

Wanna see a sheet?

I am always looking for activities to make buddy math sheets. Some are:

ThatQuiz - easy to set up, great for computational practice, grades for me - you can also choose the slide options and put task cards right in there. As long as you include 4 answer choices on the task card, it will grade them for you. Sweet!

Nearpod - I create nearpod for each skill, these are often task cards that I just put in the draw it mode. OR I include a video demonstration of a skill (for example, open number lines), have students practice on a few draw it slides and do a quiz at the end. It grades the quizzes, but cannot grade the drawings (obviously) but it will give me a participation score so I can easily see who finished and who "Finished!" mhmm.

Quizizz - easy to create by pulling questions from their database, fun for the kids (they always choose this!), graded for me!

Kahoot (assigned as "homework") - a Kahoot that students do on their own time, another fun way to practice skills
Google Forms - Google Forms is a great way to quiz your students. I just create a form with various types of questions (multiple choice, shorts answer, etc.) and make sure that I click the "response validation" box so that students cannot move on until they've entered the correct answer. The best part is that I get a spreadsheet of everyone's answers/information created for me. 

IXL: students complete 2-3 IXL practices - sometimes I assign a certain skill, sometimes I just say "3rd grade".- easy for me to check

An online game - I use bit.ly to put a game url and paste it into the sheet. Students then play and screenshot a certain target score/goal. They show me their screenshot on Friday to count the square.

Fact sheet - just can't get around it - some students just love doing them, I never time them or grade them but they can choose to practice that way

Skill/Review worksheets - these change weekly but they're the ONLY copies (besides the buddy math sheets themselves) I copy for math. Most of them I make myself, but sometimes I just find something that is good practice of our skill.

During buddy math, I encourage students to work together and help each other. My table is where the largest chunk of learning is happening. Students also sit around the room as they work.

Buddy math is amazing because I can add a variety of activities and make sure they are tailored to exactly what my kids need. They get choice which helps them to have ownership of their learning.

My students and I have absolutely loved this system for math stations.

Let me know how you conduct stations in your room!

Happy teaching!

Non-Scale Victories

I recently heard an analogy I would like to share with you.

Say you set a goal of losing weight. So you start working out and eating healthy and adopt a plan you think will help you reach that goal. After some time, you step on the scale and see that you haven't lost any weight. It doesn't make logical sense to blame the scale, get angry, pick it up and smash it, right? You need to go and readjust your plan.

This analogy was given in connection to using data (specifically summative standardized test data) to improve practices in school.
I want to break the analogy down a bit and look at it more deeply.

One, in order for this to hold up - you have to assume that the tool you are using to monitor progress toward your goal is a tool you have complete faith in. If I want to lose weight, I choose the scale as my tool because I have faith that the scale will give me complete and accurate information. Weight is quantifiable (it's a number)(not like trying to elicit everything a person knows in their brain, which is completely not quanitfiable). I am going to pick a scale I know isn't broken or malfunctioning. I go in with faith in that tool.

Do teachers have faith in their state standardized tests as a tool to tell them how they are doing? How many times have you seen a state test question that simply doesn't make any sense and/or doesn't actually assess what it thinks it does? How many times have you watched kids take a state test in under 5 minutes or fall asleep? How many times have you seen a kid put an incorrect answer only to ask them about it and their explanation holds up (and is actually really genius...)? How many times have you seen a kid answer correctly and probe them (please tell me you do) and find they didn't actually understand it at all...

We don't have good faith in our tool. You gave us a scale that isn't properly calibrated. It isn't showing all the hard work that we did at all. So yeah, we might get a little angry at it.

But let's keep going with this analogy.
If you've ever worked with a personal trainer or participated in a diet program, you've probably heard or used the term "non-scale victory". A non-scale victory is a way to know that you are having success without using the scale. This is a very personal process. You must know your body very well. Non-scale victories might include noticing your clothes fit differently, having more confidence, getting compliments from people, etc.
Most trainers will tell you that non-scale victories are actually BETTER than seeing a number go down on the scale.
How does this relate to our schools?
Well, if we want teachers that teach kids to be good test-takers, than probably not at all.
But what is your true purpose as an educator?
Let's go back to health for a moment.
Let's get deep.

Is the point really to lose weight? Or is the point really to be healthy, feel good, have more confidence and self-esteem; in short, create a lifestyle?
It's an easy answer, isn't it?

So is it our goal to get kids to earn a number? Or is the point for them to be educationally/academically/emotionally healthy, feel good, have confidence, and create a lifestyle as a life-long learner?

I get so tired of feeling like I have to get my 3rd graders to be good-test-readers-only. Being a good reading tester does NOT mean you are a good reader. It means you are a good reading-tester. And I could spend my time giving my kids worksheet after worksheet and helping them get really good at figuring out how to tackle reading test questions, but what have I actually done for them in terms of their adult reading life? Probably killed it....just like lifting weights until you hurt yourself probably kills your love of fitness..

If your goal in fitness is to be healthy and build a lifestyle, then you have to readjust the terms of your goal and therefore readjust the steps you take to get there. You need to rely on more non-scale victories.

We need more non-scale victories in school.
Remember how I said that non-scale fitness victories were very personal and require you to know your body?

Well, non-scale educational victories require you to know your kids.
They require administrators to trust that teachers know their kids. That teachers can see "the clothes fit differently" (or maybe they don't and then we will address it).

When you workout with a mindset of achieving non-scale victories, you do things to get healthy. You are less likely to do something dangerous just to get a "quick fix". You also don't beat yourself up so much when you have an off day, miss a workout, or eat something amazing. Because you know it's a lifestyle you are working toward.

How amazing would it be to have schools with teachers and administrators that looked for non-scale victories. That don't see failing state test scores as an automatic reflection on the poor practices of their teachers. That have teachers that say "look, this kid didn't pass the state test but I know this kid can read....let me give you some evidence." and administrators that believe them. 

Because we KNOW not every kid is going to pass a state test.
That doesn't always mean they didn't learn. It doesn't mean the teacher didn't work hard enough. It doesn't always mean ANYTHING.

Sometimes it means the kid needs to show it differently. That they didn't care. That they went to sleep. That they got tired. That they had a bad day.

That they lost fat but built muscle ;)

And I know this is almost a pipe dream in our day and age with the policies in place. That state tests are not going away anytime soon.
Neither is the scale.
And legislators are just simply not going to "take our word for it" when it comes to our kids. I get that, too. I still believe there have to be other and more divergent ways to show kids are learning, but I get it.
What we can do is begin to change our mindset within our school. Begin to worry less about the scores that come in and begin to focus more on non-scale victories. Because believe me, a teacher will tell you when a student is struggling.
They will let you know.
Because it kills them. They don't need a bit of data to convince them, and they shouldn't need it for you either.
Start getting to KNOW your kids. Don't teach them to be great test-readers (or great computers for math, but that's a whole different post for another day). Know your kids SO WELL that when they move a centimeter, you notice it. Don't spend so much time looking at your scores that you don't even know the kids behind them.

Teach them to read critically; to think divergently.
And most of all, PLEASE most of all, do something every day that builds their healthy lifestyle as a reader. There's already so much out there trying to kill it.

Go out and get you some victory.
Happy teaching!

Aubree Hurt

Favorite Concept Game - POP! (freebie included)

IT IS FEBRUARY!
That is just so crazy to me.

Happy Thursday guys! Today, I wanted to share a game used regularly in my class. This is one of those games that rocks because you can use it for pretty much any concept, any subject.
I don't recommend using this game to introduce or teach the concept. This is the game I pull out after the anchor charts have been made, the practice has been done, and kids just need to PRACTICE.

It's tried and true POP! There are so many names for this game but I used POP when I taught kinder because...easy CVC. Then, when I moved up it was to hard for me to get used to another name so it stuck.
With POP, you create cards with whatever concept you want kids to practice. In kinder, I had sight word cards. In 3rd, I have fact & opinion cards, cause & effect, fractions, multiplication problems, seriously ANYTHING. You show one card to each kid and if they get it, they keep the card. If they don't, they return it. They collect cards until they pull a POP card at which point they get POPPED.

But what I've done is made my POP games digital. I turned them into slides and now we can easily play as a whole class.

I have all my kids stand up. I start with number 1 (class numbers) and display the slide for them. They answer, stay up if they're right, sit if they're wrong. If a POP slide comes up on their turn, they sit. Kids stay pretty engaged because the slides will loop around again.

Sometimes I will mix this up in a variety of ways. One way to do this is to do random "back from the dead" slides. Pick someone who was out but was paying great attention, sitting nicely, etc. and tell them they get a chance to POP back in. If they answer their slide correctly, they stand back up. (I try to do this with ANY kids that get POPPED without answering a question  - that way everyone answers).

Another thing I will do is play in teams. In this variation, the two teams sit in a circle. Pick a team and have them pick someone to start, they stand up first. They answer, with the help of their team. If they are POPPED, they sit at their seat. The next person in the circle from the other team stands up. You alternate questions with teams. The last team to have members WINS. This way is great if you have students you don't want embarrassed by the 1 on 1 nature. They can still participate but they get team help.

I hope you will try POP in your classroom sometime soon! My kids even love doing a round during inside recess.

And just because it's FEBRUARY and I know things are CRAZY - here is a freebie of the POP we did in my class TODAY. It is Fact and Opinion.

Look for other digital POP games in my TPT store SOON.

Happy teaching!

Digital Word Sorts - Nearpod

Happy Monday teachers!

Today's post is about something I'm really excited to share, mostly because it's about my favorite tech tool. If you haven't already heard about Nearpod, you are truly missing out.
Nearpod is a great tool for interactive lessons, formative assessments, and more. Basically, you can make a presentation that students can access on their own devices using a code. From there, you can add quizzes, activities, videos, etc. My favorite feature, though, is draw it. Wit the draw it tool, you can allow students to draw, write, or type on any slide. Basically, you can create digital task cards, worksheets (although yuck), or basically anything you want.

Just go play around with it. I promise you will love it.

One of my favorite ways to use Nearpod, though, is for our weekly word sorts. I love to have students thinking about words and word parts. I want them to be able to sort our words of the week but I hate the hassle of cutting and pasting...or frankly, even making 24 copies of anything.

So this year I began using Nearpod for our weekly sorts. Each Monday, students come in and enter the code. The first slide they see is the list of words. They look over them and write them down (if you use agendas, this is perfect for that). Then they go to the next slide which is just a blank sort form. Like this

I usually include 4 sections even though they know they don't have to use them all. Or, they can use more. Students use the pen tool or the text tool (what they usually prefer) to sort the words out. Once they turn that in, they go on to the "open response" part. This is where I give them a word part and they must come up with their own words that have that part.
In this sort, I asked students to type 3 plural words that use "ies", 3 plural words that use "es", and 3 other plural words.

Here is an actual student response from our word sort this week. The words use au, aw, and ough.

The best part is, all you have to do is go to "Reports" on your Nearpod home page to see everything students did and submitted. 

Easy, paperless way to get the job done.

If you use digital word sorts, let me know how it goes.

Again, Happy Teaching!

Vocabulary Activities (Upper Elementary)

Happy FRIDAY!
I hope your week went well. I still cannot believe we are nearly though January!
This week I wanted to share with you some vocabulary activities I use in my room. We use the vocabulary associated with our reading curriculum, although sometimes I change it out. I don't think the words matter so much as long as students are increasing the quantity of words they understand. However, I find some curriculum vocabulary to be extremely content specific and not as relevant to my students. For this reason, I like to exchange some of those with words I have noticed my students coming across frequently in reading and not understanding. Something I want to do even better with next year is student led vocabulary. I love the idea of students adding words to a box or poster when they come across words they don't know. From there, the class can pull their vocabulary words. Those kind of words would be perfect for the activities I want to talk about today.

First off, a vocabulary activity I use all year.
Vocabulary Sentence Scramble
 It takes a bit of prep but isn't hard and is so amazing. I got this idea from The Brown Bag Teacher and tweaked it to fit our needs. All you do is get some (preferably colored) sentence strips, a marker, and your vocabulary words. You will need to have a sentence for each word (if you're using curriculum words, there are probably some sentences there or even pull sentences from your story). Write out the sentences on the strip, leaving a blank for the vocabulary word. Then, cut the sentence strip apart word by word. Students work to unscramble the sentence and fill in the blank with the correct vocabulary word. This is always an option for my students at word work and they choose it often. They love the challenge and the puzzle aspect. At first, I would help them by including how many letters the vocabulary word had (instead of a _____ blank, I would put _ _ _ _, etc.) and include the capitalization and punctuation. Throughout the year, I take the help away and students must include the capitalization and punctuation in their recording sheet.

Each week, I create the new sentences, cut them up, throw them in baggies and load them in our word work tubs. Easy peasy. And don't worry if you don't have colored sentence strips (or run out, like I have). You can use a different colored marker for each sentence on white strips and students can separate them back in their baggies that way.

The next activity is another I've seen around the Internet, tweaked, and LOVE. 

Conversation Competition

This may be the easiest way to get your students using their vocabulary words in "conversation" I have seen yet. We did this activity today and all my students were abuzz using their words.

For this one, all you will need is a sheet of paper with the vocabulary words on it like this...

(our vocab words this week)

Put students into partners. Each partner will need one vocabulary sheet and a pencil. Then, have partners stand around the room. (disclaimer: this activity will need some modeling. I picked one of my "higher" vocabulary students to help me walk through the activity before I threw students out there). When you say go, students must take turns using the vocabulary words in a real life sentence (must make sense, try to be relevant and/or creative - make it fun!). When they've used the word, have students initial next to the word on their sheet (disclaimer 2: the first time my students did this, I told them to just checkmark but they lost track of which partner had done that word so initials are better). BOTH partners must use all the words in "conversation" (i.e. each word should have 2 initials). When they've finished (and this will inevitably take longer than they think) they sit. Keep track of the order partners sit. 

Call the first team that sat up to share out their sentences. The class must come to a consensus whether they used the words correctly or not. If they did, they can be the winner. I usually throw out some superlative awards after that. For example, I may say "today, I'm giving a most creative award" and pick a student that came up with a creative sentence. I also do funnies (but appropriate), longest, shortest, etc. But the trick is, the word must be used correctly, tense and all. 

As students get older or more adept, you can make it more challenging by requiring that it be an actual conversation. I found, however, that my 3rd graders weren't quite there yet and it was enough for me that they were using the words. 

How many times have you asked your kids to write sentences using their vocabulary words? Try this instead.

So, there are two of my favorite vocabulary activities for the upper elementary classroom. Vocabulary is so important and I am always searching for more ways to make it relevant and engaging. Share some of your favorite activities with me!

Happy teaching!

Word Work Boggle - LOW prep! (free printables)

Happy JANUARY! We are halfway there! (Can you believe it!?)
Are you as ready as I am to get back to the grind? By that, I mean not ready at all. I love my pajamas.

But alas, we are on our way back. And now that we have been doing Daily 5 for half a year, we are desperate for some new word work options. I have seen the idea of Boggle for ages and love it. But I am notoriously bad about changing out bulletin boards. Plus, I would have kids fly through a board and finish before it was time for me to change it out.

So, I sat down to make Boggle more realistic for our classroom. Enter Mini Boggle Boards. I print, laminate, and throw them into our blue word work tubs. This way students can
* choose the board they would like to work on (there are smaller, bigger, various levels)
* change when they've exhausted a board
* get a differentiated board (for groups I want working on certain things)

As I was making them, I realized how smart it would be to include word parts that I want my kids to internalize. These would be especially good if you are a kinder/1st grade teacher teaching phonics. This gets kids moving away from making simple "sat, hat, mat" words to words that include "tion", "ing", or long vowel patterns.

I hope you can find a way to use these boards in your own classroom! The best part is I am gonna give you the ones my kids use (and love) for FREE. All I ask is that you hop over to Instagram and show some love.

You can find me on Instagram at AubreeTeaches.

OH, you want the printable?

here you go

Happy NEW YEAR!