Summer School Sunday {with a goodie for you too!}

So, my summer break is taking a temporary hiatus.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be teaching summer school for the next two weeks.  Then I get a week off but that's the week before school starts!

So, I wanted to show you what I've got in store for my kiddos at summer school...

We will be working hard on our math facts.  I'm teaching summer school to incoming 3rd graders so we will be hitting hard on addition and subtraction facts.

I'll be using lots of the resources from Cynthia at My Kind of teaching.

She's put together a crazy comprehensive pack to help students master their facts throughout the year.  Now, I've only got two weeks... but I LOVE the fact PDFs she created.  They're kid of like PowerPoints, except you don't need PPT to do them.  I'll be displaying them and using my Mimio pad to click through the pages as my kiddos write answers on white boards.

We'll also be using some of Rachel's (aka The Tattooed Teacher) sweet summarizing activities to work on our comprehension skills.

Both of these packs are available at an incredible price until the end of the day today as part of the great bundle on Educents.  Today's the last day for it!!!

I also put together my 2nd grade 100 Days to CCSS Success: ELA edition to use as quick filler activities with these summer school kiddos.  I think this will be a great way to start the year with my new kiddos too... especially as MEAP review!

I've shared how my 3rd grade one looks before:

I did the 2nd grade one a little differently...

And here's the inside of 2nd grade with all of the review pages...

You can find them all (1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade versions) on TpT if you're interested!  I'm pretty proud of these babies!

I'm looking forward to easing into the swing of things nice and slowly with this tiny group of kiddos!

I'm also wrapping up stuff for this coming year with my soon-to-be students.

I just got this amazing poster that I designed on Vista Print to celebrate my "Lunch Bunch" kiddos each week.  My students can earn the privilege to eat lunch with me in the room on Friday for passing a certain number of AR tests, being invited, or competing their homework for the entire month.  They write their names on sticky notes and stick them to the sign.  I LOVE this new sign!

Isn't it too cute?!

I am also working on putting together a data folder for my students this year.  It's mostly done and they'll be tracking things like math fact progress, spelling test scores, grammar snapshot scores, AR points earned each marking period, AIMS Web fluency scores, personal goals in reading, math, and behavior for each marking period, and then "yes" or "not yet" on their progress on the CCSS ELA standards we're doing each marking period.

I'm really excited about putting this power in my students' hands.  We do a lot of thinking and talking about our progress and it's so powerful for kids to see that they are getting better... or getting stagnant... or falling behind.  When I did my Master's Degree project 4 years ago, I did it on student goal setting and tracking in oral reading fluency.  When kids didn't increase from one week to the next, they had to tell me WHY they did not increase.  That type of thinking and self-monitoring is amazing!

So, I've put together a REALLY basic data folder to share with you.  It's got spelling (for 10, 15, and 20 word lists), grammar, oral reading fluency, math facts, behavior, AR points, sight words, reading level growth, and personal goal forms.

You can get it by clicking the picture below.  I'd love to hear from you if it's something you can use!

And last... don't forget about the giveaway I'm hosting for Learning Resources... you can win FOUR of these:

Just click the pic to go enter!

Graphing Math Facts

Do you like how I did that... put the file at the top instead of making you read through my ramblings to find it? :) You can download the graph for free... and it's even fillable so you can put in your own increments! Please click the document or this link to go to The Teaching Oasis site and download this goodie for freeeeeeeee!

So, I've always done some sort of math fact drill... but not as consistently as I should have. My school uses Everyday Math, which is a program that I do love, but we all know that it lacks in basic fact practice. My kids play the games and have really good strategies for figuring out their facts... but to just instantly know them, well... that's a goal of mine every summer and I always end up just doing the same thing I did (or didn't!) do the year before.

BUT... at the conference I was at last week, I met a teacher from another district who was correcting math fact drill pages and it intrigued me... so I mustered up my courage to start a conversation with her about how she organizes math fact drill and she shared a website with me where you can generate your own math fact practice sheets. Here's the link! I did my own hunting and found this site too... which I like the look of the printables better.

Anyway, after talking with her, I have a new resolve to be consistent in how I do math fact drill. So, the new plan for next year is to develop a set of these sheets that increase in sum starting with a sheet that has sums from 0-8, then going up to sums of 10, and gradually ending around sums of 15. I'm going to do sheets with 40 problems and give my kids 2 minutes. That's three seconds a problem. I plan to do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They will each have a data folder and inside the folder, will be the file above and I'll go through prior to each test and slip in the page they need next. In order to move on to the next level (or sum set), they will have to get 3 in a row 100% correct for whatever sum they are on.

So, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the drill and Tuesday and Thursday will be some other sort of memory work like me flashing up a shape for 2 seconds and then asking questions about the shape... or flashing up a group of objects and asking them to tell me how many were in the group.

I hope that makes sense. I think this document will be perfect alongside the learning targets tracker I posted last time!

When I got my Master's degree, I did a project where students set goals for and graphed their own oral reading fluency progress and it was very powerful to put that responsibility into their hands. I'm hopeful that having them be involved in their math facts will prove to be equally exciting and fruitful!

Learning Targets

So, day two of "Quality Assessment" training concluded today and was full of more great information and resources.

I'm going to keep this blog post brief so you can get right to the resource and have time to enjoy your weekend, rather than spend the whole thing trying to read through my long winded post! :)

I love the idea of students knowing the learning target... and not just knowing it or having it posted on their assessment (which I also LOVE!) but being accountable and responsible to keep track of how they are meeting it and reflect on their own level of mastery.

So, I adapted the following document from one I was given today that was originally made by Lighthouse Learning Community, Inc. Mine is a little more basic but I made it fillable so that you can put in your own subject and type in your own kid-friendly "I can" statements related to the learning target. The other columns for evidence, however, are not fillable because that is where the students will document tasks they have done that relate to the learning target.

Now, I'm not so crazy to think that my kids will do this on their own. So even though I will be telling them what tasks to write where for their evidence, I think that it will be powerful for them to do the documentation. I also figure that I will have them rate their level of understanding/mastery after the addition of each task with a pencil... that way as they complete more tasks, they can change their level of mastery if they need to.

I don't have the logistics of this worked out yet, but I'm envisioning some sort of "data folder" for each kid where they will have several of these sheets, graphs for graphing math fact mastery, etc... and I will pre-make these before school begins with the most essential of essential learning targets in each one. I hope that makes sense!

Look for more posts in the future about learning targets... I'm all jazzed about this now and feel like a bad teacher for not having realized the importance of this before! The presenter said something that I'll leave you with that helps me keep things like this in perspective... she said, "What we know today does not make what we did yesterday wrong". How powerful is that?!

So, I guess this post didn't turn out to be that short after all... once I simmer down about this blogging thing, hopefully I'll learn to be more concise! :)