Howdy, friends!

 

It has been a while since I have written, but I have not forgotten you. I must take a moment to express my gratitude to all of you who read this faithfully or happen to stumble across this link off of Pinterest, Facebook, or some other source. I am very honored that you continue trust me to provide insight into my practice and resources that I use with my students for you, through Teachers Pay Teachers. My Facebook fans have doubled in one week and I have absolutely no idea why! If you have the answer, please comment and let me know! Whatever the case, I am delighted that you would spend part of your busy day here on my blog!

 

For many years, we have been committed to assessing students, whether it be a benchmark or common assessment for a unit or a mastery test, such as the infamous STAAR test (given here in the great state of Texas.)  We saw this significantly increase after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed into legislation. Though much attention has been on the assessment of our students and standards, what has been forgotten is the day-to-day mastery of our learning target.

 

When we teach a unit or subunit, we have many things that need to be taught in order to gain mastery at the end. Each of these pieces can be broken down into daily learning target. "Today, we will learn how that two addends put together make a sum." Or, "today, we will learn how to order numbers from least to greatest."



The daily learning target is what I want my students to know by the end of the day's mini-lesson. We create small goals for our students to master during the week, so that by the week's end, we can give them a summative assessment (on the entire subject). In the last few years, our practice as teachers have changed. More emphasis has been given to the formative assessment of students.

I often use a quick question that the students need to answer or give them some type of application that they need to do on a sticky note. I can use the sticky note to check their understanding of the daily learning target. It often sounds like this: "Draw an example of..." or "Create a..." This promotes higher order thinking/critical thinking skills.

 

Look at the example of the Circle Map (Thinking Maps) of Light Energy. Here is a quick insight into what I think when I see this map at first glance:

1. See the sticky note of "Angry Birds." I may go up to that student and ask, "Tell me why Angry Birds is an example of light energy." Based on the student's response, I would know if they need additional support (intervention) on the topic of light energy.

2. See the sticky notes of the sun, night light, stars, and glow-in-the-dark stickers, I can quickly see that all of those students have a very exact example of light energy, thus demonstrating mastery of the daily learning target in science.



Students were instructed in science to "Draw an example of light energy."

Here is a math example of a number bond unit.



Students were instructed in math to "Create a number bond with two addends." (Texas TEKS K.3AC) 

How do you use sticky notes in your classroom?

 

Happy Stickin'!

 

Laura 

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Laura Williams

Names Chart

Howdy, friends.

It is the second day of kindergarten in Room 109. The students are remembering to push in their chairs and use their walking feet. Hooray!

Today, we focused on our names as we continue some basic "Getting to Know You" activities. Our sweet librarian came in to save the day, since I still have a small voice, fighting a cold, and read Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. The kids really enjoyed the story and the librarian does such a great job reading it with expression and gestures. During the story, they learned the word "dreadful!" I forget how almost everything we do is new and exciting to them!

We created a name chart and compared each others' names. They found this activity to be pretty interesting, it also helps me continue assessing them in their counting skills. The chart took awhile to make, but I did a few names at each sitting so by the end of the day we were finished. We made some basic generalizations about our names because everything is a learning experience even these fun activities!

Many procedural routines were reviewed and practiced today with specific feedback: lining up and exiting the building during a fire drill, pushing in chairs, and rules for playing a language building exercise I play with my kids. (I will have to feature that on the blog sometime. The students I have had in all grades love it!)

ENGAGE: BrainPop Jr.

In the afternoon, we reviewed what the study of science is and watched a BrainPop Jr. video, "Making Observations." It was great to engage the students more into the depth of what scientists do. The video used a lot of academic vocabulary and previewed the science tools that we would be talking about in the "explain" part of our lesson.

EXPLORE/EXPLAIN: Tool or Toy? Sort and Science Tools Tree Map

After the video, we explored the topic with toys and tools. We also played a game with our sorting cards. (These sorting cards come from the wonderful Kindergarten Kindergarten.)  Each student received a card. They had to come up to the front and tell their peers what was on their card, if they thought is was a tool or toy, and why it is a tool or toy. The students really took off during this activity! They were engaged and everyone was using the sentence stems. The words they expressed were pretty amazing. This is the first time they are speaking in an academic content area. Here are a few rationales that were memorable...goggles are for protection, a doll is something you play with, a stuffed animal is for cuddling, a balance is used to see if something is lighter, "the pinchers help you pick up things". The "pinchers" are tweezers! For the record, there was not one item that was mislabeled by these kindergarteners! Is that not amazing?!

Science Tool Charts

Then, we created a Tree Map to organize our tools into four categories. I had the science tool sorting cards printed (these came from our StemScopes subscription) but wasn't too sure how I wanted to use them in the classroom. I got to thinking, it would be cool to put them into a Thinking Map. I played around with the cutout pieces and after two rough drafts came up with the Tree Map featured in the photograph above. Fortunately, I have enough brain power fighting the common cold to think through this stuff!

My kindergarteners are amazing, did I mention that yet? They knew what the word "collect" meant. I am really going to have to challenge them with higher order thinking skills and academic vocabulary. This is something I naturally do, but the "big words" I am used to using with kindergarteners are not "big enough. For instance, I was going to use observe as a word to put into our Cognitive Content Dictionary, but that's out of the picture. I wish kindergartens could take a STAAR test?! Okay, be careful what you wish for! Right?!

The science tools chart was very easy for them. They actually helped me categorize the science tools using these four verbs: collect, observe, measure, record. I look at this chart and think to myself, "This would have been a cool chart in second grade and here my kindergarteners are doing this." This speaks volumes to the Pre-Kindergarten teachers and families! I am very impressed.

That's enough bragging on the new bunch of buckaroos. They are students with great potential and I am eager to continue creating a positive classroom culture that will allow them to grow in their intellect.

Thanks to my faithful readers. To any kindergarten teachers that haven't covered science tools yet, I would highly recommend these two charting activities. I did not do either of these last year, I took a different approach. I think these help them start thinking like scientists quicker and will allow me to use the process skills in a most efficient way.

Happy Observing!

Laura

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Laura Williams

Howdy, friends.

Aside from filling up my shopping cart today on Teachers Pay Teachers, I am preparing my things for the new school year. I have been VERY busy and haven't put as much thought into as I feel I should. I have been doing curriculum writing for my school district in the area of science which consumes a lot of personal time, but I love it!

I created a data analysis and graphing bundle recently based off of what I did in my kindergarten classroom this past year. A big push from our school district last year was graphing since it is so heavily tested in the upper grades on the STAAR test (Texas). I recently completed a "study" on the third, fourth, and fifth grades mathematics assessments and was blown away at the results. See the full results on the Preview for the bundle.

5 Minutes a Day Bundle

Anywho, I proved that data analysis and understanding how to read and interpret data from graphs is very important, especially in the format of a table. Okay, you may have known that--but I proved it to myself! I created and designed more than just a cutesy pack, but a practical pacing guide with scaffolded critical thinking questions (based off questions found on STAAR in the three grade levels--they are shown below clipped together with binder rings--binder rings sold separately.). Looks can be deceiving! THIS IS A HIGHER LEVEL THINKING SKILLS BUNDLE OF JOY!

5 Minute a Day Bundle

The idea behind the pack, and what I do in my classroom, is to devote five minutes a day to graphing and data analysis. I have used a system where I do a small five minute piece a day, and by the end of the week, I have a beautiful graphing wall. Disclaimer: it wasn't so beautiful last year. I used sentence strips, index cards, random colored markers, etc. This is why I dedicated so much time and thought creating this pack for you as it is something I will be using in...three weeks! Saddle up!

Students take ownership as they collect and record the data on the graph of the week (each student "graphs in" weekly). Each day, something different is done we collect on the first day (including converting data on bar graph to a table, questioning, and labeling the parts of the graph to build content-specific academic vocabulary).

5 Minute a Day Bundle

The scaffolded questions are written to be a direct match to the TEKS (Texas Standards). They grow in complexity and are arranged in stages. Stage 1 represents basic "right there" questions while Stage 3 are the most complex questions where students have to combine the data set. In the middle are inferencing questions and basic operations (finding the difference, etc.) As a bonus, I added some sentence stems cards (for English learners) and multiple choice cards (for upper grade to write their own questions.)

There is also an extension piece that is added, especially designed for English learners. Look at the photograph above. Do you see the blue arrows? These are blackline masters and include significant vocabulary for data analysis and graphing. A special piece I like to do with my students is having them label the graph, after we study it for a few days. Not only do they begin learning the content-specific words, but they also have a concrete example for learning these new words. If you label the graph and table every week, can you imagine what smart statisticians you will have in your classroom?

My students were very successful in this method of teaching graphing and data analysis and I know yours will be too!  There is only printing and preparing on your end...everything is done for you!

I hope this post inspires you to incorporate data analysis in your classroom and if you want to use my five minutes-a-day data resource, it's in my TpT shop. 

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Laura Williams