Whale, What's Your Opinion?

It's no secret that I'm kind of obsessed with killer whales right now. After watching the documentary Blackfish, I got kind of interested in these majestic creatures who are too smart and too emotional to be held in tanks. I've wanted to share some of this with my students, but honestly didn't have the time with all the testing hoopla.

Well, as luck (or bad luck) would have it, we had to go to school last Monday. That was supposed to be the first day of our two-week Spring Break. But, with all the snow days we've had this year (none of which actually resulted in me seeing snow, of course), we had to make up the day. I decided that instead of drilling them on test stuff, we were going to have fun! And, boy did we!

A day or two before our make-up day, I had two kids draw a huge killer whale on some butcher paper during centers. I didn't tell them what it was for, but it sure sparked all their little curious minds! They were so excited for what was to come.

The next day, I assigned them a partner and gave them some websites to find information about killer whales in the wild.  They wrote facts on post-it's and then put them on the massive poster. They found a lot of facts!! Afterwards, we talked about some of the interesting information and then I showed them some YouTube videos of killer whales in the wild.

Next, I had then write one paragraph about killer whales in the wild. The paragraph had to have a topic sentence, three details and a closing sentence. We used a blank paragraph template, but I totally forgot to take pictures! 

On the actual make-up day, we started by making a blank poster out of construction paper about killer whales in captivity. I had them divide their paper into a PRO and CON section and we talked about what those mean. 

I showed them a thirty minute video on YouTube called "The Making of Believe." It's a behind the scenes video of SeaWorld Orlando and the trainers interactions with the whales. It was important to me to present the kids with both the good and bad of captivity and let them from their own opinions. You can see from their posters that they started off thinking captivity was great! 

Then, I pulled up a website for kids about the negative effects of captivity.  They added the new information we read under the CON section of ther posters. 

Overall, I think they were shocked at te information we uncovered. The fact that the whales harm the trainers, even kill them, was pretty surprising to them. They said that after watching the video SeaWorld made, they would never think that! Which led to a great discussion about bias and how companies only share things that make them look good to the consumer.

I had te kids write another paragraph using the template about killer whales in captivity. I told them they could include any facts: good or bad or both.

Lastly, they wrote one more paragraph stating their opinion about whether killer whales belong in captivity or not. They had to include reasons that they felt that way.

They worked so hard on their writing and did a really great job! I was very proud of them, because frankly, writing is not their strength. At all. And, try as I might to fit it in, we just don't have a lot of time to devote to it. 

I know it's hard to read because I'm blogging from my phone. Sorry! 

I hung all their work in the hallway. 

I'm so glad I went ahead and taught this little mini unit. I debated about whether it was a good use of time or not. But, I decided that any time I can engage my kids, teach them about hot topics and current events, help them practice research and writing: that's always worth the time. 

And besides, we all need a break from multiple choice now and then. 

Even the teacher. 

Maybe especially the teacher...

Life Lately.

Man alive. 

I blink my eyes and it's March, y'all. When did that happen? 

And, could someone please tell the weather that it's March? Because we just had a snow day today and we have another one tomorrow! 

I'd like to pretend that I'm one of those teachers who is so sad to miss out on a day of learning with her children, but I'm going to be honest with you: I cheered when we got the call. Almost an obscene amount. 

Judge me if you must :)

I'm going to do one of those posts where I just purge all the pictures on my phone. That seems to be my method of operation lately, so why rock the boat? 

I'll start with Valetine's Day. (Wow. I'm a bad blogger.) My kiddos made Love Bugs! They were pretty excited to make these little creatures.

They had to write poems about their bugs. I'd say about half of them did a fabulous job. And, the other half? Well, they tried. Who says poems have to rhyme anyways? The one above was my favorite. I mean, how can you not love a poem that rhymes ambitious with Candylicious? And, who doesn't love pizza rolls? I know I sure do! 

My kids spoiled me rotten, too. Perhaps my best gift was a black lace ( see-through) shirt. I held it up and exclaimed "Thank you!" to the little girl who picked it out and she said "You're welcome! You might want to wear a shirt under it!" Thankyouforthat. 

In other school related news, we set DEA goals that week. I decided I was going to lay it all on the line and set class goals and individual goals. And, y'all, there are some BIG rewards on the line! I had them use stickers to track where they are and they will be easy to move after we take the next test this week. I'm excited to see how much they've grown. Fingers crossed!!

We also kicked "can't" to the curb! And that goes for me, too! 

In baby niece news, we have found some GREAT deals lately! My mom and I have been scouring thrift and consignment shops an found some good stuff!

This sweet little dress was 8 dollars!

Seersucker dress for 4 dollars.

Smocked bubble for 10 dollars.

And, drumroll please...

Smocked bubble for 1 dollar and 75 cents! 

It's fun to find super cute stuff that is cheap. It's all about the hunt! I've also bought a few things for myself :) I'll share those later! 

My little FiFi is doing good! She's as cute as ever. Here are some pictures of her lately:

Last night, it was sleeting and raining and icing. Hard, y'all. I didn't know what todo about taking her out. So, I just put her Halloween costume on her! Ha! She was, ahem, not very pleased with me. But, frankly, I'm used to that :)

She leads a very stressful life. Clearly.

I rearranged my living room. Again.

And, my mom made me this new table cloth for a future nightstand. But I hated to wad it up and throw it in a closet, so I set it up downstairs. 

There are some major house changes happening over here in the next few weeks. My roommate is moving out and getting married and I am doing some major house stuff! Stay tuned for all that! I'm talking moving bedrooms, painting, purchasing a couch: big stuff! 

Lastly, I'm going to leave you with three things I'm loving right now:

1. Cry Baby gum

I bought it for my kids. To hand out as a treat. (Yes, I'm evil. But, I love it when they make crazy faces beause it's so sour! And, before you call DCS, I always give them the choice of sour or regular.) 

But, I can't stop chewing this stuff! Why is it so good? 

2. Girl Scout Cookies

No explanation needed. But, just know that that box is loooong gone, people!

3. Baby chicks

My mom and I went to visit my grandmother this weekend. We went in this country store called Rural King. (No idea. They sell goat food, Duck Dynasty merchandise and Cheetos. So, if that sounds like your cup of tea, be my guest!) But, as we were strolling along the garden section, I heard a chirping. And, I trend to my mom and said "Do you hear that?" She did, so we headed that direction and they had like 12 giant pens of baby chicks! It was seriously the cutest thing I've ever seen! Ever. In the history of the world. 

SEE?

Okay, I'm off to bed. And, when I say "bed" I, of course, mean watching a Real Housewives marathon. Of course. And, I'm not enjoying the Lisa gang-up. Not one little bit. Those ladies better leave my Vanderpumps alone! And that's all I have to say about that. 

Good night, dahhhlings! 

(You read that like Lisa, didn't you?) 

Whining and Watercolors

This week has been quite the week. And, it's only Wednesday. Well, technically it's Thursday. Yeah, I'm blogging at 12:06. In the morning. 

You see, I have a sinus infection. A pretty nasty one. And, by nasty, I mean the kind where your entire face hurts. The kind where your nose feels so dry you think you won't be able to breathe. And then, five minutes later, your nose is running so hard you wish it was dry again. And your face is red and puffy. And your teeth hurt and your shoulders hurt and like I said, nasty.  Waaahhhhh. I'm hoping the antibiotics kick in soon! 

The biggest problem is that I can't sleep. Because I can't lay down and breathe at the same time. Hence, midnight blogging. 

I'm also watching Friday Night Lights. Again. Just thought you'd want to know that. 

So, anyways, long week. I left Finley at my mom and dads this week because I work really late on Tuesdays and I had a dermatologist appointment after school today. Sunday, I jokingly asked my mom if she just wanted to keep her this week and she was like "yeah!" And, once we thought about it a second, it made sense. Better for her to be there than in her cage all week until 6:00 at night. Of course, I got sick and stayed home all day yesterday. Ha! The best laid plans...

I don't know what they did to her. But, this is all she's done since she got home! She's exhausted. But extra snuggly, so I'm not complaining :)

In fact, this is her right now. She usually likes to sleep in her crate. But, she wants to be ON ME. Which, doesn't really help with the "not able to breathe due to suffocation caused by sinus" situation. 

Switching gears. Have you heard of the SnowDome? It's awesome. It's a big dome over the city of Nashville that makes it impossible to snow here. It's awesome. Everyone loves it. 

Did you catch the sarcasm? 

It's literally the single most annoying thing I've ever experienced in my life. I know, you're thinking that's a pretty dramatic statement. But, waaaaahhhhh.

I. Want. Snow. 

It snows north of here. It snows easy of here. It snows west of here. It even snows in dadgum Atlanta! Twice! And, Nashville has had less than an inch of snow in three years, y'all. 

Seriously. Waaaahhhh. 

Whoever is responsible for jinxing the snow in Nashville, I'm gonna' need you to UNDO IT. PLEASE!!!

Okay, switching gears again. One last time...

Have you ever heard of the app Waterlogue? It's sort of addicting and pretty cool, I have to say. It's an app that paints your pictures as watercolors. I know!!! If only I had a pretty picture of snow... waaahhhhhh.

Here are some of the pictures I've done...

Of course, my little Fin...

My house...

An old baby picture...

Lipscomb University, my old stomping grounds...

My classroom...

Beach trip...

My bedroom...

My brother's wedding...

Hills of Tennessee... 

Baseball game...

Seriously, you should check out this app. It's a lot lf fun! My mom and I are gonna print some and put them in frames. Probably. We'll see if it actually happens ;)

Okay, I think I'm done whining for tonight. 

Hopefully, I can sleep now. 

I'll be dreaming of white fluffy flakes, since that's the only place I'll see them. 

Goodnight!

The Scoop at School

As I said in my post last night, I've been terrible at blogging about school this year. So, this is my attempt to share some of the things my third graders have been working on since we got back from the break. 

The break that started out as two weeks and then slowly crept closer and closer to three weeks. Maybe that's why it took me a full week to get readjusted to being back at school. And, quite honestly, I'm not positive those cute little kiddos I spend my days with are adjusted yet! Ha.

Anyways, the first thing I want to share is our text-tackling strategy. Last year, about a month before TCAP, I realized that the main reason my kids were terrible at answering questions was because they had no strategies to attack the test. Just the length alone completely overwhelmed them! I know what you're thinking... Really, it took you until a month before the test to figure this out? But, remember, it was my first time teaching third grade and I just had no idea what I was doing. 

That's not at all to say that I know what I'm doing now, because I DO NOT. But, I made the decision this year to expose them to long and difficult texts, all the time, and teach them how to work through them.

So, I used the strategy I found last year and then adjusted it a little and came up with this: 

And, guys, we use it. We use it weekly, if not daily. I still teach reading skills and Common Core. I do. But, I teach them within difficult text. And, I try not to force it. Because, finding the topic sentence is practicing main idea. And cause and effect comes up in pretty much every passage we read. And, compare and contrast? It's everywhere. I just feel like it needs to come naturally. 

And, in my humble and not-so proven opinion, there's no better skill I can teach them than to be able to tackle any text I put in front of them.

I try to find passages that they'll enjoy. We've read about the Titanic, sea turtles, whales and about a million natural disasters. They really like those! Last week, I chose two passages about a blast in Siberia. One was a scientific review and one was an eye-witness account. Here are some pictures of what their passages look like when we do this: 

To this point, we've done it together mostly. We read a paragraph at a time and go through each step together. I never tell them what to underline or what to circle, but we share our thoughts and discuss what's happening in the text. 

My next goal is to get them doing it completely on their own. They've done it on their own some, but we still need more work on it. And, we've got plenty of time to practice it. If we didn't, I'd make the time. 

We've also worked on prefixes and suffixes. We transformed my extra word wall into a word parts wall. 

We use index cards to dissect the words. White cards are the root words, yellow cards are prefixes and blue cards are suffixes. They're getting better at it, but it's one of those things that I never quite feel like I can stop because they've all completely got it. Believe me, there aren't too many of those skills :)

In math, we've been focusing on graphing.  We practiced it for a week and then this week, they did a graphing project. I can take NO credit for this project! This is something that my team did loooong before I was a part of it. I'm so blessed to be on a team that works so well together. I don't say that enough. 

But, anyways, the kids got to come up with their own topic/question, collect the data and make graphs and questions to go along with it. 

To model this, I let them all have a Skittle and we graphed the data five different ways. 

Here are the projects they made:

The yellow flip books are where they wrote their questions. I was able to modify the project by giving them all different amounts of questions. 

We also started a little landform mini-unit this week. They thought this was really fun and were extremely into their projects. 

We obviously have a few more to do.

And, speaking of exciting, this little book right here has provided quite the entertainment during these freezing cold days when we can't go out to recess:

Seriously, not a single kid all week has even mentioned recess. They practically run back from lunch and then plop down on the carpet and don't say a word until I stop reading 15 minutes later. Then, they usually moan and groan and beg for me to read more. Which, I totally wish I could! I'd love to just sit and read this book to them all day long! Being as obsessed with gods and goddesses as they are, it's really been a fun experience. And, I've never read it before so it's exciting for me, too! We're on Chapter 10 and it's getting GOOD, y'all! 

Okay, one last thing. 

Look what made a return to my classroom this week: Evil TCAP Man! We are not fans of this man, believe me. But, I honestly think this "guy" is a great motivator to the kids. We tell the kids that he works in Washington and his job is to make kids fail the TCAP. If the kids pass the test, then he didn't do his job and he gets fired! They are all about getting this guy canned from his job! Each problem we do, I have the kids verbalize to me how he tried to trick them in that problem. 

Plus, it's funny when I find them staring at his picture. One kid shook her head sadly and said " He looks so normal! Why would he do this?" Ha! 

I also added a new thing to my morning meeting. We now have a class song. It's called Sieze the Day and it's from the Newsies soundtrack. If you don't know it, google it. Seriously, it's the catchiest song ever. And it's really short! We play it every morning now and the kids just sing along. We went through the lyrics and talked about what they meant and I applied it all to the Big Test. 

Sieze the Day means we're going to take advantage of every single minute we have to prepare. Seriously, if they're lethargic, all I have to say is seize the day and they're a brand new bunch!

Slay the giant means the test. That's the big thing we're facing and we're going to take it down! 

One for all and all for one means that it takes every single one of us to do our part. It's not a success unless every single person does their best.

It's just a cute song that gets those kiddos pumped up to learn every day. 

I know it sounds like I'm TCAP obsessed from this post. And, I'm really not. But, in my mind, from now until then, we're in prep mode! That will be more intensive closer to time, but it's starting now. I know some people don't believe in talking about it with the kids or stressing them about it. And that's fine.

But, to me, I think it's important to talk about it. I think they need to know it's coming because it helps them to understand why we do the things we do. And I never talk about it in an intimidating way: I always talk about how they're going to be so ready and do so good on it. I just think if you don't talk about it, it becomes some big, scary mystery. No thanks. 

Well, I've gone off on a tangent. As usual. I think I'll call it quits here and head to bed. 

Thanks for reading!