Guest Posting for Minds-in-Bloom

I'm so excited to be guest posting for Rachel Lynette over at Minds-in-Bloom!  I know most of you are either already out enjoying the summer, busy packing up your classroom, or counting down the days!  But it is never to late (or to early)  to think about ways to enhance your curriculum with art.  I hope you'll take a moment to hop on over to Minds-in-Bloom and read about my ideas for 5 simple ways to integrate the arts into your daily curriculum!  

Be sure to visit the Literacy Loves Company blog later this week for a post on "Stained Glass Selfies", another great, simple, integrating art idea for you to use in your classroom!  

Have a great day!  

It's Been a Ball! End of The Year Student Gift

The end of the year is quickly approaching and I know for some of you, the school year has already ended.  LUCKY!    I have about 13 1/2 days left with my kiddos and I'm having those same mixed emotions I have every year...  excited for the upcoming summer and sad to see my students move on to the next grade.

The last few years I've given a small end of the year gift to my students.  Just a small token.  With 30+ kids in my class, giving gifts can get expensive.  Luckily, it doesn't take much to put a smile on a 10 year old's face.

For under $20 dollars, I purchased 100 bouncy balls and clear cellophane gift bags from Amazon.com.  This gives me enough gifts for at least 2 classes.  I then printed these little tags:

and VOILA...  A quick, easy, fun gift for your students!

Click HERE for a free download of the gift tags to use for your own students, a gift from me to you! 

Now that you have end of the year gifts covered, what about memory books for your students?  I'm not organized enough throughout the school year to keep photos and momentos of the special moments with my students.  I envy the teachers who are!  

I'm also crazy busy with assessments, report cards, parties, field day,  end of the year activities, and packing up my classroom!  Because of this chaos, I'm all about finding ideas and ways to save precious time during the busy days at the end of the school year!  I also know how hard it can be to keep students engage.  With this new resource in my TpT store, My End of the year Pass Around Party Book, very little prep will give your students a great way to share with their classmates and collect fond memories of their school year!  

You can find this resource in my TpT store!  Click HERE to take a look!  

 I hope you have a wonderful, peaceful, productive summer and I invite you to stop back by the Literacy Loves Company Blog over the next few months for more classroom ideas, free downloads, and more!  

Garden of Greatness: a Lesson on Self-Esteem

Hi There!  Last week I posted on Facebook about how my team's hallway needed a spring make-over.  We were stuck in winter mode and the dark blue butcher paper was starting to depress me.  I needed color!  I needed funshine...  yes...  I said FUNSHINE!!

This week, I had planned a lesson on self-esteem for my 4th graders.  Part of our curriculum is to teach students about tobacco and alcohol resistance.   I always start this conversation with lessons on self-esteem and friendships.

I started the lesson with a quick powerpoint with two pictures: one of a child frowning and looking down, the other of a child smiling and looking confident.  I had the students brainstorm words to describe each of the kids.  Then I introduced them to the term self-esteem.

We then went to kids health.org and read the article "The Story of Self-Esteem".  I use kids health.org a lot.  It has great articles written so that kids can understand the concepts.  The website even has a read-aloud feature.  My students LOVE it because it is a computer voice that often pronounces words incorrectly and they think that is hilarious!

After we added our notes to our health notebooks, I introduced the "Garden of Greatness" craft.

I had each student brainstorm a list of things that he or she is good at, things that made them feel important, or things that made them feel unique and special.

I passed out strips of bright colored paper and circles pre-labeled with their names.  Students glued between 4 and 8 of the strips onto the back of the circle.  When that was done, they turned over the flowers to the front side and wrote ideas off of their list onto the strips of paper.

To finish the project, I collected the flowers and stapled them onto the bulletin board.  As I stapled, I wrapped each petal to the back.

The finish product turned out great!  Bright, colorful, and full of FUNSHINE!! 

Thanks for visiting!  

Here are few new resources recently added to my TeachersPayTeachers store:

Get it FREE!  Click on the graphic to go to my TpT store to download!  

Comic Strip Quotation Marks

It's spring and and with spring comes a lot of things that can distract 10 year old learners: hormones, new sport seasons, sunshine, allergies, love....  it all boils down to spring fever and keeping my kiddos' attention keeps ME on my toes!   That's why I'm so excited to share a fun way to practice or review quotation marks and descriptive writing  in the classroom!

Last week, in class, my fourth graders started learning about the proper use of quotation marks.  We started out the week by brainstorming what we already know about quotation marks, creating an anchor chart, and reading and looking at real world examples of quotation marks in use.

The next phase of the lesson included reading "The Mystery of the Missing Socks" a Grammar Tale from Scholastic.

You can find this at Amazon.com.  

On Tuesday of this week, we put all of our new knowledge to the test by turning comic strips into stories!  

Comics are great to use to practice using quotation marks because the dialogue is already placed in speech bubbles.  All students have to do is describe the setting, add the action, and use the quotation marks correctly.  I happen to have a bunch of old comic strips in a box.  I have been saving them for "someday" and that day was Tuesday! 

I spent some time going through the comics looking for ones that were 1. appropriate and 2.  had enough dialogue in them to make them useful.  When I was done I had about 15 strips that would work. 

 I took the comics to the copy machine and made a packet for each of my table groups (We are in "wagon trains" right now, so there are 8 students per group).  

To start the lesson, I asked my class if they liked comic strips.  Of course, most of them said, "YES!" I explained what were were going to be doing and then I modeled for them using a Hagar the Horrible comic.  

When I was done modeling how to take the speech from the comic and put it into quotation marks, I handed out the packets of comic strips to my table groups.  If I had to do it all over again, I'd give my students time to read through the comics together.  They were very excited and it was difficult to get them to settle down and get to work.  

For the first draft I had students focus on writing the dialogue, using dialogue tags, quotation marks, and other punctuation correctly.  I encouraged them to be descriptive and add action so that scene and mood for each panel was clear.  

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The next day, using the model story I wrote the day before, we talked about adjectives and adverbs.  Together, we went through my story and highlighted any examples of those two parts of speech.  As we were looking at my story, we talked about whether or not the scene and mood were clear. 

• Did I use the BEST word choice?  
• Could I be more descriptive?  
• If we closed our eyes and read the story would we have questions or would we be able to clearly visualize the actions, facial expressions, and tone of voice of each of our characters? 

After revising my story, I challenged students to revise their own stories by adding at least 3 adjectives and 3 adverbs.  

My students are still working on their revisions and will be sharing them in class on Wednesday!  I am looking forward to hearing how their stories turn out and seeing how they are doing on their use of quotation marks!

As an extension to this writing activity,  you could add a comic strip writing station to your literacy station.  Students could take comics and write stories or take short stories and write comic strips!  What a fun way to integrate the arts and encourage creativity in writing!

Thank you for stopping by! I hope that this post has inspired you to use comic strips in your classroom!

Make Math FUN! Add a Splash of Art!

Hi There!

Today I want to share with you a couple of ways that I integrated art into my geometry instruction this last quarter.  We were just at the beginning of our geometry instruction and were learning about lines.  This day's lesson was about parallel, perpendicular, and intersecting lines.

I wanted to find some line art for students to locate these types of lines from.  I could have drawn my own, but to save time, I just went to the internet.  I Googled "Geometric Line Art" and found a ZILLION different options, but for this activity, I chose this one:

During my instruction, students took notes in their math journals and drew examples of each of the types of lines.  I then paired them up and had them get out highlighters.

The instructions were to take turns finding parallel, perpendicular, and intersecting lines.  I also asked them to locate right, acute, and obtuse angles.  If you had already studied triangles, you could also have them search for types of triangles.  Basically, students played an "I Spy..." game.

I handed out protractors for students to use as they searched for different angles.

Students were quite engaged with this task!  At the end of their work time, as a check-in, we met on the carpet and discussed which types of lines and angles were easiest to find, which were more difficult, and their conjectures about why. 

We usually have art on Friday so, in order to extend our learning of lines and angles, our art focus on that Friday was a geometric art project.  I posted my example along with some questions that morning so that students would start thinking about the project and to build a bit of anticipation.  

The only prep I had to do was to cut up some construction paper into different random geometric shapes and locate enough black markers and protractors for each of my students.  Easy Peazy!  Oh...  and have an idea of the vocabulary I wanted students to interact with:

•line

•line segment

•ray

•intersecting

•parallel

•perpendicular

•right angle

•obtuse angle

•acute angle

•triangle

•square

Students were asked to get out crayons and rulers.  

Not only was this an art project about lines and angles, but it was also a lesson in following directions, which some of my students are struggling with right now.  

As I gave verbal cues, students drew the type of line, angle, or shape I asked for.  They used their rulers and Sharpie markers for bold black lines.  We decided that a "line" would go from one side of their shape to the other.  A ray would start on the page and go off one side, and a line segment would not touch either side.   You will want to make this clear ahead of time.  

When the drawing of the lines and shapes was completed, students used crayons to color in their shapes, but any medium could be used: markers, colored pencils, paint.  The directions for this phase of the project were that you could not use the same color to fill in any "adjacent" shapes, and we discussed what "adjacent" means. 

 When the projects were completed, for a quick assessment of the project, students could share/exchange with their peers and try to find the different lines, angles, and shapes.  

The completed art pieces were collected and I made a colorful bulletin board to display them.  

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Looks a bit like stained glass, doesn't it?  

I like interactive bulletin boards, so I added questions to encourage students and parents who passed by to stop and interact with our art work.

This ended up being a great math and art experience for my students and it supported my opinion that integrating art into math doesn't have to be painful!  It helped my students build their math vocabulary, practice locating shapes and determining angles, and also introduced some new math words to my class.  As an added bonus, students practiced the skill of following verbal directions.  

I hope that this has inspired you to add a bit of art to your math curriculum!  If you are interested in more great ways to integrate art in your classroom, follow my Literacy Loves ~Art Pinterest board!  

Thanks for visiting!