Free Writing Prompt: My Vacation Memory Book

Have fun writing in this shape book! Summer shorts, vacation shorts, any kind of fun shorts...make it fun to write in. Several prompts will help your kids think writing is actually a "cool" thing! The best thing about these shorts is...they're FREE!

Just Updated: My Summer Vacation Memory Book

First Week-Crazy But Exciting!

Whew! I'm still winding down--and it's almost noon, Saturday! What a week! But what fun!
This year, I'm co-teaching with two teachers during literacy block, and I have to say I'm learning as much about kindergarten as the 5 year olds!  I also have 4 of my literacy intervention groups on top of co-teaching. I'm hanging on!

Second graders are off to a great start. They are ready to learn. After we covered our expectations, I felt like we had to hit the ground running with W-O-R-K!  But they really needed to have a bit of fun.
Sight word bingo and getting-to-know you games are just the best for those first few days.  They're rockin' and readin' already.

To all you busy and bustling teachers out there--Have fun, even if it looks like work!  Building routines and moving around with hands-on activities seem to work for me. Oh, and tons of praise, praise, and more praise!

~Karen :-)

My Featured Fellow Friend--Honey!

Honey is the subject of my newest teacher resource: Doggie Writing Prompts: Honey's Adventures.
She's a real pet living in the country in Vermont. As you can tell, she loves camping--and was a bit disappointed to find the marshmallow bag empty. In my writing prompts for kids, Honey has a mishap and gets all muddy. She must take a shower, but hates showers (of course!). She'd much rather be out chasing squirrels and running through the mud! Check it out...fun writing for kids who paws-itively love dogs!
Doggie Writing Prompts: Honey's Adventures

Savoring Summer, a Babbling Brook, and Ralph Fletcher

Holy cow! I feel like the sands of summer are slipping by even as I fix my morning coffee! Where have the days gone? The panic of needing to hurry and do all those things I had on my Summer Bucket List has set in. I want to be ready for school, organized and prepared. I really want to offer an exciting year to my students. Thinking about planning...led me to thinking about writing.

I took a walk down to my brook in the back of my house....I had forgotten what a quiet spot it was--even Thoreau would've appreciated it. I started reading my book that's been on top of a pile of books, A Writer's Notebook, by Ralph Fletcher. I had only skimmed it before, and now feel guilty I'm only reading it now (I've had it for years).  There's so much to glean from his book on keeping a notebook that I can't sum it up so simply. But I like how he says, "Keeping a writer's notebook can help you be more alive to the world." I think that's so true. Written for young adults and aspiring writers (much younger than me), I found his words to be riveting.  He reminds us that we don't have to have polished writing, complete sentences, and so on. Snatches of conversations, and bits and pieces of human talk, are enough to jot down and revisit later.

But it really hit me when I read, "Many people drift through life...." (I'm trying hard to avoid that!) and adds, "Your writer's notebook can work as an alarm clock to remind you to wake up and pay attention to what's happening in your world, both inside and out."

So, I'm savoring summer--savoring it with the flavor of words...seasoning it with moments of writing little jots and notes, lists, and all those dreams and wishes...'though it's best to work with the here and now. The babbling brook reminds me to be more present about things.  But of course, it's really the chatter in my own mind... And that's how I can savor the summer before it fades away.

I'm almost done with the book--but now, I have to start a new notebook. I have a lot of them scattered here and there, and half written in each one. So, I've got to get organized!  Well, one thing I know (which I knew anyway, and have done in the past, but forget to do from time to time) is to make writer's notebooks a big focus this year with my students. Tomorrow, I'm off to buy a whole pile of spiral notebooks!

Writing About the Beach With Kids

What Fun!  Writing About the Beach With Second and Third Graders!

I made a beach-themed writing activity for my summer rock stars camp kids, because I really, really needed an activity that they would not consider "school work". They enjoyed this a lot. Normally, this type of activity would be best suited for the younger kids-the first graders. But I discovered that my incoming third and fourth graders enjoyed hunting the room for these words to fill out their recording sheets. 

This is a lot like a write-the-room activity, which is often considered a first grade activity--

But this is more challenging!  My kids seemed to get excited about this!  And even though it was a hot, humid day inside our little rock stars camp, they really wanted to finish!  

I added a few other templates or writing frames to go with this--since kids do love to write about summery things. I've posted this resource (Common Core aligned) to my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Check it out!  If you do visit my shop, please know that I appreciate any and all window shoppers! 

-Karen

Summer Rock Stars Camp --Whoo-Wee!

We're on our third week (2 days a week) of summer rock stars camp, and I feel like I've been at it all summer! Another teacher and I are working as a team to focus on a group of kids that we feel are kids who need that little summer push--as opposed to sitting in front of the TV or bugging mom all day!  I'm doing the literacy end of it, and she's doing the math intervention. So far, we've mixed in some fun with it, including
marbles and pipes, ball games, armadillo crafts, word searches/puzzles, and yet to come--the best of all--soap boats and balloon rockets!

So...besides all the fun stuff, I needed Common Core Standards aligned reading for my kids...since that was the whole point why were were targeting these kids. Well, I was worried about all that, since I did not want to pull out the usual textbooks in my classroom and hear the kids mutiny and drop out of summer camp.  Then, I remembered....!

Early this spring, I attended Dr. Elfrieda H. Hiebert's conference on reading and building fluency, and her philosophy of teaching reading based on 4,000 simple word families. (I have her conference sheet filed away, so I don't have the exact title of her conference.) But I can tell you that I latched on to some crucial information that made me think twice about how I teach reading. Her work is quite extensive in the research of how young children learn to read. So, I went to her website that she talked quite a bit about, and was happy to find that she has so much on there that I can use for my summer program. Her Summer Reads program is just perfect for my grades 3-5 kids--the very group which I was targeting this year.  I didn't want these kids to lose skills over the summer. We all know that it's pretty tough for many of them to advance over the summer, so as a reading specialist, I'm happy if they at least, do not lose reading skills over the summer.

So I'm passing this along to you--if anyone out there is reading my blog!

Dr. Heibert has some great teacher resources, check out her site called THE TEXT PROJECT. The following link will take you to some free text passages for kids going into grades 3, 4, and 5, and lots of good reading on her research. Please check it out:  SUMMER READS

(P.S.--I do not work for Dr. Hiebert, nor do I get any monetary value for promoting her website. I just love her resources, that's all! :-) )

Camp Read Day

Last week, a few "long" days before school was out for the summer, I set up a tent and camping gear in my room. I hung up a led lantern and turned my iPad on with background sounds of crickets, owls and loons. We pulled down the shades and read in the tent--and a little bit outside the tent (since we had to stuff a lot of us in). What fun!  We topped it off with the age-old fishing game, earning fishing points for each word on the back of the fish. We caught all kinds of fish--bass, trout, salmon, eels, and you name it. Yes, we even had sharks in the pond!  After our fishing adventure, we had cold s'mores, and handed out summer literacy bags to take home. Our "Lit Kits" were a hit, something for all K-5 kids to take home. The PTA helped me fund the Lit Kits. We all had so much fun on Camp Read Day, I plan to do it again next year.