Living Museum fun!

Last week I posted about our Tall Tales Living Museum. I promised more pictures in my next post, so here they are! (If you missed the last post, you can find it here.)

The sign I had for our Museum. If you're a Georgia teacher, you know that Pecos Bill and Thunder Rose are not in our standard about tall tale heroes. I had to decide between having larger groups and adding in some extra tall tale people. I decided to go with extra people. Pecos Bill was an easy pick. Thunder Rose was a last minute decision. You are probably wondering who in the world Thunder Rose is because you've never heard of her, am I right?! I found the book in our school media center (you can see it here on Amazon) and thought it might work. Thunder Rose was a great addition because it was another female for our Living Museum.

Here are the kids' scripts, all typed up and laminated. They wrote their own text-I just helped them with conventions and getting it into the printer. 95% of the time we roll right along happily with invented spelling (as long as sight words are spelled correctly!), but for a project like this where multiple people need to be able to read the writing I do act as the "editor" alongside my writers.

Here is a pic of some of my groups hard at work practicing their scripts! My class this year consists of pretty great readers, so we were able to focus hard-core on prosody (reading with inflection).

The sweet little kiddoes in my Pecos Bill group really worked hard. Here is the poster they made:

 Their writing is so adorable! Here's the last little bit of their piece: "He fighted a half-gorilla. He squeezed all of the poison out of a snake." Check out their invented spelling-isn't it adorable?

 The day of the museum went off without a hitch. The cool thing was all of the first grade teachers were hosting their own Tall Tales museum so our students got to visit each class. They loved it! One teacher down the hall had a real beaver skin as the activator for her Davey Crockett group and that's ALL the students could talk about!

Our last little step in the process is to wrap up their individual pieces about their tall tale heroes. We are going to compile the pieces into a class book and then I will enhance the pages of the book with the app Aurasma. Aurasma allows you to attach a video to a print image. That means when students (or parents, or whomever) scans the pictures in the book with my i-Pad or i-Touch the videos will pop up on the device...they will get to see and hear the performances from the Living Museum as if they were there! Isn't that neat?

Next week I'll be going to LRA in Florida to present on the Living Museum. As if that weren't exciting enough, I just got an e-mail this week saying my colleagues' and my proposal for the International Literacy Association conference next summer got accepted! We will be presenting there again about the Living Museum. Looks like I need to start saving some money for an airplane ticket!

This week is all about some much-needed R&R. We went on a little mountain trip this past weekend and after the Thanksgiving festivites we will be celebrating Little Miss' 3rd birthday. I've also been working very hard on some things for my TpT shop. Yesterday I updated my Christmas Around the World set I made last year...

I added a souvenir suitcase to store all of the little readers from this book along with a world map and a passport stamp booklet: 

We will be using it when we get back from the break. I am super excited about incorporating some holiday fun into our ELA and Social Studies time!

Today I also uploaded some little readers I've been working on. They are holiday themed for the month of December...

I think all of them are cute, but the Rockin' Reindeer one is my favorite! I am going to use these for some easy-peasy sub work for when I'm out next week at LRA. I think these will be awesome Morning Work activities that the kids will enjoy and most importantly, can do independently! If you are interested click the picture to go to my TpT store!

That's it for tonight...now I need to make a grocery list for my pre-Thanksgivng shopping trip. Ugh. I am dreading going to the grocery store tomorrow...I'm going to have to reward myself with some coffee or something to make it through! Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

'Twas the week before Thanksgiving...

Can you believe we have a week before Thanksgiving break? I am so in awe of how this school year is FLYING by. I think a lot of it has to do with how genuinely happy I am this year-but it's still crazy! (Side note: Little Miss will be THREE soon-the day after Thanksgiving, as a matter of fact-and I don't know how that happened, either. Craziness!)

Next week will be pure madness in the classroom...the good kind. We are hosting a Living Museum next Thursday on our tall tale heroes. If you've never heard of a Living Museum before...well...don't feel bad, I hadn't either until about six months ago! For a Living Museum, you have the kids dress up as historical characters (or whatever-I mean, we're doing tall tales because that's one of our standards) and "come to life" as that person when the visitors come through the "museum." To prepare for the Living Museum, we've been doing a lot of research and writing over the past few weeks! To start the project, I hung half sheets of chart paper around the room with pictures of the tall tale heroes. (In case you're not savvy on the Georgia standard...we're supposed to learn about Davey Crockett, Annie Oakley, Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Johnny Appleseed.  I added a couple of extras-Pecos Bill and Thunder Rose-so that my groups wouldn't get too big. I figure a little enrichment won't hurt!) The kids picked their tall tale hero knowing NOTHING about their person, which added to the fun!

Then the research began. I put out books about the people under the posters as well as simple passages from my good friend Bethany's Tall Tales unit. The kids read about their people and added facts on sticky notes to their poster. I walked around the room and provided extra support. (For example, for some groups I sat down with them and read their texts along with them. For other groups, we just chatted about what they learned and the facts that they put on their posters.) This past week we spent a lot of time crafting their scripts for the Museum...and I'm so impressed! They each have 5+ sentences about their tall tale hero. This weekend I'm going to laminate their final drafts for durability so next week they can practice with their groups during Read to Someone time.

Here's a couple of pictures I snapped...I need to take some more. Pecos Bill's group did an AMAZING job and have the cutest sentences...I'll try to remember to take some more pictures this week!

So much fun and what a great way to keep them actively engaged the week before a break. My friend Bethany and I (along with my favorite professor of all time at Georgia College) are going to present about the Living Museum at Literacy Research Association next month. We are so pumped! Just to give you an idea, we started working together LAST fall on informational writing and talked about how it would be amazing to present at LRA. Can't wait!

Aside from The Living Museum, next week I'm going to try to squeeze in some fun turkey time things around the madness. I did make another little reader for next week about Thanksgiving. It's a simple little book for some of my ELL kids who are going to experience their first Thanksgiving in America this year-isn't that awesome? Anyway, I posted the reader as a freebie in my TpT shop! I downloaded a bunch of other amazing Thanksgiving resources that other sellers are giving away as freebies so I thought I'd join in...you can find it here!

I will be back later this week with more pics from the Living Museum!

fall in first grade...and a freebie!

Don't be shocked...a blog update. :)

One of the things that I've had to adjust to in my new school is having a large population of English Language Learners. In my previous school, I had one student in five years that was bilingual (and he was truly bilingual). In my new school, more than a third of my class speaks another language in addition to English! It's really cool. However, for some of my students who are less proficient with English, I'm having to figure out ways to scaffold language for them so that they can access the curriculum as fully as possible. 

One of the things that I've been doing with a few of my kids is an interactive alphabet notebook. One of my newer students didn't attend kindergarten full-time last year and I have another student who is coming to us from a culture that uses a completely different alphabet. Plus, I have a few non ELL students who need some work with letter sounds and letter recognition. I bought this set from Color Me Kinder and we are loving it! The prep couldn't be easier and what I personally really like is that I get to introduce some vocabulary at the same time that the kids may not know. 

Another "ah-ha!" that I had was that for this particular group of students, providing them with familiar texts to read at home might be extra helpful for them. Our new reading series came with a set of vocabulary readers that I tried to use with these students, but what I'm finding is that the readers are not on their instructional level. So, I'm resorting to scavenging the Internet to find easy little readers that have appropriate vocabulary and controlled sight words to keep them from getting frustrated. This week I got extra crafty and made a little book for us to use during guided reading. I also included some vocabulary cards to use with them to preview and review the vocabulary words before we read. I uploaded it to my shop and it is free, so if you're interested head on over there and download! 

Tomorrow we're off for Veteran's Day but I'll be hard at work on a conference presentation! We are also up to grand things next week in first grade, but I'll save that for another blog post!