Remember how Pinterest used to be?

Remember when finding free teacher's ideas on 

Pinterest used to be easy?  

Now it's feels more like a window for shopping.

First Day Jitters? Nah!

Today was the first day of school. It was a great day and things went more smoothly than I expected with all of the construction going on around campus. I started the morning with 35 on my class roster and ended the day with 39. Yes! That's a lot of kiddos to house in one small space (Welcome to California education!). It's not likely that they will all stay in my room--all of our upper-grade classes are overflowing and I imagine a combo or two is coming to relive the stress (I personally would take 45 kids over a combo, if given the option.)

Anyhoo...I love all the first day, bright shiny hopeful faces just bursting with excitement. I love seeing the crisp uniforms, fresh haircuts, colorful tennis shoes, and funky backpacks walking through the door. My kidlets seem eager to learn and excited to be on the "big kids" playground now.

I'm not sure we accomplished all that much today--but we sure stayed busy all day. I did the usual full hour of rules and regulations including the new Character Counts pillars, took a couple brain breaks, had a mingle party with the other 4th grade class, started 4 seed stories for Writer's Workshop, had recess and ate lunch, and went over first-day packets. Whew! Now that I think about it--we did a lot! I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings.

Figurative Language

Last year our district came up with a whole new set of tests for our students (oh joy) called checkpoints (I guess the word "benchmarks" is no longer the buzzword.) It's sort of our district's way of being test-ready and gauging progress through out the year. We actually give 4 sets of checkpoints (Gasp...Yes, 4 more standardized-type testing...don't get me started.) One of the areas the 4th and 5th grade checkpoints really focused a lot on was figurative language.



I wanted to come up with an on-going figurative language practice that my kidlets could do--maybe during Daily 5--maybe as a bell ringer activity. Last year I made a new anchor chart everyday for this type of practice and my kidlets copied down all the info into a generic comp book. It's my hope that this will become second nature to my kidlets and they will naturally start incorporating figurative language into their writing. Last year we tried to learn a new idiom every day and by the end of the year the kids were so excited to find examples of figurative language in their own books. So here is my work-in-progress. It is in no way perfect yet. I may need to change it once I see how my kidlets progress. It's actually a 2-page document that needs to be copied back-to-back. It will go in a 3-ring notebook and my kidlets will be able to see both pages at once. Download here: Page 2 Page 1 (sorry...I don't know how to make them into one download yet.)

Whole-Class Writing Journals

I saw another idea on Pinterest and knew it was a great idea for my classroom. Today I made 10 whole-class writing journals. I plan to let these journals circulate around the room during Daily 5 (Daily 3?) and want to encourage my kidlets to share their writing with the class. Some of my topics are hobbies, pets, vacations, deserted island, music, and college. The original pin links back to a really great website you need to check out. This teachers has some really wonderful ideas and a few freebies, too (I used her doc for my journal labels and then just threw in some graphics.) Click Here: I Love My Classroom

Writing Journals: Ribbon Bookmarks

I saw this idea on Pinterest (sorry--I don't know where the original post is but if it's yours please let me know). It was a pretty simple project. A little hot glue, ribbons, and now my student's new writing journals have a permanent book mark. I think they are so cute.

We Rock! Rocks & Minerals Lapbook

This is the second year I made the rock and mineral lapbooks with my kids. This is a fun project that I use to wrap up the science chapter. I give the students only one or two pieces to work on per day. This helps with staying on our deadline AND less loss of pieces. I also give each student a manila envelope to keep all their pieces in them until they assemble the full project. This was another item I have ready for Open House.

The cover (designed any way my kidlets wanted to make them):





The Inside (my kidlets were encouraged to glue in their pieces in any way they wanted):




The elements inside. I noticed that I left off a picture of the vocabulary cards. They are inside the white envelope.

All About Me: Figurative Language "Foldable"

All year we worked on Figurative Language to the point where our class could hardly read a paragraph in a book without one of the students shouting out some sort of figurative language that they found. For a culminating activity, I purchased this really neat figurative language project off of "Teachers Pay Teachers" which was made by "Working For the Classroom". The kids had a great time making them even though they were time consuming. They were a big hit at Open House.


Here are some inside photos of the project: