School and the City

Each year, 3rd graders participate in a "living wax museum" project during the last month of school. It's truly one of my favorite days of the year! We spend a few weeks reviewing nonfiction by studying biographies, then students get to bring biographies to life!  If you haven't tried a wax museum yet, you totally should. It is SO much fun - You will be so impressed by your students! We all have research standards, writing standards, and speaking/listening standards that can be taken care of with this project. Having students write speeches and present in front of an audience is not only meeting standards but it also an important life skill.  My team chooses for students to complete the project almost entirely at school. We spend a few days researching, a few days writing, and a few days making posters. At home, students practice their speeches (aiming to memorize) and put together a costume.  We also encourage artifacts to make our wax museum...

Once upon a time, when I first started teaching, I started building my classroom library.  I gathered books from retiring teachers and Goodwill. Throughout my career, I've grown my library by using Scholastic Book Club points, visiting Scholastic Warehouse sales, and shopping for specific series lots on eBay. The bins are from Dollar Tree, and they've held up well!  I must say - I'm super proud of my library!  My first school required me to have my library sorted by guided reading level. I get that! Students, in order to improve reading skills, should be reading books on or slightly above their instructional reading levels.  My library looked like this for six years... until now.  I noticed this year especially that my students rarely visited my classroom library unless I forced them to "book shop." They LOVE reading on Epic! where they can easily search and sort by categories.  Plus, as a grow as a teacher, I've learned that ...

It's that time of year, y'all! *finally* Time for students to reflect on their year of experiences while you start packing up your classroom. Whew! Exciting, but hectic!  One of my favorite projects for the last week or two of school is this  newspaper creative writing task .  It's a meaningful, creative writing activity for the end of the year! Students use all those writing skills they learned throughout the year to write about how they feel about the end of the year, their favorite memories, and advice for next year's students. We all have standards that state something about "using standard conventions of English" and "with the support of an adult, publish a writing piece." This is a great end-of-year assessment tool to see how much your students have grown in their writing abilities. Copy one of the pages as a work sample, if you need one! Most importantly, it's also a fun way for our students to "publis...