Fourth Grade Buddies and the Kid President

Check me out. Blogging two days in a row. Must be the new computer. It is so nice to have a computer set up all the time. With my old laptop, I would have to get it out and set up anytime I wanted to do something and it took forever to load. Plus I was never sure if it would come up or not. Maybe the newness will wear off but probably not for a while.
I am working on a new set of activities for math with a garden theme. I am so excited. I'll be trying one of the activities out tomorrow and I can't wait. I'm also really excited about fourth grade buddies tomorrow. We always meet on Wednesday afternoons. I look forward to these afternoons and so do my kiddos. Usually the idea for what we are going to do is something that Cassie and I have talked about for a few days. Tuesday we finalize our plans and get anything together that we can.  This week the idea started on Saturday when I heard about the newest Kid President video.

I hadn't watched it or anything but just heard the beginning. The video is about what a newborn needs to know about the word. So I sent the link to Cassie and told her this is what we should do. So today we watched the video (this was my first time to give it a listen all the way through. He suggests making your own video at the end) and came up with a questionnaire for the kids to work on together. Cassie typed it up and then I prettied it up. It is my downfall to have to make everything pretty. You can check it out here.
Here's the plan for tomorrow. We will watch the video on the promethean board and discuss the video. Then the kids will work with their buddy to answer the questions. The questions could be a little deep but I think it will be interesting to see what they come up with. This week will be all about preparing to make a video. They can work on a script and practice what they want to say.
Next Wednesday we're going let them practice for the video and then we're going to use our iPhones to video it. I'm pretty excited. I think the project will be a lot of fun! I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. I've been on the computer since I got home besides eating dinner so I should probably go spend a little quality time with Chris before it's bedtime. He's watching The Doctor and I'm listening. Time to go see what is going on.

Fourth Grade Reading Buddies

I have this idea in my head of my perfect school. I'm sure I"m not the only teacher out there who has this perfect school planned out. A place where the ideals and values I hold dear are expressed. One of my ideas is to have older kids mentoring younger kids. I love the school I teach at now. It is the school I went to in 7th and 8th grade and it's where I want my kids to go to school. We have a lot of history and it's a unique place. One of the unique things about it is it's a k-8 school. I enjoy getting to see my kids that I've had in class grow up. My first loop is in 6th grade now and it has been great to see them mature. One of the downsides to the k-8 school is that eighth graders don't always pay attention to the younger students. They don't set the example I think they should. I think mentoring could help that. Well, one of my best friends teaches fourth grade. (We might or might not be planning to take over the world by teaching reading.) She and I worked on the summer reading program. As school started, we started talking about pairing our students up for a buddy program. And about 3 weeks ago we got this buddy program going. We met before hand and talked about what our goals were and worked on pairing up the students apropriately. It worked out well, because her class was part of a loop I had a few years ago. So I knew quite a few of the kids already and their backgrounds. We worked too on pairing up our ELL students so they could learn from each other and be supported with language.
Our first meeting, we had the kids interview each other. They asked questions about reading and learning preferences. We came up with 4 or 5 questions and the fourth graders recorded the answers. Then they read a few books together.

This was one of our favorite pairings. They were so cute together and it was beneficial to both students.
The next week we read books all about fall and fall things like spiders and bats. There was a mix of fiction and non fiction. Together they worked on coming up with facts and the fourth graders recorded them on paper. Then we gave them an apple and they picked one fact to write on the apple. My intention was to put up a tree on a bulletin board and then add the apple facts. But it hasn't happened yet. I wish I had taken some pictures because they were really engaged. My kids were asking when their partners were coming all day and were so excited.
This past week we had each student bring a couple of favorite books. The fourth graders picked out characters and books they enjoyed to share with the kindergartners and then my students picked a couple of books they have been reading to read. My friend and I walk around the room while they are reading and listen in on the reading. It is so neat to see the fourth graders teaching the kindergartners. There was one fourth grader asking the kinder to predict what was going to happen. Here are a couple of pictures from this past week:

We've started making some plans for upcoming meetings. One of our ideas is to celebrate fall and Halloween together. We are no longer allowed to have parties to celebrate Halloween so we thought we'd meet on Halloween and do a fun activity together. I have seen a couple of good ideas on pinterest. One that I like is making pumpkins and then describing the pumpkins with adjectives. We've been working on sensory words and I think this would be a neat activity. Another idea we've been working on is a reading scavenger hunt through the school. I have a students who claims he doesn't want to learn to read. (That's a first for me) We're hoping we can show him that he needs reading in his life. We've also been discussing doing a visualizing activity. The fourth graders have been working on this skill. 

This week our reading skill is character. While in Kindergarten we are only trying to identify the characters and starting to describe them. In fourth grade the skill involves describing and using text evidence. I'm trying to come up with an activity for us to do using this skill.

So do you do anything like this? I would love to hear about it if you do and what kinds of activities you do. I'm really excited for the potential this type of relationship has. 

I'm hoping to be back to regular blogging soon. I've been working on some ideas and scheduling some posts. Things have been crazy the past few weeks and I think they are finally calming down some. I'll be back tomorrow for a peek at my upcoming week. 

Ms. Kerri's Busy Kindergarten was sooo busy this week!

For a four day week, we packed a lot in. I'm not even sure how we had time to do all we did. In our reading series, we read the book Duck on a Bike by David Shannon. I love this book and so did my kids. We read it Monday and Tuesday and practice retelling. This was the first time we've done retelling with partners. I was really proud of how well they did. I modeled it using the document camera and one of the students helped me. We then wrote our own sentences about other vehicles duck could be on and the sentence I see duck on a __________.

Here are some of the student's work. (I remembered to take pictures this week.)

We continued with our David Shannon author study by reading No, David and David Goes to School. Then we talked about character and did a character map of David. Mostly my students came up with all the negative behaviors of David and decided that they didn't want to be like David at all. I had planned on having them draw their own pictures of David and writing a sentence to describe his character but we just ran out of time.

Here's our chart we made. My drawing skills are definitely improving. :)

Inspired by the mentors, Fran at Kindergarten Crayons is doing in her class, I talked to one of my friends in fourth grade. She and I decided to give it a try. So Wednesday was our first try at reading buddies. They came in to read to my kids and then my students picked a book that they wanted to read. It was really neat because several of the fourth graders were students from my first loop. It was so cool to see how far they've come with their reading. My first loop, I had a Hispanic girl who really didn't make a ton of progress but most of it was due to language issues. She's super sweet and she's always come back and told me how she was doing. Well I have a student this year who reminds me of this former student. They were paired up together and it was so neat to see my former student teaching. To me it was definitely worth the effort. I'm hoping that my fourth grade teacher friend thought the same thing. We haven't had a chance to talk about it and where we see it going.

I had originally planned on reading the book Alice the Fairy by David Shannon and comparing the characters but I decided at the last minute (Wednesday afternoon) to do some Veteran's Day activities. I bought Kim Adsit's pack and went to town planning some activities for Thursday since we had inservice on Friday. I couldn't find any books for such a short notice but I did find a video on United Streaming that did the job. We watched that and talked a little bit about the military and Veteran's day. Then we labeled a hero, did a brace map on the American Flag and made our own flag. I had planned to have the kids write thank you letters and to do a tree map about soldiers. But we had a program and ran out of time. I'm still going to have them write thank you notes and draw pictures. The teacher next door to me has 4 daughters and 2 are serving overseas and 1 just recently got out of the military. She plans to send a package to her daughter in Kuwait and we're going to send our letters with her. If you haven't checked out Kim Adsit's packet, you should. It was well worth the $4 or so that I spent. I still have a few activities I want to do this week with them. The ordinal numbers and spinner activity look good. We'll see if I can find time to do them. We're also starting our farm unit this week. It fits well with our reading series theme for the week about food and where it comes from. I bought DeAnna Jump's unit and I'm super excited about doing some of the activities.

We were very busy this week and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon. I haven't even thought about what Thanksgiving activities I want to do. There are so many good ideas out there and packs I'm interested in. I don't even know where to start. What's your got to do Thanksgiving activity you're planning? Maybe that will give me some ideas.