Confessions and Common Core

So I'm starting with some confessions about myself. I hope that I'm not the only one out there like this. I'm hoping there are some other teachers who feel the same way I do. First confession is I love to learn. I love to  read books about different topic and learn more about them. I absolutely love reading professional literature. I know, I know I'm a weirdo. I also love to plan and use my assessment data to plan for my students. I don't actually enjoy writing lesson plans but I do enjoy coming up with ideas to do in my class and planning good lessons. But once school starts and life gets crazy, sometimes I don't take the time I should to learn new things and to plan out in depth lessons. But I'm getting back to my roots this new year. My one little word is intention. I really want to work on planning with intention for my students. So to start this plan out, I've been digging a little deeper into the common core. I have been looking at the data I have about my class from our Star testing we just did and from a Discovery Education Assessment (Anyone else use this assessment? I'm not sure how accurate it is.) And I have some distinct groups in my class. I have about 4 students that are reading way above grade level and 2 of those challenge me at every turn to give them more. Then I have about 9 students who are basically on level with where they should be. They are reading fairly fluently. Although 5 of these students are ELL students and have some language barriers still. Then the last 3 are not where they need to be at all. I'm good with my on level group and I'm good with my group that needs a little more help and time. But where I'm challenged is with my kids that are reading above grade level and have no trouble with anything I give them. My plan for after Christmas (which would be starting Jan. 8th) is to push all my students no matter where they are. To make them work harder and to challenge them to do the best they can do. I started thinking about what skills I needed to work on for comprehension according to the common core. I looked at Kindergarten, first and second grade, since I'm in first grade. I wanted to look at where my students should be. Ok confession time again. I feel like this is the first time I've really looked deeply at the common core standards. I've read them and I refer to them when doing my planning. But this was the first time I focused on one particular area in all three grade levels. It was helpful to see what the distinctions between the grade levels. I found a lot of the kindergarten standards have the words with prompting and support. Then these words are taken away in first grade. First grade has a lot to do with identifying different information while second grade is describing and applying. It was also interesting to see the same threads of skills in each grade level but the expectation is raised just a bit each year. I looked at the literature and the non fiction. One of the biggest areas of weakness on my part is looking at the author's argument or points in a piece of non fiction. I haven't even started tackling that skill with my students. I'm not even sure how to tackle that with my students. But now that I know about what I need to, I think I'll be more successful which means my students will be more successful. If you haven't checked out the common core app, you should. I have the tool on my blog. Look to the right and check that out. It has a lot more explanation than I have on my file that I keep in my lesson plan book. I took the 3 grade levels and the different skills and made a document to help me in my planning. I've attached the document and you can get it for free if you are interested. Click Here for the link.
So I took what I learned from this research on the common core and created these sheets. I hope that you can use them. I took the characters and settings standards and made a response sheet for each grade level. I hope that this will help me differentiate with my various levels in my room. Let me know what you think and if this looks like something you could use more of. click here for the link The clipart is from Melonheadz and the font from Hello Literacy. Love both of them.
I am linking up for the first freebie Friday at TBA. Be sure to head over there and check out the other freebies.


One last thing before I let you go from this really long post. I got a lot of sweet responses about the student at my school, Regan, and his family. I was wanting to post this prayer card before but I wasn't sure I was allowed to. But I found out that I could and there are trying to get as many people as they can to like the facebook page. His page is Rootin' for Regan. You can search for it on facebook and ask to be a part of it.

Thanks followers for praying for this student and family. It means so much to me. His family is having such a profound impact on our community and school.
I forgot I do have one more thing to mention. Sunday I'll be participating in facebook blog scavenger hunt. You can win all kinds of cool stuff from other bloggers. Be sure to follow my facebook page to find out more.

Manic Monday Freebie

This is going to be a quick post but I had to share a couple of things. First I'm super excited because I got my materials from my donor's choose project today. I had asked for some non fiction books that were on my students' level.

I can't wait to get them organized and put out for my students to use. My kids love non fiction books and with the adoption of the common core there is push for using more nonfiction books. I'm pretty excited to use these books with my kids.
The second thing I wanted to share is a freebie. I'm getting ready to start with some reading groups this week. We've built up our stamina with read to self and we've been working on stamina in the other areas. I read several posts this summer from other bloggers about using a warm up for reading groups. I have some fry phrases to use but I wanted something a little easier for some of kiddos. I made some sheets that have the phonics patterns we've worked on or are coming up in the unit. (If you use treasures reading series this would be perfect.) The last page is all the popcorn words we've worked on for the unit. I'm hoping that if we practice these, they will become more fluent with these words. Anyway, I wanted to share these with you. If you can use them, please leave me some comment love. I'm really trying to get better about blogging more often. I have my knee appointment today and will find out what my treatment options are. I'm thinking surgery is in my future. The x-ray tech at my doctor's office goes to my church. She told me that my x-rays were crazy. Eeek!
Here's the freebie:

I have linked up with classroom freebies manic Mondays.
Be sure to check out other freebies there!

Survived the first full week!

I have been such a bad blogger. I have been way too tired in the evenings to blog and my computer that I have at home has not made blogging easy. It does weird things. During the summer I have my school laptop at home so I blog on that and it is so much easier to use. Chris and I keep talking about getting a new computer so hopefully we will soon. If I bought a mouse that would probably help for now.
Anyway, we had a great first full week of school. I had every intention of taking some pictures to show you the fun things we did but I was too tired when I left school yesterday. I was trying to get all my stuff done so I wouldn't haven't to bring anything home plus getting ready for the first sub of the year. Yuck! I've been called for jury duty and I don't feel right about trying to get out of it. I think if I want my students to be responsible citzens then I need to set the example. Plus last time I was called I was able to get out of it because I was teaching somewhere else. My husband's aunt passed away this week and we still aren't sure when the services are going to be. We thought they could be Monday so I went ahead and prepared for the whole day instead of just a half a day. I had to update all my sub information for the year. I use Crystal from Kreative in Kinder's Sub Tub. She was kind enough to send it to me for one of her everyone wins giveaway. I love it. You should check it out if you are looking for a good sub tub. It's got enough information but it's not overwhelming.
This week we focused on reading and what readers do. I did a lot of activities from Abby Mullins' pack Ready to Read.  This is a gret packet. If you haven't checked it out you should. We used our poem Bog Reads and set reading goals. I was really proud of the goals my students set. I knew one little girl had been talking it over with her mom because her goal was to read between 10-20 books this year. We made the banner and I'll have to share a picture next week. It looks really good. I loved Abby's suggestions for books this week too. Here are some of the books we read:

These are great books if you haven't checked them out. I especially loved Hooray for Reading day. It's a great book if you have kids that are struggling with reading. We also did some great activities from Kim Adsit's Blasting Off with Reader's Workshop. THis is a great unit for introducing reader's workshop. After reading the Growing Readers book, this was the perfect compliment for some of the things I am wanting to accomplish this year. Some of the activities were a little basic for my first graders who I had last year. I already knew where they were at. Next week we're going to start our author's study of Kevin Henkes. I'm pretty excited about it. Check back next week to see what we did.