Jan Brett Author Study

November is one of my favorite months to teach because of Election Day, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. However, after Thanksgiving comes one of my favorite units to teach.  I absolutely love Jan Brett.  She is an amazing author and illustrator.  Each year I have taught I have done an author study using some of her books as a whole class project.

I take about two weeks to compete the author study and try to read one book each day.  After we have read five of the books I have my students write a summary for one of the books with their table group.  There is a graphic organizer in their packet to help organize their thoughts and then I give them chart paper and a marker to write their group's final draft.

After the summaries, I have the students do a character analysis.  They choose one character from one of the books and draw a picture of him/her in the middle.  They then write different things about the character around the outside of the picture.

The next big thing that I do is read The Mitten by Jan Brett and then read The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt and the students compare and contrast the two stories.  Once we have read both stories I allow the students to write their own mitten stories.  I cut out large mittens from construction paper and have the students decorate them as the cover to their stories.

The last thing we do is make a graph of our favorite Jan Brett books as a class.  I choose five of the books and have the students pick their favorite.

The mitten stories, summaries, and graph all go into the hallway as a display for the month of December. (I seem to have never taken a picture of this display so I will try to do that and update this post in the next few weeks.)

I have made a packet that goes with the author study that can be found by clicking here!

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Digital Graphic Organizers

Here is another great resource for reading and writing that I created out of all of the many graphic organizers in my Google Drive.

All of these graphic organizers can be used electronically by having students type in the boxes, or they can be printed out on regular 8.5 x 11 paper when you are teaching face-to-face.

This presentation includes the following graphic organizers:

This slide has hyperlinks to each of the graphic organizers so you can jump right to the one you want!

I prefer to keep my graphic organizers simple. I used icons from The Noun Project when I felt they would be helpful.

You can get the presentation with all of the graphic organizers by clicking on the Cause and Effect example above or check out my RELA Resources page.

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Technology Spotlight: Book Creator

I found out about Book Creator a few years ago and absolutely love it!

www.bookcreator.com

I definitely used it more when I taught all subjects, especially for reading, science, and social studies. However, I am determined to fit it into my math classes this school year.

I put together this presentation for my school on how to get Book Creator set up in the classroom and some basics for creating a book.

In the presentation is also a blog post from Book Creator for 50 ways to use this technology tool in the classroom.

Here are a few ways that I have used it:

• publishing writing pieces (I prefer to give my students an option when publishing, so this was always an option for them)
• creating an alphabet book for the end of year vocabulary review
• students write a short biography or about me book for the beginning of the school year
• used as an option for publishing a science project about ecosystems

One of the cool things about this technology tool is being able to import items into the books. Students can search for a image using google search directly in the tool, embed a google map (great for social studies and science!), insert a file from the computer or google drive, or embed a webpage. 

When I first started using this I was worried I was going to have to take time to teach the students how to use it, but I found that they were easily able to figure out the different tools on their own. (side note - I do teach 5th grade, but I feel like the younger kids could handle it too)

Book Creator has a resources section of their website for teachers. You are able to search resources by grade level or subject. They even have student examples to view.

https://bookcreator.com/resources-for-teachers/

This technology tool is definitely a tool to check out, especially with the possibility of virtual learning this fall!

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Digital Portfolios

I have come to realize something over the past two years in my journey of teaching 5th grade. They could care less about the papers you pass back and the feedback that is on that paper. The majority of the time that I pass back a project that my students have been working on it ends up on the floor at the end of the day or is shoved in their desk until I make them clean them out at the end of the month. If this is how they are treating their work then why am I taking the time to write feedback on every paper?!

So this year I decided to try something new. A digital portfolio! Now that Google has made the new Google Sites that is extremely easy to navigate I had each of my students create a site at the beginning of the year. All that I showed them was how to get to sites and the basic function keys. I didn’t teach them how to do everything, they are 10 years old and enjoy figuring things out on their own. It was much for relaxing for me to sit back and let them figure it out and answer the few questions that popped up rather than teach them step by step what to do. If I noticed I was getting the same question over and over I would stop everyone and explain how to do that one thing .

So here we are halfway through the year and we just finished a STEM Fair project and a Biography that were both completed electronically. I passed out the chromebooks and told my students to go to their Google Site and the immediate response was YES!! So they could care less about the paper biography draft I passed back to them, but allowing them to put the finished product on their digital portfolio and they all of a sudden began to care!

It is important that we remember that these kids live in a digital world. They want to be able to show off their work on their phone, iPad, chromebook, etc. to anyone they want, whenever they want. They don’t want to remember to take a paper home to show their parents what/how they did.

I have learned my lesson. Feedback will be provided electronically and I will allow them to update their portfolios as much as possible.

A few of my favorite digital portfolio applications:

Google Sites (the new version)
Seesaw
Class Dojo