3rd Grade Lesson Plans for the First Week Back from Winter Break

The winter holiday for me is always a time to relax and enjoy time with my family. I recharge my batteries and then right before it's time to go back to work, I do what I call "super planning sessions" where I look at what we have left to do during the school year and I map it out. Then I turn the idea map into a series of lesson plans. Taking the real break before I start planning allows me to come at my plans with a clear mind and not the frustration that has often built up by the craziness of those final weeks before the holidays. 

So yesterday I sat down and wrote out four weeks of lesson plans. I worked subject by subject and walked through what I want to accomplish in the coming weeks. So for example I did 4 weeks of math lesson plans first, and then moved on to our shared reading plans for the same 4 weeks. This allowed me to connect my guided reading plans to my shared reading plans and my writing plans. One reason I enjoy lesson planning for multiple weeks together is that I can see the links that I want to build for my students betweeen the various lessons. I'm kind of a big picture person.  

Now I have only sent next week's plans to my administration because as much as I like to plan, I live in the real world and I know that nothing in life, and very little in my classroom works exactly as planned. So on Friday of each week I will take five minutes and look over where I planned for us to be and where we actually are. Then I will adjust the plans as necessary. When I get to that last week that I have complete, I will repeat my original process and plan out another month of lessons.

Now that I have shared the process I use to create my plans, I'd like to share with you my actual lesson plans for this first week back from winter break. Each Friday or Saturday this school year I will be posting my actual lesson plans here on my blog.

We start our day with Math every day. We review homework, begin our calendar books and take our daily timed fast fact quizzes, which my students call "number sprints". 

Then we do problem solving centers. I copy and paste each of the word problems from my lesson plans onto my problem solving graphic organizer (which is available at my TPT store in an editable format). Then I work with a small group of students on that problem while the remaining students work in small groups to solve the same problem. We have 30 - 45 minutes for this activity so many of my students finish the daily problem early. When students finish their daily problem early, they work on our problem solving path journals or tiling puzzles.

Once we have finished problem solving, we spend an hour on math rotations. Many people would call this time "guided math". However, for me this time is different because I very rarely do whole group lessons during Math, so this is really my minilesson teaching time. There are some days that I teach the same lesson 3 times as students rotate through their centers. However, more often the students are working on independent practice while I am there to guide them. While students are not with me, they work on calendar books, practice math facts and work on IXL.

After math we have about 45 minutes and we use that time for writing. This week we are going to use the excuse of the new year to look back at the writing we have already done this school year and make some writing "resolutions" for the new year. We will also start exploring Story Bird, a great website for creating online storybooks. My students are going to be using this website to create their own folktales.

Lunch follows writing and after lunch (and recess and bathroom break) we work on grammar. A portion of our time goes to reviewing Daily Language, which we use as homework. Then we will spend time working on our parts of speech worksheets from my parts of speech unit.

Also featured on this part of my lesson plans is our country study project. We only do country study on Fridays. Fridays are an early relase day and the day my students take all of their "specials" - PE, music and keyboarding. So rather than try to squeeze in math and literacy too, we do all of our science and social studies on Fridays. My students chose countries earlier this year and we are working through monthly units using those countries. This Friday we will begin our science unit on rocks, soils and fossils. First we will learn about the types of rocks and then they will figure out which of those types of rocks can be found in their country. The students build incredible buy in to each of our science and social studies topics by making it personal by researching "their" country.

We end our days with reading. First we do whole group and shared reading, introducing vocabulary and working on genre and reading strategies. This week we begin our unit on folktales with the Alaskan folktale The Frog Princess. We will also begin looking at making text to self connections with our reading strategies posters.

Next my students take a Spanish class. And then we do our guided reading block. During the guided reading block this week, I unfortunately have to complete reading assessments. My students know that when we are rotating, if I am doing assessments, they will have a different activity to work on. This week they will be creating genre charts using old scholastics order forms. 

Meanwhile at the other centers, my students will work on: contractions vocabulary packets, IXL and book reports. My students have been slowly working on book reports all year long. They started with mystery book reports, which most (but not all) of my students have finished. Then we began working on informational book reports, this is what most of my students are working on. However, some of my fast workers have finished those and have begun working on their historical fiction book reports.

Finally, we finish the day with our read alouds. This week we are working on folktales, so we will be reading The Little Red Hen and two versions of The Emperor's New Clothes.

So that's what my class is doing this week, what's your class doing?

The Best Lessons are Unplanned

My class is reading The Case of the Gasping Garbage by Michele Torrey. This book is very cute and engaging, but it's also quite challenging for my students. A few weeks ago we read the first 2 chapters which included a mystery where yeast and flour combine to make a "monster" in the garbage can. Unfortunately, most of my students had no idea what yeast was. So they didn't understand how it could bubble and burp. The next day I threw my lesson plans out the window to correct that. I brought in the ingredients to make bread and made sure that all of my students knew what yeast did.

First we combined 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 cup of water and 1 tablespoon of yeast and watched it make bubbles.

Then we added 6 cups of flour (plus a little) and a tablespoon of salt. I kneaded the bread in front of the class so they could see it come together. ("Ooooh, my grandma does that when she makes tortillas!" said one of my students.)

We put the bread into an oiled bowl and covered it. The story talked about keeping it in a warm place. Unfortunately, the air conditioning in my room runs at full blast and there are no windows. But, we improvised and wrapped it up with the extra sweater that I keep in my classroom. ("Like a baby" one of my students said.)

While we did grammar and had lunch, our yeast worked it's magic and by mid-day we had a big bowl full of dough, which I promptly punched down, making it "burp" like the dough in the story. Next the students each tried their hand at kneading their own small ball of dough and flattening it into a pita shaped piece of bread. They put their bread onto a piece of wax paper with their name on it to rise for the second time while we worked on answering the questions on this very chapter of The Case of the Gasping Garbage.

Finally, just before the end of the day the students flattened their dough one more time and I fried it up on my electric skillet so that we ended up with a fried flat bread. (It was very reminecent of the Moroccan batbout that I miss so much!)

At the end of the day the kids could all explain that flour and yeast mix and make gas bubbles that form inside bread. So I guess that means that missing out on a few of the things that were originally on the lesson plan in order to improvise this lesson was completely worth it. We didn't read the next chapter like I had planned to. We didn't do our Nancy Drew read aloud. We didn't even get to conjugating verbs. But, at the end of the day I'd rather they understand something very well and build background knowledge they can use later than stay strictly on schedule. 

2nd Grade Lesson Plans - Week of April 11th

When I was teaching in a multiage classroom overseas in Morocco, I often posted my lesson plans here on my blog. Now that I am back in the classroom, I have had some requests from readers for the sneak peek into my classroom that sharing my lesson plans allowed others. So here is what my class is up to this week:

In the morning, we start out with Phonics/Writing Centers. This week we are focusing on the Long E spelling patterns. My students work independently on their Long E Spelling and Vocabulary Packet. 
Also during our morning block we work on writing. One of the great weaknesses for my class as a whole is writing conventions (capitals, punctuation and application of the spelling patterns we have learned), so every week we work on writing to a writing prompt. This week, my students will work on my Freddy Fish Writing Prompt (which you can download for free from my old blog post - 10 Free Writing Prompts). This writing prompt is graded strictly on conventions and gives me a great piece to conference with each child on using good conventions in their writing. 
After I have conferenced with each child on the conventions from last week's writing prompt, I will pull small groups and we will work on our persuasive writing. Right now we are working on the first prompt from my Opinion Writing Journal, which asks the students to write about the best book they have ever read. Most of my groups have finished brainstorming and are well into drafting. This week we will finish drafting and begin the process of editing and revising.

Our second block of the day is reading. We start out the reading section working on reading fluency. First we review our weekly nursery rhyme. The students are working on their Nursery Rhyme Response Sheets for homework, but we review the rhyme each day in class to help build fluency. Students also do one minute partner fluency checks using their weekly passages, which I have pulled from Read Works. (You can find the link for Read Works and other places to pull reading passages at this old blog post: Preparing for Reading Comprehension Standardized Tests.) 
Once we have finished our fluency checks, we will work on building a chart with the characteristics of different types of poetry. We have already read quite a few Shel Silverstein poems and classic nursery rhymes, but this week we will read a bunch of traditional rhyming poems and them to our chart.
Finally, we will move into guided reading. While I pull guided reading groups, my students work on a variety of reading comprehension activities using their weekly passage. After they have finished that day's comprehension activity, they have time to read independently. 
This class has many new readers who have never built up the stamina for silent reading. So I am promoting reading books from cover to cover by tracking the number of on level books each student reads. My students are also completing Book Review Bookmarks on some of the books they read, which we are displaying in our class library in order to encourage other students to read books their classmates have enjoyed.

After lunch, we move into Math. First we start with our daily routine of Calendar Books and Fast Facts Quizzes, which my kiddos call number sprints. The Calendar Books allow us to review multiple number concepts every day, including adding and subtraction 1, 5 and 10 and creating a number using base ten blocks and coins. The Fast Fact Quizzes help us to build number fluency. We are currently working on Subtraction Fast Facts, but by the end of the week I am sure that at least a few of my students will move onto the Addition/Subtraction Mixed Facts.
During these last six weeks of the school year, we are reviewing key concepts that students are still struggling with. Before Spring Break, the students took an assessment covering all of the standards covered this year. Last week we worked on skip counting with my Tiered Skip Counting Math Activity. This week we are working on number lines using my Tiered Number Lines Math Activity. 
I have split my students into three groups, using their data from this end of the year assessment. The prove it group will work with me to prove that the answers of three comparing numbers problems are correct by labeling and using number lines. The solve it grup will answer three comparing numbers problems, using number lines. The fix it group will "fix" number lines that have been mislabeled by common student mistakes. 
Once students finish their tiered activity, we move into math centers. Most of the students will be working on Moby Max and finishing up the creation of their fraction books. But my "fix it group" from last week's skip counting tiered activity will also spend time finishing the videos that they planned last week using my Video Planning Sheets. Their videos will teach others about skip counting and I am very impressed a their ideas. One group is trying to replicate an Odd Squad type of episode. Another group is teaching skip counting by subtracting life points when playing Yu-Gi-Oh. All of the groups are definitely extending their understanding by creating these videos.

So that's what my class is doing this week. What's your class doing?

This Week’s Lesson Plans: April 7th – April 11th

I have been home for the past two weeks, recovering from hernia surgery.  Luckily, I have an amazing team teacher who has been taking care of my kiddos.  However, on Monday, I go back to my little sweeties.  Here is what I have planned:

 Every morning, my students come in and work on their nursery rhyme – this week is Sing a Song of Six Pence.  Then they work on their differentiated vocabulary packets.  This week, we will all be working on the ESL Vocabulary Packet on Adjectives.  Hopefully, this will help them remember to add more interesting adjectives to their writing. After they finish their vocabulary, my students will work on their math textbook pages or their writing assignments.

Meanwhile, I pull reading groups.  Some of my students are still working on Reading A-Z books, but my Mister and Me group finished the book just before I left.  While I was gone, this group created an iMovie trailer pretending that the book was made into a movie.  This week, we will review their movie and tests, do a fluency check.  Then, we will begin working on Frindle.  My other group has been independently work on the Ice Wreck novel study, so we will spend this week reviewing their work and then begin the process of creating an iMovie trailer.

After snack and recess, my students each take a one minute math quiz – differentiated among 7 levels.  Next, my students work on their calendar books and their daily math. 

This week, all of my students will be preparing for their comprehensive trimester test by completing review sheets.  On Monday, we will also add our Math Idiom:  Two Peas in a Pod.   

This week, we will be reviewing the different ways to subtract long numbers and the different ways to add and subtract decimals. On Wednesday, and Thursday, we will jump into our new science unit: The Dry Desert.  While I was gone, the students watched 4 different videos on the desert and completed graphic organizers to reflect on what they learned.  They watched The Magic School Bus: Dries Up, BBC Planet Earth: Deserts, Polar Biomes and the Attacama Desert Explained.  So, we will take some time to review what the students learned, as well as to label a World Map with the location of deserts around the world.

  Next, we will look at plants and how they meet their needs.  I will break the class into 4 groups and each group will experiment with one of the needs of plants: soil, air, water or light.  We will use this sheet to plan our experiment and record our data.  Feel free to download the sheet for free from Google Docs.

Finally, on Friday, we will take some much needed work time on our Math Tutorial Videos, which will be added to our Online Portfolios soon.

In the afternoons, my partner teacher works on Writing and Social Studies.  This week students are finishing up creating travel brochures. In Social Studies, the students have just started to learn about Ancient Egypt. During this time, I work with a small group of first year ESL students, to give them extra support. 

Homework in my class is all assigned via Edmodo.  Monday and Wednesday’s math video links can be found on my collaborative math video Google Doc, which is always available to my students if they need to re-watch a video they have already seen.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into my plans for the week.  What’s on your plans this week?

Weekly Lesson Plans: March 10 – March 14

Would you like a peek into what will be happening in my class next week?  Here is a copy of my lesson plans:

 

Every morning, my students come in and work on their nursery rhyme – this week is To Market, To Market.  Then they work on their differentiated vocabulary packets.  I have 2 Level 1 ESL students, who will work on Transportation this week.  Meanwhile, my native English speakers are working on  Prefixes.  After they finish their vocabulary, my students work on their math review sheets or their writing assignments.

Meanwhile, I pull reading groups.  Some of my students are still working on Reading A-Z books, but my Mister and Me group is getting almost finished with the book.  They will be reading chapters 11 and 12 this week and preparing for their final comprehension quiz next week.  One of my younger groups has just begun to read the non-fiction book Ice Wreck about Ernest Shakleton and his misadventures in Antarctica.

 

After snack and recess, my students each take a one minute math quiz – differentiated among 7 levels.  Next, my students work on their calendar books and their daily math. 

This week, all of my students will be preparing for their comprehensive trimester test by completing review sheets.  On Monday, we will also add our Math Idiom:  I’ve Told You a Thousand Times.   

Once students have finished their math tests, they will be finishing up their heat inquiry projects.  The students have chosen questions about heat like “How do we make fires bigger?” and “How does a microwave work?” and have been researching for 3 weeks.  Now students are working on creating Powtoon videos to teach their classmates what they learned.

In the afternoons, my partner teacher works on Writing and Social Studies.  This week students are continuing to work poetry using pieces of my Informational Writing Journal. In Social Studies, the students are completing their goods project, tracing back student selected goods like gummy bears and bottled water to their natural resources.  The students are just about finished researching and have begun creating Prezi presentations with their information. During this time, I work with a small group of first year ESL students, to give them extra support. 

Homework in my class is all assigned via Edmodo.  Monday and Wednesday’s math video links can be found on my collaborative math video Google Doc, which is always available to my students if they need to re-watch a video they have already seen.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into my plans for the week.  What’s on your plans this week?

Multi-Age Lesson Plans – Week of January 27th

Last week, I posted my lesson plans showing how much of my resources I actually use in my classroom.  I received such a wonderful response that I decided to share my plans each week for the rest of the school year.  

 

Every morning, my students come in and work on their nursery rhyme – this week is Peter Piper.  Then they work on their differentiated vocabulary packets.  I have 2 Level 1 ESL students, who will work on Family this week.  Meanwhile, my native English speakers are working on  L endings, like el, al and il.  After they finish their vocabulary, my students work on their math textbook pages or their writing assignments.

Meanwhile, I pull reading groups.  Many of my students are still working on Reading A-Z books, but my Mister and Me group is getting ready to read Chapter 6, which is one of the most exciting chapters.  My teammate teaches the older students reading.  She has a group working on Charlotte’s Web and one working on Bridge to Terabithia.

 

After snack and recess, my students each take a one minute math quiz – differentiated among 7 levels.  Next, my students work on their calendar books and their daily math. 

 This week, all of my students will be adding the Coordinate Graphing reference page to their Interactive Math Notebooks.  We will also be doing a Coordinate Graphing scavenger hunt and using the bus schedule to plan a trip.  On Monday, we will also add our Math Idiom:  A Bad Penny.  All of our math lessons are quickies this week, so I hope students will get a chance to work on their Math Videos, because they are starting to really shape up.  Here is one that that one of my Year 4 (3rd grade) students made using Powtoon:

 

Wednesday and Thursday are science days.  On Wednesday, we will be working on how color absorbs heat by melting ice cubes under colored pieces of paper.  On Thursday, the students will begin to design their own insulation device.  I have a planning sheet for them that you can download for FREE from Google Docs. 

 

 

 

In the afternoons, my partner teacher works on Writing and Social Studies.  This week students are continuing to work poetry using pieces of my Poetry Writing Journal.  They are writing poems about Springtime.  In Social Studies, the students are learning about money and beginning to plan a weekend trip to a location of their choice, with the condition that they can only spend 100 Euros.  During this time, I work with a small group of first year ESL students, to give them extra support. 

Homework in my class is all assigned via Edmodo.  Monday and Tuesday’s math video links can be found on my collaborative math video Google Doc, which is always available to my students if they need to re-watch a video they have already seen.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into my plans for the week.  What’s on your plans this week?