Happy Campers!

As a new teacher, I have just barely begun to tap into all of the teaching resources and online communities that offer inspiring ideas and materials for making teaching fun and much easier! Our principal encouraged us to use the last month of school to focus on creating our own unit of study that we could align with the new Common Core State Standards that Baltimore City Public Schools are moving towards adopting city-wide.  I have been spending a great deal of time on a few great teacher blogs that truly inspired - and directly influenced - what I came up with!  Those of you that know me know that I love to be outside and will jump at the chance to go camping!  My city students often don't have the opportunity to get out into the great outdoors so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to share my love of camping with them - and my Happy Campers unit was born.

 Mrs. Halbert at Learning with a Happy Heart! and Mrs. Carrol at The First Grade Parade were huge inspirations.  I downloaded some of the materials that they created when implementing camping units in their own classrooms from Teachers Pay Teachers (this site literally changed my life as a first year teacher).  Among the highlights of implementing this unit were: 

• Setting up a real tent in our library and letting students do their independent reading in it!  (Special thanks to our school special educator, Katie Horn, for lending us the tent!)
• Reading the students spooky campfire stories with all the lights out and a flashlight under my chin!
• Listening to the spooky stories that students wrote themselves!
• Showing the students pictures of one of my real life camping trips!
• Learning about constellations and where we can go to the night sky best!
• Watching students apply their knowledge of fractions while making S'mores!
• Reading many books about camping, outdoor activities, and funny fictional stories about camping capers! 

As always, there are some ways that I will refine this unit to make it more cohesive and have some of the activities spark some deeper academic learning but overall I loved it and I think the kiddos did too!  :)

Shooting for Second Grade!

The theme in my classroom this year has sort of revolved around shooting stars and that all my students are stars!  In that vein, I created a Shooting for Second Grade tracking chart to help them really push themselves these last five weeks of school.  The charts were pretty time-intensive... I'm sure there is any easier way to do this... but I haven't figured it out yet!  One of my big goals next year is to have the students track their own progress consistently throughout the year and set their own learning goals.  This was a way to get started and test how manageable it was and how effective it was.  I chose to focus on literacy goals for the end of the year.

Each student was assigned an animal so they could keep their scores and progress anonymous.  I used clip art and printed out the animals in color on card stock and laminated them.  Then I attached a small piece of velcro to each animal.  I used poster board to make the charts - I created a square for each week left in the year that their animal could move to if they met the literacy goals that they set for themselves.  The students all started out on a square that listed their current reading level for 100 Book Challenge, Wireless Generation Test (reading comprehension), and oral reading fluency (number of words read accurately in one minute).  The board also featured a list of goals all first graders should reach by the end of the year.  I met with each student individually to reveal which animal they were (they loved this part!) and discuss their scores.  Then I worked with them to help set a goal.  As they met their mini goals for each week (I met with them to track their progress one week after goals were established) their animal moved.  If they did not meet their goals, I helped them problem solve how they could in the future and told them that their animal would move once they met their goal.  This was very motivating for them.  They kept asking to meet with me so they could move their animal and they were definitely sharing more about what they were doing independently to reach their goal (every teacher's dream!!!).  I wrote the goal they were working on on the square so that they could refer to it and I kept a log for myself as well of each meeting I had with them and how they demonstrated progress.  So far so good - we will see how this all plays out as end of year assessments approach! :)