Fridays are for Reflecting!

 

Class Dojo Reflection Activity

    Raise your hand if Class Dojo is your best friend! I really wish you could see how high my hand is raised and how hard I'm smiling right now! I use Class Dojo faithfully, to help enhance my behavior/culture system. Credits and rewards are earned for good choices while "reminders" (aka negative points) and consequences are earned for poor choices. At the end of each week, my students log into their student accounts to view their points and reflect on their behavior for the week. This routine has really helped my 3rd Graders to develop self accountability and goal setting strategies. Here's how I assign the Class Dojo Reflection Activity:

1. Upload the assignment to your preferred virtual learning platform. I like to use the 'Worksheets' feature on Class Dojo but you can definitely assign it on GoogleClasssroom using Google Slides or other platforms.
2. Students login to the student accounts on Class Dojo to view their reports for the week. I give them about 3-5 minutes of viewing and they have the option to ask questions about any of their credits or reminders (I have the memory of an elephant on most occasions but if you have a bad memory, then I do not recommend encouraging questions lol).
3. Students then complete the reflection activity by inserting text boxes for each prompt. Try to encourage students to find trends in their behavior. Maybe they have a hard time in the mornings but they start to improve later in the day. Or perhaps Wednesday was rough all together and they're just realizing that they were triggered by something that happened at home. This is my favorite step because I tend to get lots of heart felt apologies (without asking). It seems as though my 3rd graders are becoming more aware of how their actions impact the team and holding themselves accountable. 
4. Students share their goals if they feel comfortable. Sharing a goal sometimes helps to solidify its purpose and promote peer accountability. When you forget your goal or start to fall back into bad habits, your friends will remind you of the endgame!
5. The teacher gives feedback and affirms students. Although we are still making progress with creating SMART goals as 3rd graders, I never want to downplay a student's personal goal. I try my best to encourage them to make a goal based on a trend in their behavior and affirm them for acknowledging it.

If you like this resource and would like to incorporate it into your virtual/hybrid learning routine, download this freebie from my Teachers Pay Teachers store today. It comes with a Google Slides page for GoogleClassroom and the PNG image for teachers to save and use as necessary. Let me know how your students enjoyed the Friday Reflection!

Happy Teaching...on Coffee!

Ms. Copeland Takes 3rd Grade

Happy New (School) Year     

The 2020-2021 school year has officially begun and I am so excited to teach 3rd Grade for the first time since I began my career as an educator 9 years ago. The thought of being able to focus on one homeroom and truly establish a strong classroom community full of love and learning makes my heart smile! I was so excited to start this school year that I...(drum rollllllllllll), FILMED MY FIRST WEEK and started a YouTube channel!

Youtube

In my very first vlog, I start the week getting reacquainted with the staff members of my entire school by discussing some motivational pieces related to education. One article in particular really resonated with me. "A Teacher’s Guide to Thriving Through the School Year" highlighted  five actions that help teachers maximize their impact with kids. If you get a chance to read the article, let me know your thoughts about it below. Which action steps spoke to you (if any)? 

On the second day, I was able to get a great understanding of my expectations for virtual learning by forgoing trainings/webinars for the various online platforms that we will be using. You have no idea how excited I am to have access to Raz Plus (like seriously, I can't believe that I'll actually be able to use the turbo version of Raz Kids without having to beg for someone else's log-in information). My school is really going all out with making sure that we have ample resources to make learning fun for kids, despite the pandemic. Other programs that we will be using include (but are not limited to): GoogleClassroom, Zoom, Amplify Reading, Freckle, and Great Minds Affirm. I feel so grateful to be at a school that invests in these types of resources without us teachers having to "pull teeth."

The work week ends with me going into the school building for the first time since February. Now that I think about it, it's really crazy that I'm a teacher and I haven't been inside of a school building for SIX MONTHS (not that I'm complaining #safetyfirst)! While at school I was able to start to organize my classroom, and to internalize Module 1 of the Eureka Math curriculum (3rd grade). My coach gave me some guiding questions that really helped to focus my mind as I read through the module. Does your school use Eureka for math instruction? If so, how do you like it? If not, which math curriculum do you use and how do you like it? 

ECSTATIC is the best word to describe how I'm feeling at the start of my new journey as a 3rd grade teacher! Did you start your school year yet? What are you most excited about? Drop a comment and don’t forget to like watch my first video and subscribe to my channel. Happy Teaching (on coffee)!

Math Lesson Structure

The Ultimate Math Lesson Structure

How many math "best practices" have you heard of in your teaching career? I know I've encountered at least 100 effective strategies for teaching math and I'm only in my 6th year (5 if you don't count that awful year I spent teaching 1st grade reading). There's centers, problem of the day, fact fluency, guided practice, independent practice, exit tickets, checking for understanding, giving feedback to individual students during the lesson, small group instruction, technology, writing in math, assessments, reteaching unmastered skills, number strings and the list goes on and on (and then some). If you're like me, you're probably thinking that it is impossible to do them all and still teach all of the grade level standards before the school year ends. Although that may be true, there is a way to consistently push rigor while still incorporating some of the other components of effective math instruction on a daily basis.

Homework Check

Implementing a daily homework check structure into your lessons may not seem like the highest leverage use of time but it has some great benefits. Not only does checking homework increase accountability for students but it is also an opportunity for closing gaps in understanding. Give students 3-5 minutes to check their answers against a key and allow them of fix incorrect problems for credit until the timer goes off. Most of the time, students can find their own error(s) this gives them space to take ownership of their work accuracy. As they are checking their homework independently, the teacher(s) should circulate and check in with each student. Use this time to record the names of scholars with incomplete or missing homework for grading purposes. Also, be sure to touch base with the students that are not completing homework; this can be an opportunity for a great teachable moment related to college and career readiness for the upper grades.

I've been using this homework resource from The Clutter-Free Classroom for a few years now and it has made my life so much easier. I just print the answer-keys included in the bundle for my students and they're all set to check on their own.

Math Facts

Math facts is the space where students build automaticity with numbers. While it is normal for some students to rely on various counting strategies, at some point they should be able to recall certain math facts from memory. The more facts they remember, the more brain space they have for tackling H-level (hard as heck) problems. Give students 1 minute to complete 25 math facts that you want to focus on. Keep the same math fact focus for at least a week (more than a week is also okay) to promote muscle memory. 

I created these Multiplication Facts Worksheets formatted on GoogleSlides that are great for hybrid learning  for my math facts. These worksheets are great for both in-person and virtual teaching!

 

Skill Fluency

The skill fluency portion of the lesson is where the re-teaching happens. This is where you build procedural fluency of previously taught math computation skills that scholars are still struggling with. This is not the place discussing new learning in depth. Start by having students analyze a work sample and facilitate a quick discussions about the work. Then present a Criteria for Success (CFS) and release your students to practice the skill for about 5 minutes. Skill fluency should take no longer than 7-10 minutes total.

I get my practice pages from this RTI progress monitoring resource by Mandy Neal. She includes at least 10 practice pages for each skill at different levels of rigor. It really comes in handy when your students need practice with same skill more than once.

Problem Solving Task

The Problem Solving Task (PST) is my absolute favorite part of the lesson! This is where the new learning takes place. Students are given a problem (typically a word problem) that is a little bit beyond what they already know and are prompted to try it independently. I usually start by reading and annotating the problem as a class so that each scholar understands what the problem is asking. As students are working independently for about 4 minutes, the teacher should circulate and looks for scholar work samples that are going to drive the class discussion.

The PST discussion is where the magic happens! "Show call" (display under a doc cam) 2-3 samples of scholar work with various strategies that you want to highlight and ask synthesizing questions about the work. This questioning will allow for students to do the heavy lifting by articulating what they see and whether or not they agree or disagree with the strategy. The last work sample of the show call should be contain the strategy that you want to focus on for practice. You may have to make your own work sample if you don't anticipate that students will produce the strategy that you want to focus on. After your class discusses the last work sample, allow your students to come up with a "key point" (the "how" of the learning objective) as a class. This allows them to feel a sense of ownership of their learning.

The PST should take no longer than 20 minutes for both the work time and discussion. I usually create my own problem solving tasks and will make them available in TPT store shortly.

Guided Practice

Guided Practice is where your students are seeing the new strategy for the first time. I usually start with an interactive modeling/think aloud of the skill and give students a thinking task as they observe.   Usually the thinking task is, "what are the steps that I did to solve this problem?" After I call on a student to attempt to list all of the steps, I present the CFS for the skill and release them to independent practice.

I usually do guided practice problem in a math journal/interactive notebook structure. This should not exceed 10-15 minutes. Check out my UPESC and Bar Models interactive notebooks if you want to build problem solving skills in your classroom. Other skills and standards will be available in my TPT store shortly.

Independent Practice & Exit Tickets

After students get some practice with the teacher and/or partners, they should have some time to practice the skill indecently and receive feedback on their progress. Use the CFS to give bite-sized feedback so that you don't spend too much time with just one scholar. It is very important that each students gets a chance to receive feedback from you so that they are not practicing the wrong thing for too long. If you notice a trend (more than 3 students are making the same mistake), they pull the team back as a whole to stamp the error and highlight the part of the CFS that they should focus on to avoid that mistake then release them back to work. After practicing for about 10 minutes, give your students an exit ticket. This is a final product of the day's learning that students complete independently without feedback. The teacher should collect and grade the exit ticket and use the data to inform instruction. Try to have exit tickets graded and handed back to students within 2 days with an exemplar attached. The immediate feedback helps to promote the quality of student work as they progress through the unit.

Other Components

Due to my math block being so short (only 60 minutes) I have to find creative ways to incorporate some of the other components of math. Once a week, we have a Centers & Math Workshop Day where students get to work with different centers while my co-teacher and I give small group intervention for tier 2 and 3 scholars. I use Jennifer Findlay's math centers and my students love them! 

One of the centers is a technology station where one table gets to work on the I-Ready math program. I-Ready has been a great way for my students to get tailored instruction at their level! 

On Friday's my students get a weekly quiz with a mixture of past and present skill focuses. I use the data from these quizzes to inform my skill fluency reteach lessons for the next week. After the quiz, I use the remainder of the block to do some of the other math best practices such as number strings, problem of the day, or any other structures that promote student achievement. While I am flexible with this use of time for the whole group, my co-teacher uses this space as another opportunity for small group instruction with our struggling scholars.

This lesson structure has been a sure fire way to promote student achievement by pushing rigor and conceptual understanding as students learn new skills as well as building procedural fluency throughout the year. If you are looking to revamp your math instruction, try using this structure to inform your planning an let me know how it works for you! By the way, don't forget to make a hot cup of coffee as you plan!

Tips for New Teachers

1. Get Organized

Having a personal organization plan and implementing it with fidelity is one of the most important things for having a successful school year. Think about your work style and the time of day when you're most productive and make a plan for getting work done. For me personally, I am most productive after school and I really enjoy working alone with the 'Today's R&B and Hip Hop Hits' Pandora station on. I also prefer to work at school (as much as I try to convince myself that I can get work done at home it just doesn't happen). Also think about how you like to organize your duties. Do you prefer an electronic org system by using a calendar on your laptop (TEAM MAC) or are you more successful when you write things down? I am a 'write it down or it won't get done' type of teacher. To keep all of my duties and planning organized in one place I use a teacher planner which I created myself to fit my needs (getting organized feels better when your planner is cute). Check it out at my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Once you put careful thought into how and when you want to complete your teacher duties, hold yourself accountable and just do them.

Pink and Teal Planner

Pink White and Grey Planner

 2. Map out your Classroom Culture Vision

Effective classroom management is a crucial part of promoting successful student academic outcomes. You can have perfect lesson plans but if your class is chaotic, the learning won't happen. Think about your ideal classroom environment. What do you see? What does is sound like? What is the teacher doing? What are the student doing? Now think about how you will respond when that vision isn't happening. Create behavior plan that considers the different nuances of responding to minor misbehaviors vs. major misbehaviors. I learned the hard way in my beginning years of teaching that responding the same way for all behavior infractions plays a big part in student disinvestment of your behavior policy. Be on the look out for a detailed post about how I use Class Dojo to enforce my behavior policy.

 3. Avoid the "One Man Island" Syndrome

YOU CAN NOT DO THIS WORK ALONE! The best teachers can attest collaboration is one of the biggest contributions that helped them on their path to being a successful educator. Don't be afraid to ask for help and definitely don't be afraid to steal ideas from someone who is doing it right and make them your own. If you haven't already heard of Teachers Pay Teachers by now, it will be your best friend if you are not at a network that provides lesson plans and curriculum resources. There are tons of materials that you can filter through for free and for purchase. Browse through the website and I guarantee you'll find what you need.

 4. Plan in Advance

As a teacher, it is your moral duty to make sure that you are intellectually prepared to teach your students the skills that they need to know. Knowing where they are and where they need to go is a major part of this preparation. Planning in advance is a way to ensure that you fully understand what students are expected to learn and can teach it effectively. This topic is a bit difficult to talk about in a concise way so I will just share some best practices that I learned throughout the years when it comes to making sure that I am intellectually prepared for my students.

Beginning of the Year

• Read or create a yearly overview of what students are expected to learn that year.
• Chunk the learning into units and allocate a specific number of instructional days for each unit 

Throughout the Year

• Create a logical progression of teaching points for each unit (try to do this before you actually begin teaching the unit)
• Have a meeting with yourself every week and map out what you will be teaching the following week 
• Read or create your daily lessons a week in advance so that you can adjust or prepare for those lessons mentally and physically (there is nothing worse than realizing the day before that you don't have the materials you need to teach a lesson)

Help yourself stay on top of your planning with this teacher planner and make sure that you have a good cup of coffee while you work!

 5. Get to Know your Students with Disabilities

Providing a rigorous education for ALL students is the role of an educator. Some people may try to advise you not to focus on students with IEPs when you first begin teaching but I believe this type of thinking to be immoral. These students' lives are in your hands for an entire year and being a new educator is no excuse to not do all that you can help them learn (if this sounds like I am getting a little preachy, that is not my intent. Supporting students with disabilities is something that I am very passionate about and my goal is simply to help shift mindsets that sometimes prohibit students from getting the education that they deserve).

When you receive your students' IEPs, take the time to read through the specific diagnosis, the academic and/or behavior goals, the mandated accommodations and descriptions of strengths and areas for growth. You may even want to create an IEP  At a Glance sheet to reference as you plan to support these students throughout the year.

Providing support for students with disabilities is not as hard as people would believe. Sometimes this support can be a simple as giving frequent feedback during and after work time. In the beginning of the year, start small by knowing who your students with disabilities are and check their understanding of directions frequently. Be on the lookout for future blog posts about supporting students with disabilities.

I hope that this was helpful! If you have any other tips that will help new teachers have a successful start to their school year, please comment below!

Bonus Tip: Become a Coffee Lover

Transitioning to a New School

I am excited to announce that I will be transitioning to a new school for the 2017-2018 school year and I can not even begin to explain how excited I am. I will still be teaching 5th grade (the best grade to teach) but instead of teaching only math at a middle school, I will be teaching math and science at an elementary school for the Citizens of the World Charter Network. To say that I am 'elated' is the biggest understatement of all time. Although, I really love the team and family at my current school and will miss the staff and students dearly, I cannot wait to make this transition and have my own classroom again! I wanted to share some tips with you on making a switch between schools that will hopefully help to make your changeover as seamless as possible!

1. Start an Inventory!

You want to start an inventory of your teacher stuff. You know the storage containers, manipulatives, books, school supplies, etc. that you've accumulated over the years. Getting a record of it will help to ensure that you leave with ALL of your belongings and figure out what you need more of. It can also help you figure out what you can get rid of/donate to other teachers (for all of us teacher hoarders out there that keep things for years that we don't use). Sometimes we don't realize how valuable (or not so valuable) our teacher things are until we take the time to write it down. You might even end up rediscovering a manipulative that you used to love and haven't used in a while. Download my Supply Inventory Freebie to get started on your inventory with style! 

              

Plan your Move!

I know that it takes me a long time to get things done in general, let alone moving to a new school. It's kind of like moving to a new apartment from an already, fully-furnished one that you've lived in for years. You want to make sure that you take your time and plan out how you are going to pack and where you are going to store everything. I won't be able to "move in" to my new school until August so I plan to rent a storage unit at the local CubeSmart near the new school. Starting in the first week of June (the last month of the school year for my district), I will begin to transport all of my things little by little. Until then, I am gathering boxes and propositioning friends to get ready to help me! 

Shop for Containers

While you are planning how your are going to pack, you should also start to pick out your color schemes and themes for your classroom. This way, you can start shopping (my favorite pastime) for different storage containers that match and any other teacher things that you realized that you needed after doing your supply inventory. I am sticking with a 'brights' theme so I will only need a few more storage containers to pack up the miscellaneous things that aren't currently stored in a container.  Having your materials already organized in storage containers helps to make the move much more efficient. Here are some examples of the storage containers that you can picked up from Dollar Tree, Family Dollar, or National Wholesale Liquidators. 

Build a rapport with your new Principal. 

Every now and then, you should send an email or card to your new principal just to see how things are going or to receive any updates on information involving your on-boarding. Principals get really busy toward the end of the school year and it is likely that they will get tons of new information (such as a draft calendar, scope and sequences, new hire information) but forget to send it to you. Keeping in touch is a great way to stay in the loop while scoring 'brownie points' with your new admin. 

 Go out with Class!

Whether you are leaving your school on good terms or bad terms, it is important to remember that you are a teacher first! Maintain your professionalism and continue to do all that you can to move your students forward in their education. Try to resist the 'End of Year Laziness' trap that a lot of us fall victim to. If you are leaving on good terms with your school, you are in a special position to possibly return if the worst should happen at your new school (you never know!). You want to continue to be the professional that you have been all along, being sure to leave a lasting impression. 

I hope that these tips were helpful and if you have any more tips, please share in the comments! Thanks for reading!

Problem Solving Using UPESC

When I first started teaching, I struggled to find a way to help my students with their problem solving skills in a way that was rigorous yet consistent. I often found myself blaming my students' low reasoning skills on their lack of reading comprehension but I soon found this thinking to be extremely false. As the years went on and my delivery of instruction improved due to professional development, I finally feel that I am at a place where I am confident in my ability to help my students develop their problem skills.

First you want to give students a consistent process for solving word problems. My students use the acronym UPESC which stands for Understand, Plan, Estimate, Solve and Check.

Understand- To understand the problem, I teach my students to read and annotate word problems by circling important numbers with the units, underlining key information (important information without numbers) and labeling the important information. To keep my students from randomly circling and underlining, I try to stress that anything that is circled/underlined should have a specific smart note on why that information is important. Without naming this stipulation, it is almost guaranteed that students will underline the entire problem and circle every single number that they see without trying to fully understand what is being asked. The two questions that help the most during this process are: what do we have? and, what do we need to find?

Plan- During the planning process, students should use their annotations to help them choose the operation. Visual models definitely help students choose the appropriate operation by forcing them to represent the situation of the problem. My students use bar models as their visual representations and with consistent practice and feedback, choosing the appropriate operation becomes a breeze even for my students with the most gaps in their reasoning ability. Once students have shown mastery of choosing the appropriate operation on a consistent basis, I allow them to simply list the steps for solving.

Estimate- There are several estimation strategies that I teach my students to choose from throughout the course of the school year, the strategy that they use depends on the problem. The most common strategy that students can use to estimate is rounding. When dealing with fractions students can use benchmarking or their understanding of relative magnitude to help them estimate their final answer. The purpose of this component is to help students gauge the range of their final answer so that they can readily recognize when they have made a mistake after solving. There are countless occurrences where my students were able to avoid silly mistakes based on estimating their answer before hand.

Solve- Once students fully understand the problem and have a clear plan of execution, they can solve but they must show clear, complete work. I do not accept work with just an answer. My reasoning for this is because it becomes more difficult to give feedback for students to fix mistakes when its not clear they've done incorrectly.

Check- Finally students should wrap up their problem solving by checking their work. They should start by checking their work against their estimate; if their answer is close then they most likely solved correctly. To check their work more thoroughly students have the option of checking using the inverse operation, re-working the problem, or using models if they chose to solve with the standard algorithm. Any checking strategy is acceptable as long as students are showing strategic thinking for checking to see if they solved correctly.

I usually start teaching this process for solving word problems in the very beginning of the year with lots of guided practice, questioning around reasoning and feedback. I have found that students make faster progress when they have exemplars to refer back to when they are working independently. Posters and interactive math notebooks come in handy for my students when developing their independence with problem solving.

If you are looking for resources to start helping your students with problem solving check out my UPESC Problem Solving Pack and my Interactive Math Notebooks for Bar Models. These products along with consistent practice and feedback, are sure to help develop the reasoning skills that students need to tackle word problems.

        
    

What do you do to help your students with their problem solving? Share your strategies by leaving a comment down below! 

Get Ready for the New School Year

Most people spend their vacation days traveling, relaxing, spending time with friends/family and even indulging in a few libations to get over the stress of day-to-day life. And then there's teachers... It is likely to find a teacher spending the days of their summer vacation scrolling through Pinterest and getting excited for the new school year. Our good time is shopping at the Dollar Tree and Target finding goodies for classroom storage. As much as you may try to NOT think about work, the teacher heart wants what the teacher heart wants. As I was preparing for the upcoming school year, I thought that I'd share a few tips on how I get ready for the first day of school.

First things first, GET A PLANNER! A major part of being a great teacher is staying organized. I find that having all of my responsibilities in one place helps me a great deal with maintaining organization. There are many ways in which teachers pick planners; some use binders to organize with dividers and some use simple monthly planners. This year I decided to create my own teacher planner. I absolutely love how I am able to customize it to meet my needs using the ARC binding system.

Next, you want to start pre-planning. You need two things: your district/network calendar and the scope and sequence for your curriculum. If you don't have them yet, try searching for them on your district/network website. Once you have them you can start filling out your monthly spreads with important dates (I use pen for hard dates like holidays and pencil for dates that are susceptible to change like testing days) and developing a year plan for when you want to teach various domains for the standards. If you really want to make the most of your pre-planning, try making a pacing guide for how many days you plan to allocate towards each skill. There are so many skills that need to be taught in one short school year, developing a pacing guide helps to hold you accountable for teaching all of the standards. I have started my pacing guide by writing down every single skill that needs to be taught and so far I'm at 227 teaching days. Clearly I need to do some fine tuning since there are only 186 days in my school year lol. I will share my math pacing guide as soon as I finish finalizing it.

Once you've finished pre-planning, you want to start thinking about your culture vision. When you think of your ideal class, what do you see? What are students doing? What are you doing? How are students learning? Ask your self all of these questions and write down your thoughts. Now that you know what you want your class to be like, start thinking about what you are going to do when your vision isn't happening. The best teachers establish a system of accountability with consistency. My major goals when thinking about my culture vision are: establishing trust with my students, being fair/consistent and most importantly maximizing learning time. A great book to invest in when thinking about you culture vision is Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire by Rafe Esquith. He has such an eloquent way of establishing trust with his students and his classroom culture is truly inspirational.

Finally, you want to prepare for the new school year by planning  your lessons for the first week of school. I have recently come across the website called Planbook and I am obsessed. I found out about this site from Bridget at The Lettered Classroom on her YouTube channel. She sold me on the benefits of this website and I will definitely be using this site for my lesson plans. Check out her videos here; she has a promo code to get your first 6 months for FREE!

I hope that these tips were helpful and be on the lookout for more information about teacher organization, character development, math, science and more!