I was at a training last week that highlighted different Gifted and Talented strategies for classroom teachers to use in their classrooms and Tag Galaxy has become my new best friend. Like many teachers, we knew that anytime you can tie pictures to words even the simple ones, students are more likely to make meaning and connect it to themselves. Plus, to  move words from short term to long term memory students have to build personal relevance with the words. Pictures do that. I have for the longest time used Google Images to do this. But Tag Galaxy is even better than that.

 First when you put in any word, Tag Galaxy creates a sun and satellites. You will want to stick with the sun. the satellites are smaller pictures that tie to your word search but they are not as effective at getting at what you are looking for.



In my search, I used Italian Greyhound. the sun is all the pictures out there and the satellites are everything from dog, puppy, sight hounds, and Italian. If you click on the sun, it will enlarge and you can surf the sun for the picture you are looking for. (Like with all picture searches, I would go out first and make sure that they are clean if you have students using it.)




Once you pick a picture, it will take you to the original picture source. You cannot save from the Sun or print.

Going back to the G/T presentation and what you could do with students--I have a group of 5th graders that I could see using this to pull pictures for their weekly spelling words instead of me doing it or having them draw the pictures. I have always tried to find ways for my students build their own personal relevance with words.  Not only to help their reading and writing but to increase their own vocabularies so they have a greater background knowledge to pull from.

Until next time.

The longest time without a break is going from know to Spring Break. I have to say these ideas I found from Pinterest I can't want to use in my class.

I spend one day a week working on building sight words and language skills, I love this idea as a way do more practice by not so much as a board game or just flashcards. This idea can be used with any word card. The freebie I have for you, I created language skills with pictures to build student vocabulary. I had a hard time finding a trashcan like this one but I did find one at the Container Store that would be small enough to work.






My Base 10 storage doesn't exist. I have three piles of blocks. This would be the perfect solution to moving them for small groups. These were not easy to find but I did find them at the Dollar Tree here. I had to buy more than what I needed but this will solve a small group math management problem--no more loss Base 10 blocks.





I have used Elkonin Boxes during guided reading but this idea to have it on the floor is something I have started for a couple of students who don't hear all the sounds in words with three sounds. My room is all carpet, so I used blue painter's tape. They love jumping for each sound. My hope is that I soon see it in their writing.

Be sure to pick up your freebie Language cards. Have a great week.

A year never goes by when I have to explain to a teacher what motor planning is what they can do in class to support students. I hope this information helps you find something you can use in your classroom.

WHAT IS MOTOR PLANNING?
Motor planning is the ability to conceive, plan, and carry out a skilled, non-habitual motor act in the correct sequence from beginning to end. Incoming sensory stimuli must be correctly integrated in order to form the basis for appropriate, coordinated motor responses. The ability to motor plan is a learned ability which is generalized to all unfamiliar tasks so a child does not need to consciously figure out each new task he or she faces. The child with motor planning difficulties may be slow in carrying out verbal instructions and often appears clumsy in new tasks.

WHAT CAUSES MOTOR PLANNING DIFFICULTIES?
Motor planning difficulties are caused by problems processing sensory information and poor neural connections in the brain. In order to have efficient motor planning, an individual must be able to organize sensory input from his body, have adequate body perception and be able to move around his environment. Difficulty with sensory processing can lead to poor motor planning for fine, gross, and oral motor tasks (such as handwriting, jumping, and forming words, respectively).

HOW CAN I HELP TREAT MY CHILD’S MOTOR PLANNING DIFFICULTIES?
A sensory integrative approach is often used when treating a child with motor planning difficulties. Children rely on adequately interpreting sensory information from the tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, visual, and auditory systems, in order to develop body awareness. Children with motor planning difficulties often have a poor body scheme. By providing your child with sensory information to help organize the information he receive form his environment, he can develop a better body scheme and his motor planning can improve as a result.

WHAT YOU CAN DO IN CLASS:

• Before doing a task encourage the child to:
• Visualize the task;
• Verbalize before doing the task or repeat instruction;
• Verbalize end result;
• Assess whether plan worked- if not work out why not for next time.  

• Help the child identify steps needed to begin and accomplish the task.  Have the child repeat directions and, if possible, write down the steps.  
• Timing and sequencing are important to introduce into activities.  Sequencing may include getting from one position to another or remembering which movement comes after which. 
• Giving a short assignment so that the child can feel instant success in completing a task. 
• Giving one direction at a time.  After one action is successfully completed, add another direction. 
• Helping the child physically move through the action.
• Minimizing visual distractions.  Check for clutter in classroom environment. 
• Reviewing how to play a game before actually playing it.  Demonstrate and verbalize actions.
• Review what has been taught on a regular basis. 

Ideas to assist organizational skills:

• Ensure a clutter free environment.
• Have instructions written down in simple sentences.
• Ask child to repeat instructions- gradually increasing the number and complexity of instructions.
• Discuss with your child their time plan for the day, e.g.: ‘What will you do this morning?’ ‘What will you do after lunch?’  A daily planner on the wall at home will prompt items required for the day. 
• Gradually withdraw the amount of help you are giving your child and encourage them to develop their own strategies for planning and organizing e.g. making a list, putting out reminders.  

Motor Planning Activities:

• General tactile (touch) and vestibular (movement) stimulation are important for motor planning.   Include regular visits to play parks with rides on swings and slides. 
• Brain Breaks
• Activities involving sequences of movement are particularly useful in developing motor planning. Start with simple sequences, gradually make them more complex.  Where possible involve the child in making up patterns.  

For me mental math plays a huge part of building number sense and a students ability to work math in their heads. Some days most of my math block is spent doing mental math and other days it may only be 3 minutes of an activity. I have listed some for my students favorite. They work great for interventions and RTI.

Mental math is the main form of calculation used by most people and the simplest way of doing many calculations. Research has shown that in daily life at least 75% of all calculations are done mentally by adults. However, unfortunately due to the emphasis on written computation in many classrooms, many children believe that the correct way to calculate a simple subtraction fact such as 200-3 is to do it in the written form.

Through regular experiences with mental math children come to realize that many calculations are in fact easier to perform mentally. In addition, when using mental math children almost always use a method which they understand (unlike with written computation) and are encouraged to think actively about relationships involving the particular numbers they are dealing with.

In order to be effective Mental Math sessions should:

• occur on a daily basis (5-10 minutes per day)
• encourage ‘having a go’ on the part of all students
• emphasize how answers were arrived at rather than only whether they are correct
• Promote oral discussion
• allow students to see that there are many ways to arrive at a correct answer rather than one correct way
• build up a dense web of connections between numbers and number facts
• emphasize active understanding and use of place value

Following are some possible activities for K-5 classrooms:

Fill the Hundreds Chart:

On day one display a Hundreds Pocket Chart with only 5-6 pockets filled with the correct numerals. Leave all other pockets blank. Select 3 numerals and 3 students. Ask each student to place his/her numeral in its correct pocket and to explain the strategy they used to help them complete this task. Repeat the above with 3 numbers and 3 students per day until all pockets are filled. Take note of students who use a count by one strategy and those who demonstrate an awareness of the base ten patterns underlying the chart. Select numbers based on your knowledge of individual student’s number sense (e.g. you may select a number immediately before or after a number that is already on the board for one child and a number that is 10 or 11 more than a placed number for another child who you feel has a good understanding of the base ten pattern).

Possible questions to involve other students:

Yesterday we had __ numbers on our number chart and today we added 3 more. How many numbers do we now have on our number chart? How do you know?
If there are __ numbers on our number chart how many more numbers do we need to add to fill our chart? Ask several students to explain the strategy used to solve this problem.
We now have ____ numbers on our number chart. If we continue to add 3 numbers every day how many more days/weeks will it take to fill our number chart? Explain your thinking.

Today’s Number is… 

Select a number for the day (e.g. 8) and write it on the board or chart paper. Ask students to suggest calculations for which the number is the answer. Write students' suggestions in 4 columns (addition examples, subtraction, multiplication and division). After 8 or 10 responses, focus in on particular columns or types of responses that you would like more of. For example,"Give me some more addition examples", "Give me some ways which use three numbers", "Give me an example using parentheses" etc.

What's My Number

Select a number between 1 and 100 and write it down without revealing it to your students. Have students take turns to ask questions to which you can only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Record each question and answer on chart paper. For example:

Is it greater than 30? No
Is it an even number? Yes
Is it a multiple of 3? No
Does it have a 4 in the ones place?...

After 3 or 4 questions ask, “What is the smallest number it could still be? What is the largest? Discuss why it is better to ask a question such as "Is it an odd number?" than "Is it 34?" early in the game. To ensure that all students are involved have them use individual laminated 100 charts with dry erase markers to mark off numbers after each question is asked. Keep going until the number has been named correctly. During the game you may also want to keep track of how many questions are asked before the number is named. Next time you play challenge students to guess the number with fewer questions.

'Friendly' number activities
Give a number less than 10. Students must respond with an addition fact that will make the number up to 10. For example, if today's target number is 10 and you say 6 the student must respond with "6 + 4 = 10". Vary the target number e.g. 20, 50, 100, 200, 1000 etc. to suit students' ability level.

Since moving to a small district there are fewer questions from teachers when they are working with students who are learning English as a second language. Though it is a beginning, have students in a group or a classroom talking is important--it builds social language skills first but it also helps build academic language. (Academic language takes students longer to wrap their heads around.) I find these ideas a step. One that is important for all students.

Oral Language Acquisition and Learning to Read and Write?

How powerful is this relationship?

Implications

• A low-anxiety environment: This includes a setting where students feel nurtured and supported by their teacher and peers, and in turn, they feel safe to take risks without the fear of being laughed at or made fun of.
• Repeated practice: This is just like what it sounds! Students need repeated practice hearing and using a new language. They need multiple opportunities to comprehend and express their ideas in a new language. Like with anything new that we learn, practice helps us get better.
• Comprehensible input: This means finding different ways to make what is being said comprehensible and easier to understand. Things to consider with comprehensible input might include using speech that is appropriate for students' language proficiency, providing a clear, step-by-step explanation of tasks, and using a variety of techniques to support their understanding.
• Drama: This is a sense of excitement and engagement, can be found in activities like Reader's Theater, dramatic play, puppetry, narrating wordless picture books, etc. All of these activities also have the other three factors embedded within them. These activities assist in the development of oral language in addition to introducing students to oral reading and rich literacy experiences and responses in a classroom setting.

Connections to ESL Students

Stage	The Student	The Teacher
Preproduction	Minimal comprehension. Does not verbalize. Nods "Yes" and "No." Draws and points.	Show me … Circle the … Where is …? Who has …?
Early Production	Limited comprehension One/two-word responses. Uses key words/familiar phrases. Uses present-tense verbs.	Yes/no questions Either/or questions Who …? What …? How many …?
Speech Emergence	Has good comprehension. Can produce simple sentences. Grammar/pronunciation errors. Misunderstands jokes	Why …? How …? Explain
Intermediate Fluency	Has excellent comprehension. Makes few grammatical errors.	What would happen if …? Why do you think …? Questions requiring more than a sentence response
Advanced Fluency	The student has a near-native level of speech	Decide if … Retell …

This month I'm highlighting 3 projects or ideas that I plan to do with my students when they come back. I have talked in the past about how my students need to work on both language skills and build their sight word and word work knowledge.






 Before going to Christmas Break, I took some time and broke about all their running records. I looked at the errors they made as well as looking at the average errors made across all the running records I made for each reading level. So, my student reading at 10s--I looked at his errors, his error average since starting 10s, and an average of how long it took him to read 10s. I then asked myself why he was doing what he was doing. After all that I created a plan and a SMART goal for January. I normally don't plan out what books a student is going to read since with Guided Reading  I let the reader determine the path we take each week. But in this case because I set a SMART goal to more each student a reading level by the end of the month, I'm creating a plan for the month and hoping students blow the goal out of the water.

So what do I put inside of my folders for my students. In this case, I went back to my running records and looked at the errors they were making. Though they are at different reading levels, the error patterns were more or less the same--sight words and vocabulary. Like the one below, I used a circle map and the vocabulary from each book. I created maps specific to the book, so that my students could cut out the pictures and place them on the circle map.

 For sight word practice I created a play on this read, stamp, and write to help students work on sight words instead. We don't use Houghton Mifflin and have a building wide sight word list that they need to master. Each list has been tailored to each student to focus on the ones they need to learn.



A freebie for stopping by:

Working in a small district, my Speech-Language Pathologist is only in the building a couple days a week. Which makes collaboration with her very hard. I have a couple of students who have significant expressive language delays that make learning and making progress in reading very difficult for them.

I have used some of these activities to build both background knowledge and vocabulary to help with their comprehension of what they are reading. I have found that their first reads or cold reads of an instructional level text are at a frustrational read but by the second read its an instructional level. My SLP believes that this is because of their language delays.

I have decided to make a point at the beginning of each book to focus on their expressive language as part of their pre-reading. My hope is that by the end of the month these students have moved up a reading level.

Strategies to Develop Expressive Language Skills in the Classroom

• Opportunities to speak and time to rehearse before speaking
• Visual clues to help children order ideas effectively before expressing them
• Vocabulary lists to help with word finding difficulties. Use appropriate and consistent vocabulary
• Color coding different groups of words/sets of pictures
• Giving correct models of language structures
• Repetition and reinforcement of correct language structures
• Small group work to give children confidence to express themselves
• Appropriate questioning to give children the opportunity to reply
• Self-questioning and the development of learning scripts (e.g. What do I know already? What do I do next?)
• Rhymes
• Word play
• Restrict your language to short unambiguous language
• Story telling – cutting up picture segments and retelling stories
• Try and keep children ‘on topic’. Be specific, remind children e.g. ‘We are talking about…’
• Discussing what they have seen or done with an adult or more verbally able peer
• Puppet play/drama etc.
• Sharing books
• Revise links and associations between ideas and vocabulary – categorization/function/
• context/similarity/association
• As part of the partnership approach, it is important to detail which of these strategies have been most effective.

Barrier games

• This can be used for both talking and listening. The child or children either side of the barrier have identical sets of equipment.
• One child has a picture or constructs an assembly of objects and then gives instructions to the other to enable him/her to duplicate the picture or assembly.

How do I feel?

• In a small group imagine a situation and talk about how you would each feel and what you might say (speech bubbles resource is good here).

Silly Stories

• Collection of objects/pictures, e.g., horse, lady, man, child, dog, ball, pirate, dinosaur.  Adult starts story “Once upon a time there was a dinosaur”. Next child (house) continues the story “He lived in a house made of chocolate”.  Next child (ball) “One day he found a ball under his bed” …..

Narrative

• Color Coding approach.  Children take one color question ‘Who, What, Where, When’ and sequence a story using their own ideas.
• Mind Map Activities: An excellent way for supporting new vocabulary and talking.

Defining and describing

• Have a range of objects in a bag or a range of pictures. One child takes an object or picture and is allowed to give 3 pieces of information to describe their item. The rest guess.

Question Question

• Barrier game. Once child has an object or picture and the rest ask questions to find out what it is. You cannot say the name of the item.
• A good resource is Clowning Around or Guess Who?

What do you know?

• Use a composite picture and take turns in the group (mini circle time). Each child giving a new piece of information about the picture. Extend by talking about a particular object or event in which everyone has been involved.
• Tell me how to do it
• Use a classroom activity or event which has already been experienced and get a child to re-tell the event in his/her own words.
• Allow a child to explain to the others how to play a particular game.

Conversation

• In a small group it is possible to think about how we behave during a conversation and make explicit the skills we need. There are a couple of good resources for this.

Being mid-year, I find that I'm explaining why I'm selecting the text that I am. I walked into out book room and someone asked what I was looking for and I said no more than 2 words on a page with strong (if not in your face) picture support. I have a student that I've been working with on not adding to the text (she loves adding extra words to the story). The teacher in the book room pointed my to the a shelf on Level As. Knowing what text looks like at each level helps me find the right text for each group. I hope this helps you out or something you can share with parents.

Early Emergent Readers (Levels aa-C)

·         increasingly more lines of print per page
·         more complex sentence structure
·         less dependency on repetitive pattern and pictures
·         familiar topics but greater depth
·         beginning to use knowledge of letter sounds to solve unknown words
·         uses language, memory, pictures, and print as major cues to read and understand text
·         is able to predict what comes next

Early Fluent Readers (Levels K-P)

·         More pages
·         Longer sentences
·         More text per page
·         Richer vocabulary
·         Greater variation in sentence pattern
·         Less reliance on pictures
·         More formal and descriptive language
·         Analyzes new words and checks them against what makes sense and sounds right
·         Uses meaning to begin to self-correct
·         Uses known words and word parts to figure out unknown words
·         Begins to retell the major points of the text
·         Decreases the use of finger pointing as fluency and phrasing increase
·         Uses prior knowledge and own experience to make meaning

Fluent Readers (Levels Q-Z)

·         More text
·         Less familiar, more varied topics
·         Challenging vocabulary
·         More complex sentences
·         Varied writing styles
·         More description
·         Reads silently; reads fluently when reading aloud
·         Initiates topics for discussion about books
·         Begins to use comprehension strategies (retelling, monitoring for meaning, making connections, making mental images, making/revising/confirming predictions, questioning, determining importance, inferring, summarizing, synthesizing, critically evaluating) across genre and subjects
·         Consistently develops new strategies and new knowledge of texts as he/she encounters greater
variety of texts
·         Is in a continuous process of building background knowledge and realizes that he/she needs to
bring his/her knowledge to his/her reading
·         Sustains interest and understanding over long texts and reads over extended periods of time
·         Notices and comments on aspects of the writer’s craft

I hope everyone has a great week going into Christmas Break. Have a great holiday break and enjoy the Sight Word freebie below.

With Christmas approaching I always take time to reflect on some of my favorite things. One thing I have come to love is snow shoeing. Last year my parents retired to the Colorado Rockies, this was our first Christmas ever spend in the mountains. Go figure-right. I have lived in Colorado most of my life and have never spent Christmas in the mountains. As a family we went show shoeing. We took the dog-mine being Italian Greyhounds-had a grand time.

I'm donating a gift card from one of my favorite stores-Target. I need a 12 step program.  I love their $1 bins. They are perfect for everything from dressing my dogs to filling my treasure chest. I have to work at staying away. I get most of everything I need from Target. Have fun and enjoy the shopping trip.

I have a group of struggling learners who have had a hard time showing growth on Nonsense Word Fluency from Dibels. I created a set of cards that I can give students that have them sound out the nonsense word and then blend it back together again. They are perfect for reading centers, RTI Intervention work or struggling readers who need extra practice with nonsense words. This has do wonders to bring student scored up from an average of 40 sounds and no whole words to 15 whole words read correctly. This item is at my store for 50% off. Click on the picture.



Enjoy you Blog Hop! Have a great and safe holiday!




Because we value our followers and wanted to treat you to our favorite things Oprah style, we have put together the best giveaway of the season! My bloggy friends and I welcome you to the best, biggest, most cheerful event of the season:

























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This month I'm hooking up with Lisa from PAWSitively Teaching for a Pick 3 from Pinterest. The items I have picked out are ones that I can see my students doing over the next three weeks. Click on each picture to take a closer look on how these teachers created each Pinterest.


I work with preschool students and students who need to practice counting and one to one correspondence whenever I can build it in. Making snowmen would be perfect to tackle both of those. I could even see them cutting them out to work on fine motor skills. Who knew by creating snowmen that I could cram all those skills into them.