October Essay Writing Menu (On Sale)

Well, better late than never. I finally finished my October Essay Menu and Writing practice.  It's 50% off for the next few days since I finally finished it.

There is an essay menu, graphic organizers, checklists, rubrics, scaffolded practice pages, and publishing paper. I am making them to go with each month. I also have September and December made. Hopefully I will finish the November Essay Writing before the end of October.

Don't forget about the October Spelling and Vocabulary menu, too. This freebie has a menu of themed writing ideas that can be used with any list of words.

October Spelling and Vocabulary Menu - Freebie

When I loved up to 7th and 8th grade this year, I decided we would work through some SAT vocabulary words for our vocabulary this year.  I found a book with SAT vocabulary words and divided the words into 12 lists.  They have around 35-40 words per list.  I am giving them about 3 weeks to work on each list.

I am most interested in their ability to understand the worlds in context and apply the words. For this month, I decided I wanted to give them some creative options for using their words in writing assignments.  (There are less opportunities for thematic, seasonal assignments in middle school).  I created a vocabulary menu to be made with any vocabulary or spelling list.  I love choice menus! They turn in their assignments today, so I am excited to see what they came up with.  Click HERE to get a copy.

What do you use to give your students choice in applying their spelling or vocabulary words?

Making Writing an Authentic Habit in the Classroom

As an educator, I believe it is important to strive for authenticity in the classroom.  Learning should have meaning and reflect what happens in the real world.  Finding ways to apply skills to the real world can be difficult.  Approaches to teaching like project-based learning are a wonderful way to incorporate real-world application.  Now, I wish I could tell you my classroom was a masterpiece of project-based learning, but I am striving for authenticity, right? I truly do want to incorporate more PBL this year, but that is another story.

Learning should be authentic. 

What I want to share with you today is about writing. By now, you may know I am working on my PhD in Educational Psychology with a focus in Gifted Education.  One of the things my advisors have been encouraging us to do lately is to set aside time every day to write.  This is nothing new.  I have heard this in creative writing classes and from other graduate professors before. However, that does not mean I have actually implemented this habit in my life.  The hardest part about writing every day is figuring out the time that works best.  My schedule is crazy hectic between work and school. I just started this week and have decided to set aside 20-30 minutes every morning to write.  For me that means, I will probably write most mornings between 5:30 and 6:00am.

To become a better writer, you have to practice.

To produce writing, you have to set aside time every day to write. 

Choose a time.  Be consistent.  Just write. 

It got me thinking.  I want to be a better writer.  I want to actually produce writing.  I want my students to be better writers.  We need to make time for writing...writing without pressure...writing without due dates.  Now, don't get me wrong.  We will have assignments.  We will have due dates, but writing needs to be a regular and authentic habit in my classroom.  Writing needs to be a time to allow for creativity, risk, flow of ideas, and authenticity. 

In the past with my elementary students, I have usually done 5-10 minutes of journal writing.  I find this is a great way to help kids get used to putting ideas down and get over the perfectionism of every sentence having to be perfect. I usually did this almost every day.  This year with my middle school students, we have a block schedule.  Thus, we only have Language Arts twice a week.  So we will only be able to set aside a dedicated space for writing twice a week.  Now, I don't want you to think we haven't been writing.  We have been doing more formal writing assignments, but not necessarily every class. 

I started thinking about how I wanted to collect my own writing every day.  I would rather type it.  I know I do not need 10,000 Word documents.  I thought about storing my journal entries in Evernote, which would work well. Then, I remembered a website I had looked at a couple years ago, but I never ended up using in my classroom.  Penzu.  Penzu is an online writing journal.  Now, if I was writing something super personal, I may not store it online. But for writing for grad school or even writing drafts of blog posts, I think it is a fabulous place to store entries.  With Penzu, you can customize fonts and backgrounds.  They even make the page look like notebook paper, so it feels like a journal.

I decided I wanted to try Penzu with my students this year as well.  I signed up for Penzu Classroom for a teacher account.  This way, I can view their journals and even send them assignments.  I can even comment on their assignments within Penzu, so I am excited to try it out.  Yesterday, I got everyone signed up for accounts. Most likely, I will still have them publish final drafts in Word.  We will use Penzu more for pre-writing, brainstorming, short journal entries, and free-writing. If students do not lock their journals, they can even view one another's journals.  I am thinking this could work well for peer feedback.  We will have to see how it goes. I'll let you know. I also gave my students the option of using Penzu or having a paper journal.  Almost half of my students chose a paper journal, and the other have chose to use Penzu.

You can view a video on Penzu Classroom below.

How do you make writing authentic in your classroom?

Christmas in July: Writing Resources Sale

To continue with my Christmas in July, all of my writing resources will be 50% today and tomorrow.

Back to School Essay Writing and December Essay Writing

These are great way to give your kids choice and get them writing essays every month.  It has everything you need to teach, scaffold, and assess your students' essays.  I am currently working on October and November Essay Writing. It has been aligned to the 4th and 5th grade CCSS.

Common Core Paragraphs

I created these graphic organizers because some of my fourth graders still could not write a good paragraph.  This includes graphic organizers, checklists, and rubrics to help your kids master writing great paragraphs.  It has been aligned to the 1st and 2nd grade CCSS.

Back to School Writing Prompts, Halloween Writing Prompts, and Persuasive Writing Prompts

Use these as a center, journal topics, or for the kid who can never think of what to write. 

Autobiography Writing Assignments

This is a great beginning or end of the year activity to get kids thinking about their own lives.  You might even use this as an entrance into a Personal Narrative unit. 

Bats Research and Writing Unit

My students had a lot of fun with this last year in the month of October. 

Right now lots of bloggers have some great blog posts on Bright Ideas for the Classroom at the Bright Ideas Blog Hop.  I am excited to go check them out and pin some great ideas to my Genius Classroom Solutions pin board. 

As we get ready for school to start, I think it is important to not only find bright ideas for the classroom but also consider self-care.  I think as teachers many of us wear a lot of hats and get so used to taking care of other people, we forget to take care of ourselves. At my other blog, Balancing the Backpack I am sharing some ideas about self-care and wellness. I hope you will follow me on my journey toward balance.  Today I blogged about easy snacks to eat on the drive home and yesterday I shared some tips to drink more water. 

Monday Made It: Back to School Essay Writing and Overnight Oats

Today I am going to link with 4th Grade Frolics for "Monday Made It."

I have not linked up in a very long time.  I am not the most crafty person.  I prefer to make things on the computer.

I do like to try new recipes though.  I have a love/hate relationship with food.  I love to eat.  I try to eat healthy. I like variety, but I do not always enjoy cooking.  I do pretty well with dinners and lunches.  For dinner, I usually cook several things on Sunday and we eat leftovers throughout the week.  That is how I manage cooking with my crazy schedule of work and graduate school. Lunches I usually pack bento lunches for myself during the school year.  This helps me get in some variety and makes me be intentional with what I eat. Breakfast I really struggle.  So like any good teacher in the summer I have been looking through Pinterest for breakfast ideas.  I try to avoid gluten and dairy when I can, so I have been looking for some gluten free and dairy free breakfast ideas. I came across several recipes for Overnight Oats.

I tried this recipe first from SugerGlueMom for Strawberries Overnight Oats.  They look great, but personally I found the steelcut oats bitter without being cooked.  (The steel cut oats are delicious if you cook them overnight in the crockpot.)

I found some other recipes with rolled oats, so I decided to try that instead of the steelcut oats.  Here is an example of a recipe I found.

They look pretty in mason jars, so now I want to get some mason jars.  I made my overnight oats with 1/2 cup rolled oats and 1/2 cup almond milk.  In the morning I added some stevia and fresh peaches.  I thought it was good and had a cold cereal taste.  You could add more milk if you wanted it creamier.

I had this idea last year with my students to make sure they wrote at least one essay every month.  I wanted them to have choices.  Within a three month time span, I wanted them to have done at least one narrative essay, one persuasive essay, and one informational essay.  We did this routine in December and January.  The kids really liked the menu I made and having choices.  Like many of my ideas now that I am working and going to grad school both I never finished making all of the months, so that is one of my goals this summer. I finished making a Back to School Essay Writing  this week for the months of August and September. It has an essay menu, graphic organizers, rubrics, scaffolded practice for drafting and revising, and publishing paper.  I am going to be working on finishing the other months.  Now, that I am moving to middle school I need to work on making a middle school version.

This last one is more of a tried it than a made it.  For the last couple months, I have been getting familiar with essential oils.  I am trying to learn as much as I can about their uses.  Well, being that it is summer and Texas I managed last week to get sunburned and eaten alive by bugs.  I have about 17 bug bites between both of my legs.  Bites swell up to about the size of a quarter on me.   I put Lavender Oil on my bug bites and within 30 minutes they had gone back down to just little red dots.  The Lavender helped with the itching, too.  I also used the Lavender Oil on my sunburn.

I had one stubborn bug bite behind my knee that was completely red and inflamed because of its location.  I tried the Purify oil blend on it as well.  It helped some.  I finally had to give in and use Hydrocortisone once just to get the inflammation down. Since then though if any of the bites itch, I just put a little Lavender oil and they are good. 

Have you made or tried anything new this week?

Finally Trying Out Mentor Sentences

Over the past week we are back from Spring Break and starting quarter 3.  The last couple weeks I have put a lot of time and effort into trying to really plan out the last 10 weeks of school.  It always feels so hard to decide what needs to be covered and what doesn't.  I attended a teacher workshop about four years ago where someone told me about Jeff Anderson and his book Everyday Editing.

I immediately bought the book and really wanted to try to start using mentor sentences.  It always seemed like so much work to have the time to pick out sentences, so I never implemented it.  I decided that this quarter would be the perfect time to try it out. I have been trying to plan out what sentences I would use and matching those to the different texts I am using to introduce writing units.  We are doing a genre study for Reading and working on writing narratives for writing.  Then, we will do a novel study and some opinion writing.  Then, we will cover some poetry and lastly review over nonfiction text structures. That comes up the rest of the year.

I was researching resources for mentor sentences.  The best place to start is Ideas by Jivey.

She has some great blog posts and some great picture book mentor sentence units.  I purchased some of her units.  I am using some of her books, but using some of hers gave me a starting point where I felt motivated to pull out some sentences of my own with other mentor texts I knew I wanted to use.

There also some other TpT sellers who have made some mentor sentence units that are not dependent on a mentor text.  I think this sounds like a great idea if you just want to match it to any curriculum plan. If you do not use a lot of mentor texts, this would be a good way to go. Here are a couple options:

Amber Thomas - 4th grade mentor sentence packs (These seem like a good option, especially if you teach fourth grade.)

Jen Bengel - Monthly interactive edits (These have monthly themed sentences.  I tried these in December.  You make observations about the sentences, but the students are not asked to create their own sentences inspired by the mentor sentence.  The themes are cute though and would work well for a center.)

I personally love the idea of matching it to a mentor text because you can tie it to other writing or reading lessons to always show the interconnectedness of great reading and writing.  I think also encourages students to look for great sentences in what they read.  It shows that we should pay attention to the way writers create great description. We got started this week. I had my students go through the process of writing the sentence in cursive, noticing the sentence structure and then creating their own sentences.  I created this form.  You can have a free copy HERE.

This week we used a mentor sentence from the book Crow Call by Lois Lowry.

We are working on personal narratives, and this is a great text for discussing small moments and sensory detail.  I just put the sentence on the board this week.

This was my sentence inspired by the mentor sentence.  I was showing them it did not have to be as long, but they needed to have two complete sentences joined by a semi-colon and try to use some description in their sentence.

Here were some of my students' sentences.  Overall, I think it was a good start with mentor sentences. Some were more descriptive than others, but they still tried to mimic the sentence structure. 

I am hoping to start having them find some sentences in their reading that we could use.  We will be starting a novel unit soon. Have you tried mentor sentences?

Weekly Writing Inspiration and December Essay Writing

I hope you are getting some great shopping in at the TpT Cyber Monday sale. I spent my fair share today, but I got so many great things!

I wanted to share some writing resources I am really excited about right now.  When I first start blogging almost two years ago, I did a weekly series called "Weekly Writing Inspiration." This is something I started in my classroom several years ago. Each week for our journal writing we used inspiration instead of prompts. We had a quote of the week, a poem of the week, and a picture of the week.  We discussed what we observed, the meanings, and how they could inspire our writing.  It really got the kids to think critically and creatively. As creativity and critical thinking are two of the four 21st century skills, they are something I want to continue to emphasize.

Weekly writing inspiration is something I have done in my class every year, but it usually falls off somewhere during the year because I start running out of time to find a quote, poem, and picture each week.  I have always meant to sit down and compile 40 poems, 40 quotes, and 40 pictures. It never happened as many great teaching ideas find themselves.

Well, the other day I found some resources on TpT that helped me fulfill my weekly writing inspiration goal.

Panicked Teacher's Quote of the Week

Panicked Teacher's Idiom of the Week

Picture of the Day (We just may not do it every day).

We started doing one of these each day before Thanksgiving. We discuss the meanings and use the handouts from the packs. Then, each day we use the quote, idiom, or picture to inspire our journal writing. I just will have to pick out a poem then each week. My goal is to get a monthly poetry pack made with poems to analyze. I made one for March last year. Hopefully, I can get one made for December in next couple days. :)

To help my kids get better at multi-paragraph essays, I want to make sure we do at least one essay per month for the rest of the year.  I decided to start making a monthly essay menu with four choices for each of the writing types: informational, opinion, narrative, and research. They will be able to choose, but in 3 essays they need to do an opinion, a narrative, and an informative.  I am excited to share my essay menu for December with my students on Wednesday. 

What are your favorite resources for writing and the Common Core?

Mother's Day and Writing Motivation

Just for fun I realized today is my 200th post.  Have you ever had one of those days that would have been stressful if so much of it wasn't just funny?  That was my day...  It did end with happy hour though. 

I still need to have my students do something for Mother's Day.  One of my favorite lessons I have done for Mother's Day is from www.writingfix.com.  The lesson is to write poems modeled after the book I Love You the Purplest. You can read the lesson, download handouts, and also download student samples for the lesson here. Students write a poem about their moms using color to describe them and what they associate with that color.

Sabra had a cute suggestion to make word clouds for moms and then mount them on scrapbook paper.  We are definitely going to do this.  We will also make cards.  I am going to give them a large envelope to put their word cloud, poem, and card in.  They can decorate the envelope.

I have a freebie in my store to make Mother's Day coupons, awards, and cards. I usually have my students write their moms a thank you letter.

Today is also Workshop Wednesday.  The topic is how to motivate your students to write.  Here are a few things I have found to be pretty successful.

1) Allow students to type when possible -  Many of my students have been more successful typing than when they have to handwrite. (We do still handwrite though as well).

2) Give students choice  -  I love love RAFT (Role Audience Format Topic).  It is a fabulous way to get kids writing, use higher order thinking, and allow for structured choice.

3)  Model your thinking -  I have mentioned this before, but I have seen more growth from my students when I model my own writing than even just through using mentor texts.  Students like knowing that you write, too.  It helps to see how writing really works.

4) Choose random points of view - My students get so excited about writing from the point of view of small animals or random objects.  Why be a pilgrim on the Mayflower when you could be a rat on the Mayflower observing everything?  Why not describe light from the point of view of a shadow? Why not describe the setting of a book from an object located in the setting? 

5) Allow students to write with a partner - My students love writing together or swapping journals and finishing each other's stories.  I have a couple students who have decided to start a daily comic together (that actually gets made like a couple days every other week, but they enjoy it).

These are the things that come to mind most when I try to remember what motivates my students to write.  I am off now to see if I can find some scrapbook paper and envelopes for Mother's Day projects.