Kagan Cooperative Mats- Standards Based

These mats are standards based, and will excite and engage your students! My students love to see a new mat come out.  These mats not only guide instruction, they assist students in cooperative discussions.  In addition to this mat, I have also uploaded a main idea/summarizing mat, and a RACE mat that will help students respond to short answer questions. 

Grab Your Mat Here!

Lots of Analyzing Photos!

Today's learners are very visual!  With this in mind, most of my "hooks" involve some sort of imagery to begin with.  Within my district, we focus on one standard, in both literary and informational, each week, although inferring and vocabulary (Standards 1 and 4) are taught each week.  With that being said, most of my units start with photographs/illustrations.  Visuals are a great way to draw the kids into the content, spark their natural curiosity, and ignite their inferencing skills!  Most of these photographs were used with Scholastic Scope or Storyworks!

Character Traits and Gobstoppers!

While scrolling through instagram, I found this fabulous idea to demonstrate character change using Gobstoppers!  It was a fabulous idea, and the kids always love any lesson involving food, but who doesn't right??  We used A Bad Case of Stripes as the anchor text for character change, plot, and theme.  The Gobstoppers worked perfectly!  Students will not be forgetting that the characters change just like the candy did! We of course connected the candy/character change to the theme!

Kagan and More!

The Kagan strategies have really been an amazing addition to our classroom climate!  If you haven't been to one of these learning academies, I highly recommend it!  The kids are super engaged and the discussions that are going on are amazing!  

Numbered Heads Together: 

Jot Thoughts: 

Round Robin:

Rally Coach: 

 

Busy, Busy, Busy!!!

As most of you know, the beginning of the school year until about Christmas break is a mad dash!  This year, my 5th/6th graders have been just as busy as I have!  We have almost been through every single ELA standard once so far, I have attended a two-day Kagan learning event, been to an all day training approximately 2 hours away, started to work extensively on my social media presence with insta, and most of all have grown some amazing connections with all of my kiddos!  The Kagan training really was amazing and refreshing!  I also have the opportunity to attend the Kentucky Reading Association this year!  I have oodles and oodles of pics of awesome things that have been going on within my classroom.  I am going to upload several here, but for a more thorough picture of what has been going on in the classroom, head over to instagram by clicking on the insta icon to the right!


First up:  This is an amazing resource to implement cooperative learning and content!  Please head on over to my TPT to snatch this up!

Next Up:  This is an awesome literary inference lesson!  The kids were super engaged.  I did also do, what I call a character case, to get things moving.  Inside the character case, I placed a printout of the following:  soccer ball, the word resistance, soldier, map with Chile circled, faded out "composition," and an illustration of Pedro, the protagonist. We then did a read aloud, followed by the matching evidence to inferences activity, which is also available in my TPT. 

We also worked on Standard 8 with the Fortnite text located in the latest Storyworks!  The kids were beyond excited to have the opportunity to talk Fortnite in class! Grab the positive, negative, neutral statements to go with this activity in my TPT!

ELA Standard Strategy Cards

These cards are awesome and extremely handy to have on a ring when you are lesson planning. Lesson Strategies are broken down by ELA standard to enable you to quickly identify engaging activities that would help your students achieve mastery of that standard! 

Get your copy here! 

Tech is Sweet!

Noisli

Chatterpix