Monday, April 22, 2013

Awaiting the Arrival of a Very Special Guest!!!

This week we have a VERY SPECIAL GUEST coming to our school! 
Debbie is not only a guest, but a dear friend of mine who I have been awaiting the opportunity to have at my school for quite some time! 3 years to be exact! I met Debbie three years ago at he Illinois Reading Conference. I was walking around the conference with a terrible migraine, when some lady in a crazy fun outfit (that I LOVED and WANTED) walked up to me and said, "Hey, I love your purse! As a matter of fact I love giraffes...I even wrote a book about a giraffe". And then, she was off on her merry way! I looked at my watch and realized I had better be on my way too! So I headed down the stairs to the next session on my list and what do ya know....There she was! I was going to this lady's session! This is where I officially met Debbie Clement! She really caught my attention with her book/song Red White and Blue! And that is where our friendship began! She is one amazing person...inspirational, talented, awesome, loving, caring, crazy, fun, and a lot more technologically saavy than she gives herself credit for! 
I can't wait to see her again on Wednesday! And I can't wait for my colleagues and students to be able to enjoy her talents

 
 

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Little Poets Get Published

April: Poetry Month!! 
This blog post is a continuation of my Making Little Poets blog that I posted at Pre-K and K Sharing last week. 
 

In that blog we were in the process of working together, as a class, to write our very own poem. I wanted my students to understand that it takes a lot of hard work, editing and re-writing to get  a book or poem published. So we talk about the steps that they take to do this.

 
Here are the steps we took in writing a class poem (for more detail, please read my blog Making Little Poets)
Day 1: Brainstorming
Students brainstorm topics that they wanted our class poem to be about.

 
Day 2: Getting Started 
Start writing the poem...come up with the first sentence and edit along the way if need be.

 
                               
  Day 3: Continue/finish writing rough draft and begin editing 
 Read over what has already been written and continue to write the poem until it is finished.  As a rule of thumb, I like to keep the poems to 10 lines or less (mainly because I want it to fit in a pocket chart once it is written out on sentence strips but also because I want to wrap it up in 5 days otherwise the kiddos start to lose interest).
Day 4: Edit and re-write
Read the poem and decide what changes need to be made. Then re-write the poem and re-read it again to make sure it is just how we want it :) Thursday, we read through our poem to see if the students liked the way it sounded. As we read it, we talked about the beat or the rhythm that  poems can have. This made the students look at the poem in a whole new light and also made them want to change a couple things and make the poem a little longer. 


At the beginning of Thursday's lesson, this is what our Poem looked like:
Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
My friends are really cool!  

By the end of the the lesson our poem became a little longer and read like this:
Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hallway,
We like to be in the lead.  
 
 Day 5: Final Copy
Thursday night, I typed up the final copy to share with the students on the Smart Board. On Friday, I pulled up the poem on the Smart Board and we read it together. After we read it, one of my students brought up the fact that they didn't like the sentence "walking straight down the hallway" because it sounded funny. I agreed, so we tried to figure out how to change it so that the rythm of the poem made a little more sense. By changing one word, the poem sounded better. We made the change, wrote the poem out on sentence strips and put it in the pocket chart to work on next week before my students perform it! We didn't put the poem in our PIG folders yet, because I wanted my students to know the poem better before putting it in their PIG folders to take home and read to their families. 
So here is our final copy that is officially "published" in our classroom collection of poems! 

Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hall,
We like to be in the lead.  
~Mrs. Ramirez's Kindergarten Class 
 
Presentation Day:
This week, on Friday, we have our Poetry Celebration Assembly and my students will be able to recite the poem, written by them, in front of their peers! 
This weeks poetry agenda includes List Poems! By the end of the week, my students will be writing their own list poems and having them published in our very own Poetry Anthology Book! Although this year I am doing it a little different, to see how I teach List Poems check out my We Love Poetry! Or to see how I do poetry throughout the school year, click here

If you have any questions about how I did this or how I teach poetry in my classroom, please feel free to ask! 



Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Missing in Action

Hi friends! Oh how I have missed sharing with you!! 

 I know it has been a really long time since I have shared with you and I am sorry for that! We went through a pretty crazy time these past few months. Back in February, we were working really hard on negotiating a contract (as we had been working without one since the beginning of the school year). Then by the end of February we were pretty sure that it was inevitable that we would be on strike. This was very unfortunate but we were standing up for what our students need and what they deserve.
Then, in March, we DID go on strike for 9 whole days. It was nine days of camaraderie, nine days or h-e-double hockey sticks and 9 days or reflection.  Then, finally, at 2am on day 10, I got a phone call that said the strike had ended and we would be back in the classroom that morning at 7a! I have never been so happy to receive a phone call so early in the morning! I couldn't wait to get back into the classroom with my students! I had missed them sooooo much!

I will say that the strike of 2013 (as we call it) has brought each and every teacher in our district closer together and made us a stronger union. We formed a bond that no one can break and became a family of teachers. It used to be "Oh, so and so teaches at this school and so and so teaches at that school" and now we say "yes, we work together".

It really makes me kind of sad that it took a strike to make us closer but I will say that I am glad that it happened. We needed something to help us build that bond and it also helped realize that our community supports us more than we ever knew was possible. They were wonderful throughout the whole ordeal with their generous gifts of support, prayer, notes, food, and their homes. I cannot thank them enough!

Now that I am finally back in the swing of things, I hope to keep you updated with new ideas and happenings in my classroom!