Santa's Helper Christmas Writing

There is a fabulous book called "Who Will Help Santa This Year?" that is super adorable and absolutely hysterical.

It's all about who will help Santa and Santa finding the perfect worker (elves).  I have been really working to make writing fun for my students.  I thought this would be great because it could be short and sweet and turn into a class book.  The plan is to have each student write a paragraph about someone or something that could help Santa and tell about the things that could go wrong.  Then I am going to put it together for a class book and keepsake. My kids love to be silly and I want them to work on creativity so this should be a great starting point for them.  You can download the pages at my TPT store.

 

Sub Plans

So part of the job of teaching is that inevitably you will be absent. That means sub plans. Inevitably you will also be absent for multiple days. This year I headed to the MSTA State Convention (my third year and it's like Christmas, birthday, and Thanksgiving all rolled into one). That means three days out as I travel several hours and spend two days at convention. As much as I love coming to convention I am terrified of the possibilities of a sub in my room. Let's face it, everything that can go wrong will. My first year I left almost ten pages for sub plans. Did I mention that was just for day 1? I worry. A lot. Plus, I've been a sub. I have been in rooms where they leave a stack of papers and no instructions or they don't leave enough work or there isn't a roster or any number of not great things. Not in my room. I have managed to cut it down to 4 pages or so per day which gives them enough detail that if they are clueless in the classroom it gives some assistance and if they are an experienced teacher they can quickly scan and get the important details.

One of my favorite activities though is leaving a writing prompt where the kids get to guess where I am and what I am doing. This is great for convention since I am gone several days and it gets their imaginations going. Last year I moved, changed jobs, had a boyfriend, went to the beach, took my daughter to the doctor (I am single and I don't have kids haha), and so much more. I was laughing so hard I was crying. I was actually really sad that I didn't get to be there to see it in action during the writing process and it became my inspiration for "My Teacher's Secret Life," a writing prompt about what teachers  do on their weekends. 

This year, I actually forgot to put it in my plans, so before I left I had a few minutes and we did a quick writing that was just basic ideas. The first thing I noticed was my kids wanted to write two sentences and be done. I think I need to do a daily journal to get them used to writing more. They absolutely loved writing about me though. They were dying to know what I was doing. They will be so disappointed to find out I didn't climb mountains, skydive, travel to Paris, cook a Thanksgiving dinner, get married or bring them back souvenirs. Those were just some of the awesome ideas. I think they think I'm a rockstar. My life is way too boring for their high expectations. Haha. 

Halloween Scrapbook Pages

It seems like this time of year I add quite a bit to my kids' scrapbooks. During October we go to the pumpkin patch on a field trip and we have a ton of fun and take lots of pictures and I make a field trip scrapbook page.

To add to that we also do monster writing. I love working on descriptive writing because my kids really need help making their stories more interesting.  Monsters make it easy because they get to use their imagination. The first thing we do is draw monsters. My kids are much more into art this year so their drawings were spectacular and every kid had their own brand of creativity. Once we drew our monsters, we practiced brainstorming and we spent a ton of time talking about adjectives. Then they wrote paragraphs describing their monsters.  We got these up in time for conferences so our parents could see them.  The kids loved showing them off.

We also include our first publisher project in our scrapbook.  Most of my kids are great with technology, but in third grade they haven't really worked with any word or computer programs designed specifically for publishing.  In October my kids get a crash course in text boxes, fill color, lines, clip art, fonts, and typing skills. We do all of this in Microsoft Publisher and the kids get so excited.  It takes a lot of convincing to get them to focus on the writing and not all the extras.  Ok so that doesn't really happen in real life because who doesn't love clip art, but a teacher has to try.

End of the Year Scrapbooks

This post may seem a little premature, but it's never too late to prep for the end of the year right? Ok so the year hasn't started yet, but this takes all year to put together.

I love for my students and their families to see how far they have come since the beginning of the year.  If you go back and look at pictures from the beginning of the year and compare them to the end of the year, they are SO different! Add in how much their skills improve, like writing, and you will be amazed.  As much as I say it is for my students and families to see a difference though, it is just as much for me.  As teachers we tend to get overwhelmed and all we see are the things that we didn't get to this year.  It's nice to have something to show us that even if we didn't teach every single lesson we wanted to, we made a ton of progress.  The best way I've seen to do that is to do a scrapbook for the end of the year.

When I found out our hallway all does scrapbooks for our kids I thought there was no way that I was ever going to get enough to put in a scrapbook...boy was I wrong.  About half of the scrapbook was pictures and the rest was writing.

We took pictures for:

• First Day of School
• Field Trips
• Hall Decorations
• Christmas
• New Years
• Valentines
• Superhero stories (we used Face in Hole to make them superheroes)
• Mother's Day
• Recess Pictures
• Quizbowl Pictures
• Parties
• Centers
• Grandparents Night
• Open House
• Pretty much anything else we could think to take pictures for
• Class pictures

Any time my students wrote a published paper that I would hang in the hall, I kept the work and put it in a file for my students. Some things we wrote about were:

• Beginning of School what we are like
• Grandparent's Day Why I Love My Grandparents
• Field Trips
• What we are Thankful for
• Disguising a Turkey
• Letter to Santa
• Letters to Soldiers for Christmas
• Superhero Narrative
• Descriptive Writing about Monsters
• The students created a publisher page about their Halloween that used clipart and borders.
• Letter to a Valentine
• New Year's Resolutions
• How to Catch a Leprechaun
• Narrative about a time they were happy or their favorite day
• Letter to the principal explaining what the student would do if they were the principal

Those are just the things I can remember.  Anything that you do can end up in the scrapbook.  It does take time and planning though.  I spent a large portion of the end of my year working on these scrapbooks because I hadn't kept up with them.  

What I Wish I Did Last Year:

We took pictures about once a month for this, that, and the other.  Those pictures of each student ended up on my computer on an edited page with cute graphics and captions.  I was pretty good at making the pages for all my students when I took the pictures.  Unfortunately I didn't print them off until the end of the year so it took forever.  Plus I still had to make some of the pages.  This coming year when I make them I plan on printing them so it is one less end of the year hassle.  Here are some examples of picture pages with me front and center:

Their writing pages were either typed on a computer with a border or they were hand-written on cardstock with fun borders.  Once again, I didn't always print out the typed pages, so this coming year I want to print them as they complete them so it is one less thing I have to do to complete the scrapbook at the end of the year.  The other problem I had was that some of my pages were laminated and some weren't because once again I didn't make time to get it done during the school year.  It was one of those things that I kept thinking "When I have a chance..."  I ended up not going back and laminating because there were just too many to do.  Plus anything that was printed at the end of the year didn't get laminated either.  It was ok for the scrapbook, but it doesn't mean they will hold up well over the years and my goal was to make something parents could keep.

With all those pages, putting the book together was actually pretty easy.  I made a list of all the things that went in the book and made sure the list was ordered.  The students' work was already separated into an individual folder so when they brought me the binder I requested I could just hole punch and put in the pages.  It actually isn't as much work as it sounds like if you do the printing, laminating, and separating work throughout the year.  I think of it as 20 minutes or so every couple weeks or month or hours of work at the end of the year.  I have to say they turned out adorable and I hope my parents were as excited to get them as I was to see them finished!

End of the Year Brochures

Well it's the wonderful end of the year.  We've been through testing fun days, write-up free days, awards assemblies, packing, cleaning, sending things home, inventories, grades, filing, and all the other wonderful little tidbits that you have to do.  One thing I wanted to do this year was to add a fun project at the end of the year so my third graders could look back on the year and make it something my new class could benefit from.  As I looked around for ideas I saw students doing letters and similar things, but I loved the idea of doing a brochure (can't remember where I saw the idea).

My kids adore using the laptops to publish their writing so I decided the end of the year would be a great time to take that a step farther.  I created a brochure template and decided on four topics: What you love about third grade, how you felt when you came to third grade, fun things you do in third grade, and what you learned in third grade.  I went ahead and put the topics as headings on the brochure template and created textboxes for them to type in.  With this project my goals were for students to type their paragraphs, change fonts, navigate pages, edit text box borders and insert clip art.  We didn't work on the computers as much as I wanted this year, so those tasks in themselves would take a lot of time and effort.

We started by writing a paragraph for each topic.  This crew of kids aren't fans of writing so this is like pulling teeth, but this was something they could identify with, wasn't difficult, and they actually half-way enjoyed it.  When they found out they were getting to publish on the computer and do fonts and borders they were ecstatic.  Their next question was if they got to share them with the class.  They may not like writing but they definitely like talking. The kids loved this project and I can't wait to show them to next year's students.

It is easy to use one of the pre-made templates on Word or Publisher if you are doing editing on the computer.  If you want to be a little more low-tech with this assignment, you can get a free printable here.