A Week Full of Reading Celebrations!

We have 6 days of school left. It is hard to believe that the school year is ending.  Last week, I looked at my camera roll and realized that the last full week of school, in many ways served as a celebration of our reading.  

On Thursday, we had a FABULOUS Skype visit with Liesl Shurtliff.  Rump was our last read aloud of the year and it was FABULOUS! Kids loved it and many have added Jack to their summer reading list already!

Irma asks Liesl Shurtliff a question about Rump.

On Friday, we had our last "Books and Breakfast". It was a full house with 15 students coming to school early to enjoy donuts and discussion about the first book in a new series by Bruce Hale--The Big Bad Detective Agency.  The kids loved this book and have enjoyed the 6 Books and Breakfasts we've had throughout the year. 

Our Last Books and Breakfast of the year!

On Friday, we had an All-Day Read in our classroom (every 3rd grade classroom did!). It was pretty low-key --something kids have been asking for for months. We talked about the joy of a full day for reading and kids started to think about books they'd bring from home.  That morning, some kids brought in bags of books--favorites from their home reading life. They reread these and shared them with friends. 

Kids brought in bags of favorite books for the All Day Read!

The day before the All-Day-Read, we decided to pull some books that we'd loved this year to put out so they could be easily reread during the All-Day-Read. For the last 30 minutes of the day, there was a whirlwind of favorite books being pulled. I overheard lots of, "Oh, remember this one? We loved it!" as they rediscovered books from earlier in the year.  

Some of our favorite books of the year.

Some of our favorite books of the year.

One of my own personal celebrations happened last week in the midst of reading workshop. A few kids were choosing new books when one of my past students came in to get a book.  I have a few students who stop down frequently to grab a book they know I have, ask for book recommendations or just browse.  What was fun about this visit was how she just became part of the conversation already happening at the bookshelf where kids were sharing books as they browsed.  Love how even though these kids didn't know each other, they trusted each other about books just by standing together browsing:-)

I love reflecting during these last weeks of the school year and I love how naturally things happen around reading at this time of year.  I am going to miss this community of readers but  I am enjoying sitting back and watching them interact these last few weeks, hoping that this feeling they have as readers stays with them.

Math Monday -- In Which the Lesson Doesn't Go As Planned...And is a Success

It's Math Monday! 

Join Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning

for the Math Monday link up!

We were going to begin a big estimation problem (How Many Books Are There in Ms. Hahn's Classroom?), so I chose my math workshop opener from Estimation 180 -- days 28-30, a sequence of toilet paper estimations. I knew exactly what I wanted to get out of this opener, and I expected it to be quick.

What I didn't expect what that my students would get mired down in a dis-remembering of what exactly perimeter, area, and volume are, and why the square footage fact we jotted down from the packaging shown in the answer of day 28 could not be used as the total length of the toilet paper on the roll on day 30. Maybe it's because we were talking about squares of toilet paper that their brains convinced them that square feet would be okay as a unit of length.

I let them struggle through misconceptions like squares and cubes are the same and you use 3D measurement for square feet. It was one student's tentative sharing of a rhyme she learned at her old school, "Perimeter goes around, but area covers the ground" that finally turned the tide away from the confident assertion of another student that square feet is a measure of length. You should have seen the lightbulbs go off above the heads. Boom. They had it back. Area is LxW (2D), volume is LxWxH (3D), and perimeter is S+S+S... (a measurement of length). Whew.

I've written often about the difference between leading the learning and following the learning. The importance of following is something I have to remember over and over again.

Poetry Friday

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Sarah Browning

THE END

Just when the story's getting good,
I must close the book and return it
to the rightful owner.

I have marked up the text a bit:
underlined key phrases,
jotted notes in the margins.

I've dogeared some pages,
left smears of optimism,
streaked whole paragraphs with my tears,

slept with the book under my pillow,
taken it with me everywhere,
thrown it at the wall in frustration (on more than one occasion).

You'd think by now I would have learned to live
with never knowing the ends of these stories.
I have not.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2015



There are just a few more days of school left, and I am getting ready to say goodbye, in most cases forever, to the people who have been my life for the past 9 months -- this crazy, quirky bunch of students who bloomed late, but bloomed GLORIOUSLY.

Matt has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.

Dragons Beware!

Dragons Beware!
by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado
First Second, May 12, 2015
review copy purchased for my classroom library

Claudette is relentless. She has not given up on becoming a warrior. Her little brother, Gaston, is equally single-minded. He HAS given up his dream of becoming a chef until he can become as good a blacksmith as his father and/or do something that will make his father proud.

When the flying gargoyles attempt to attack their village, Claudette and Gaston's father, Augustine, and his sidekick Zubair set off to get Augustine's sword Breaker from the belly of the dragon Azra so they can defeat the evil Grombach, who is sending the gargoyle army.

Knowing that Claudette and Gaston will try to come along, Augustine leaves them locked in the tower with Marie. Guess how long that lasts?

Here's how our heroes are armed to defeat a dragon and an evil...grandfather (you'll have to read the book to get the back story on that plot twist): Claudette's stumpy little sword seems to have some magic, and she is not at all lacking in bravery. Gaston is encouraged by Hag (a character I'm pretty sure we'll meet again in book 3),

"Don't turn your back on a talent, Boy. Lots of folks spend their whole lives looking for something their good at."

as she presses a book of spells into his hands. "Casting spells is like learning a recipe. Like cooking."And Marie has been learning about diplomacy.


I loved the first book, Giant's Beware!, but I love this book even more. I can't wait to hear Rafael Rosado (artist) and John Novak (colorist) speak at Cover to Cover on Saturday, May 23 from 2-3:30. See you there!

Math Monday -- Pans of Brownies

It's Math Monday! 

Join Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning 

for the Math Monday link up!

Dividing whole numbers by unit fractions and unit fractions by whole numbers are 5th grade standards.  (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.5.NF.B.7)

I've never taught division of fractions, but when you are struggling to understand something yourself, you often do a better job explaining it to someone else.

In my classroom, dividing fractions is all about pans of brownies. 

If you have four pans of brownies and you want to divide them each into fourths, how many fourths will you have?

4 ÷ 1/4 = 16

You will have sixteen one-fourth-sized pieces to share with your friends.

But what if you you share 15 of those one-fourth-sized pieces and realize you forgot to share with 4 other friends? 

If you chop a one-fourth-sized piece into four pieces, what size of piece will each of those friends get?

1/4 ÷ 4 = 1/16

They will get a tiny little piece, but at least you didn't completely forget them!

Creative Commons photo from Wikimedia Commons

Poetry Friday -- Gold

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

by Robert Frost

(in the public domain)

Diane has the Poetry Friday roundup at Random Noodling.

Time Flies

by Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void

RUMP by Liesl Shurtliff

I chose RUMP by Liesl Shurtliff as our last read aloud of third grade.  We may fit one more in but it is doubtful. RUMP has been one of my favorite read alouds of all time. I was worried that it would be too complex for 3rd grade but they LOVE it and it is bringing together so much they understand about story.

Before we started RUMP, we read several picture book versions of Rumplestiltskin. (This fabulous advice from Colby Sharp:-)  Some of the versions were fun. Others were a bit scary. Some of the movie versions we watched were a bit creepy. The kids loved the conversations around the similarities and differences in this stories.  But Rumplestiltskin as a character was pretty much the same--a not so nice, magical creature who is out for himself.

So much of 3rd grade is learning to read complex books, learning to look beyond the surface and to infer a bit more than what is on the page.  So much is learning to know characters beyond a few descriptors. What do they do and why do they do what they do? How do they change over time?  What do they learn from their problems?

The year has also been about connecting stories in a way that helps you understand better.  Noticing the ways that stories connect and characters remind you of other characters. It has been about thinking about what you can expect from a story because of its genre, author or topic. And it's been about the fun in changing your thinking in the midst of reading once you learn more about a character.

So, this book has been perfect t to tie all of our conversations together and to think more deeply about a character we thought we knew well enough. We are learning that perspective matters and the conversations around this book have been such fun!

Before we started the book, we previewed together and listed those things that we expected as readers as well as questions we had:

We also created a chart of Rumplestiltskin's character traits-what do we know about this character and how might our thinking about him change as we read this story?  Our original thinking is on the left and we are filling in the right side when we realize something different.

I'm noticing that perspective is misspelled on this chart at the beginning. We fixed it up and added new things we learn about Rump as we hear his story. The 2 columns of things we know are becoming very different!

Because Liesl Shurtliff is so brilliant and clever as a writer, the class is having great fun noticing little details in the book that may refer to another fairy tale they know or something from the original tale that they may have forgotten.  So much fun discovering not only Rump's perspective of all that happened but also in discovering the brilliance of this author, who is new to them.

As we get ready to think about our summer reading, I am sure many of my kids will want to read Liesl's newest book, Jack.  I know I am anxious to read it.  (And I am very excited that Liesl will be at NERDCAMP this summer!)

If you want to learn a bit more about Jack and the 3rd book that is coming next year, you can read an Interview with Liesl Shurtliff on The Nerdy Book Club site.

Studying Slide Design: Learning from #EdcampKids

We started with our own version of #EdCampKids in later March.  So far, we've had 4 EdcampKids sessions where kids attend 4 workshops each time. Every single child in my class has presented something--it is always a choice but everyone loves to share things they know.  We are in an animal slideshow stage right now--probably because so much nonfiction they are reading is about animals.  They seem a bit obsessed with animals and slideshows but we also have workshops on Origami, science experiments, and building and we have children who choose to create posters or use non-tech visuals. The conversations around audience and purpose have been amazing.

The teaching that comes out of #EdcampKids is incredible. Every time, there are so many things that happen that fall into our learning the following week.  We started this late in the year to see how it went but I can imagine that next year, the possibilities for teaching from what happens each session will have a huge impact on our writing workshops.  One of my favorite conversations happened a few weeks ago when a student very kindly shared how distracting it was as an audience member when a word was misspelled on a slide.  Such a natural way to bring up the importance of editing when you are publishing in this way.

Last week, during writing conferences, I met with several students about slide design. I am noticing from afar that the sophistication of slide designs--the choices that writers make when deciding how to design slides--is really changing.  There is a great deal of intentionality in the slide design and I wanted to capture a few that we could study. I met with several students who had recently completed a Google Slideshow to share during Edcamp and they chose a slide that they were especially proud of.

It is easy to start to worry about the traditional things we think are important---because students are not citing sources or the wording often sounds too fact based instead of synthesizing what they know. But in this process, I feel like I've gotten back to the true feel of the writing workshop.   I remember these are eight year olds who are learning to share their new learning with others. They are thinking hard about audience and purpose and how to share their new passions with peers. They are learning to combine images and text in unique ways.  They are learning to navigate sophisticated tools and collaborate with others in the process. I am reminded of all I learned from Troy Hicks The Digital Writing Workshop and Crafting Digital Writing every day as I listen into kids' thinking during writing. I am looking forward to revising both of those amazing books this summer as I plan for another year of digital writing workshop.

So in the coming weeks, some of our mini lesson work will focus on slide design (which transfers to pretty much any nonfiction writing design). We will use these slides to begin our conversation and to look closely at decisions third grade writers have made.  Since all of the kids have participated in EdcampKids as both presenter and audience member, I expect these conversations to be powerful.

You can find the padlet here.

"Rich" Math Problems

I got the best compliment ever last week: "That math problem was really fun! That was the best day in math so far this year!"

It was this problem from Robert Kaplinsky: "How Much Money IS That?!"

I put the pertinent information (photos, link to the video, questions to ask) into Google Slides, and printed the above picture for individuals and small groups to mark up. (We did the Coinstar problem the day before.)

I wish you could have been there when I started the slide show with the above picture! Excited conversation ERUPTED all around the classroom! Questions, predictions, estimates, scenarios...leave it to money to get kids excited to solve a problem!

We worked on this problem over the course of two days, and our final answer was in the ballpark of the actual amount, but not at all spot-on. That's okay. We had already determined that we were not going to be able to aim for precision with this problem.

This week, I'm going to try some of the problems from Inside Mathematics. I like how they come tiered with different levels on the same theme.

Happy Problem Solving, and Happy Math Monday!

It's Math Monday! 

Join Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning 

for the Math Monday link up!