The Effects of an Inspirational Teacher

I love reading good pre-teen/teen fiction - books in this genre are so quick & easy to read, and yet the plots & characters are just as interesting and enjoyable to me as adult fiction! Two of my favorite authors are Wendelin Van Draanen (in particular I love her "Sammy Keyes" series) and Andrew Clements (my favorite is School Story).

Earlier this year, I read the book My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison and was instantly addicted to the author's writing style. Like Van Draanen and Clements, Rallison writes stories where characters evolve in some way and learn significant lessons about life, friendships, consequences, etc. To top it all off, she is the queen of humorous writing! I find myself laughing aloud while reading her stories (and then, of course, looking over my shoulder to see if anyone heard me!).



While browsing through some of the older entries in her blog tonight, I found this post, which brough tears to my eyes! Rallison tells of a surprise visit she made to her former 5th grade teacher, Mr. Kuykendall, to whom she gives credit for much of her academic success, and who also told her she would one day be a writer. Its one of those stories that I think every teacher should read, because its a reminder of what a lasting effect teachers can have on their students.

Crafty Organizing

Any of my friends will tell you that I love doing crafts and I am a bit crazy about organizing! :-) I think both of these traits are a plus when you are teaching. Here are some neat things I was able to make to use in my classroom.




Fabric Covered Crates - Teachers are always in need of more storage, and these crates functioned really well for storing student journals and notebooks! (Not to mention what a super cute addition to the classroom decor!) I found the tutorial here: The Undercover Crate

Drawstring Bags for Playing Cards - if you are teaching math with TERC Investigations, you play alot of card games (or even games that use cards in place of dice). I was going crazy trying to get kids to put their cards back in their ziplock bags, but the bags would get lost, trampled on, ripped up, etc., and I would get stacks of loose cards left on my teacher table that would get knocked over or mixed up with other stacks. Finally I figured if I made some cute little bags with different fabric, they might be able to keep track of them better and make sure the right cards ended up in the right bags! It really worked! From that point on, whenever the cards were turned into me, they always came back in their cute bags! (Sorry, no link for this as I just made it up with a few trials-and-errors! I started with a 4 1/2" x 14 1/2" strip of fabric, folded the two ends down by about 1 1/2 inches, then sewed 2 lines across the folded fabric for a casing.)

Flash Card Bags - I have found that when working with young children, not only are they less careful about taking care of those cardboard boxes that flashcards come in; they also have a difficult time getting the cards in an even stack and slid back into that tiny opening in the box...so I thought bags would work for these as well. They are a larger version than the playing cards - I started with 2 strips of 6" x 18 1/2" fabric (one for outside, one for lining), making the casing lines at 2" and 2 1/2" from the end.

Kool-Aid Play Dough

I haven't made any of this myself, but I got to play with some not long ago, and it was the best smelling playdough I have ever used! Pretty colors, too.

Kool-Aid® Play Dough

1 cup flour
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 package unsweetened Kool-Aid
1/4 cup salt
2 tablespoons cream of tartar
1 cup water

Mix flour, salt, cream of tartar and Kool-Aid® in a medium pot. Add water and oil. Stir over medium heat 3 to 5 minutes. When mixture forms a ball in pot, remove. Knead until smooth. Put in a plastic bag and refrigerate.

A Funeral for "Dead" Words

As much as I prefer full-time teaching to subbing, I have been able to glean many a good idea from my subbing experiences! This is one that came from a fourth grade class that I was eager to use with my 5th and 6th graders in private school.

To encourage more interesting written work from my students, I came up with a list of words that were too commonly used in their writing (like, stupid, boring, fun, hate, said, and funny) and pronounced these words "dead."

A "headstone" was commissioned for each dead word, and students were required to put "flowers" on the headstones to pay their respects - on each Post-it note flower was a synonym for the dead word that they had found in the thesaurus. From that time on they were not allowed to use those words in their writings (and words like "stupid" they were also forbidden to say, since they had a bad habit of using this word to describe their fellow students).

They were extremely resistant to this activity at first, but it didn't take long before they started chuckling at the synonyms they were finding. It was not unusual for statements like "That's a dim-witted idea!" to be heard in our classroom after that.

Race the Iditarod!

Every March in Alaska, mushers and their dogs gather in Anchorage to begin an 1,150 mile race to Nome - its the Iditarod, also knows as the "Last Great Race on Earth". In 2007, my first grade class also "raced" the Iditarod by reading. Every page read was equivalent to one mile travelled, and were they ever motivated to cover some mileage! (Coincidentally, the race occurred at the same time as our school's annual reading competition, so they had even more reason to read lots of pages!)

On the wall outside our classroom, I created a large butcher paper poster listing each of the Iditarod checkpoints. Each student's name was affixed at the starting point, and as they read pages, they moved their names along the board.

(Student faces and names have been removed from these photos so I could share what the posters looked like).

We also included the previous year's Iditarod winner, Jeff King, to the race to see if we could beat him to the finish line; we checked his progress daily via the official Iditarod web site. To familiarize the kids with Jeff King, I made a poster with photos and descriptions of him and his dogs (kids at this age love anything having to do with animals!). I also had the kids write a paragraph about themselves and made a poster of our team too! We included their name, age, height, hobbies, and favorite books.

I love to teach thematically - and my school at the time gave teachers the freedom to do so as long as we covered the state standards - so I worked in as many activities as I could that were Iditarod themed. I did read-alouds about famous sled dogs (Akiak and Togo), we made "Gorp" (a trail mix that mushers eat on the trail), studied the various breeds of sled dogs and wrote about our own fictional sled dog teams, and read and wrote Iditarod poems.

The kids came up with some fantastic acrostic poems using the word IDITAROD. I showed them a few samples that had been written by other kids, we did one together as a class, and then each student wrote one of his or her own. By that time they were experts on the race and Iditarod vocabulary, so it all came together rather easily. I was really pleased with the results - here are a few:

IDITAROD by B.D.

I think it is the best race ever
Dogs do tricks
I hope we win the money
Togo is the best dog ever
Akiak is a sled dog
Race Jeff King to the finish
On the trail
Do you think we will win?



IDITAROD by K.R.

I love the Iditarod
Dogs are cool to me
I think that Jeff King is cool
The class is reading to beat Jeff King
Are people clapping?
Race is hard
Or we are helping
Does he win all the time?


They really loved every minute of this unit, as did I. Not all students finished the race, but I gave them a small prize for every checkpoint they reached (bookmarks, stickers, pencils etc.) and made a big deal of their personal achievements!

For teachers:
Official Iditarod Site for Teachers
ABC's of the Iditarod
Education World - Iditarod Lesson Planning
Reading A-Z: The Jr. Iditarod (Level U)
Interactive Unit Study: Iditarod 2007

O Canada!

Every year, my school in Albuquerque holds a "World Tour" event. Each class studies a country around the world and finds a way to present what they've learned so others can come visit their country on an evening in October. Our first grade class studied Canada - a country I have actually visited and had some, if little, knowledge of.

Being that it was my first year of teaching, I honestly had no idea how to get beginning first graders to do a research project during the first two months of school, when they were just barely learning to read. I did know that we would need reference materials so I went to multiple locations of the Albuqeruqe Public Library and checked out every children's book on Canada that I could find.

I decided to start with a KWL chart - K for what we already knew, W for what we wanted to know, and L is for recording what we did learn after doing our research. The kids came up with great suggestions for what we wanted to learn: what do Canadians look like, what do they wear and eat, what do their houses look like, what animals live there...and so on.

After we completed the chart, I distributed my basket of library books and just let the kids explore them. They were enamored. It was definitely one of those magical teaching moments when everything goes right and your kids are enthusiastic about learning and you know why you love your job. :-)

Prior to starting the unit I had also e-mailed as many of the Canadian provinces as I could find addresses for, explained our project, and asked if they might be able to send 30 copies each of their various tourism brochures. Many of them responded and we ended up with a fantastic collection, not only for use in our study, but for display at our culminating event. Some even sent posters that we were able to hang around the room.

Each day during our literacy block, we focused on a topic about Canada (food, clothes, housing, animals, etc.) and the kids would look through the books and tell me what they saw - I wrote the info on butcher paper to record what we'd learned. We later used the brochures from the tourist bureau to cut out pictures and glue them on the appropriate posters.

These are just a sampling of about 10-12 different posters we made. For some subjects, such as animals, major cities, famous Canadians, etc., there weren't pictures in the tourist brochures that we could cut out, so I used the lists we compiled while looking through library books and printed out pictures from the internet that the kids were able to glue on.

I brought in music by Canadian musicans to play while we worked (Raffi's C-A-N-A-D-A was our favorite, but we also heard music by Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Paul Anka, and others) and of course we couldn't skip the Canadian National Anthem!

I also found a tape recorded performance by Canadian figure skater Kurt Browning (of whom I am a fan!) when he won his 4th World Championship. He is an amazingly talented skater and the kids wanted to watch it over and over again. Many of them even came in during their recess time asking to watch it and bringing friends from other classes! For the rest of the year, we often had conversations about Kurt Browning when they would see him on TV, or choose to write letters to him during our letter-writing units, etc. I even had comments from parents at conferences about how much the kids loved him. It was really amusing!

Overall, I LOVED World Tour. It was overwhelming at first - just the thought of trying to fit it in with all the other things we had to do each day caused me some worry - but it turned out to be such a great experience for the kids and for me! I would jump at the chance to do it again!