Sydney's School Stories

I introduced the concept of customary units of measurement by having the students walk around the room with rulers and measure their friends and items in the classroom.  I also had students trace a ruler into their math notebooks and mark the 12 inches that make up one foot. Getting students up and moving is great for student engagement & conceptual development.

GLAD stands for Guided Language Acquisition Design and are strategies to help ELL students and struggling readers. I was first introduced to GLAD when I was getting my MA/credential at UC Irvine. When you think about it- most students are English language learners in the sense that they are learning new academic vocabulary! One GLAD strategy I tried was a Sequence Pattern Chart. This chart helps students recognize parts of speech and use a writing resource. I used this because I wanted to help students create interesting descriptive sentences for a personal narrative we were working on. To make a sequence pattern chart you create 5 categories- adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. As a class we picked one noun we wanted to focus on and then filled in the rest of the chart based on our noun. For our example the class decided they wanted to talk about "porta-potties"- we had a good time making creative stories about aliens using space traveling porta-p...

"Can I borrow a "frindle" please?" In the Andrew Clements book, Frindle , a group of smart and creative 5th graders make up a new word for the boring term "pen". We have been reading Frindle  as a whole class and I recently found a petition to change the word "math" to "Olisity". When I told my class to get out their "Olisity" notebooks during our math time- they looked shocked!  

One literacy strategy that my class & I did this year is an "Informational Text Walk & Notes" activity. For this unit I wanted to address the following standards: (1) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1 Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information. (2) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1.A Introduce a topic or text clearly, state an opinion, and create an organizational structure in which ideas are logically grouped to support the writer's purpose. (3) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1.B Provide logically ordered reasons that are supported by facts and details, and (4) CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.1.D Provide a concluding statement or section related to the opinion presented. Introducing the lesson: Use the TIME FOR KIDS website for polls ( http://www.timeforkids.com/news-archive/polls ) to discuss different issues that have "pro" and "con" sides of an argument. As a class discuss different issues that TFK has on their poll webs...

Welcome 😁 Welcome to "Classroom Ideas With Mrs. C"! I am Syd (Mrs. C) and I'm so excited to enter the teacher blog world! I decided to start a blog because I've seen great resources from other brilliant teachers and want to share what's worked and hasn't in my 5th grade class.  I teach 5th grade in the Seattle, Washington area and it is my first year teaching! I graduated from UC Irvine with a MA in teaching in 2016 and now have the privilege of working in my own room.  In addition to teaching I like- spending time with my husband "K", our cat, playing Pokemon Go, watching TV, and am working on my cooking skills. Stay tuned for classroom ideas, my favorite teaching websites, and photos. Thank you for stopping by!