Based on the illustrations alone, my favorite picture book is The Polar Express. That book just makes my heart go weak. The imagery is amazing and makes the book seem even more magical than the words alone. My mother used to read that book every year at Christmas. It was the only time she would allow my sister and I to "skip" school--we stayed home to decorate Christmas trees, bake cookies, and "experience" the Polar Express. Because she was also a teacher, she knew how to make the experience of the book so amazing. We had to have hot chocolate and she would go through it three times---once reading it aloud and not showing us the pictures, once with us by her side, taking in the pictures and the words together, and on the last time, she would sit quietly as we retold the story by looking at the illustrations alone. This is definitely a tradition I would like to carry on with my future children, and it is one I carry out in my classroom every year!

Language Arts Assessment

I came across Beth Newingham's site about a year ago and have been in love with all of her ideas and goodies ever since!!! She is amazing! In restructuring our Language Arts program this year, I wanted to go back and re-read a few of her blogposts on assessment. Click here for the post if you are interested in reading it for yourself. :)

I loved her ideas of an Assessment notebook that includes many different tools for evaluation. I especially loved her tools for anecdotal records in reading conferences and guided reading meetings. She writes her thoughts down on pre-made labels and sticks them on cardstock--a page for each student in her binder. Since she so kindly makes readily available materials to download from her site, I took the labels and personalized them for my own.... Don't worry Beth, you get ALL the credit!!

Here is the label I tweaked for Guided Reading meetings.

Here is the label I tweaked for Reading Conferences:

The changes to this label came from Angela Bunyi's blog (another Scholastic teacher, whose post on conferences you can read here: http://blogs.scholastic.com/3_5/2008/09/conference-esse.html). I loved her "2 Stars" for positive observations and "1 Wish" for constructive criticism. Angela also mentioned the idea of a blended reading and writing conference, which I knew immediatey would be the best route for me this year!! This will be the first year of team teaching. Kati (my friend and colleague) will be teaching math and science, and I will be teaching language arts and social studies. Because our kids will have both of us, I will now have almost 50 students to conference with each week! Therefore, Literacy Conferences, as I plan to term them, will also need a record keeping tool for the writing portion of our conferences. The label below has a place for my comments on students' ideas, organization, style, and mechanics.

Writing Conference Label

Please check out the other assessment tools I tweaked from Beth Newingham's blog!

Conference Log

Ahhhh.....finally getting on it! :)

Ive been meaning to set up this blog for quite some time. Please be patient as I sift through its construction.

Feel free to check out my classroom blog for parents and students:

www.sdesjacksonandkent.blogspot.com