Waste not, want not!

I was talking with a principal of a local school the other day.  She had a whinge about how much paper and copied materials are printed and WASTED every day.  She saw me and asked why I was smiling (and I was grinning like the Cheshire Cat!).  Photocopying (especially colour copying) costs schools thousands upon thousands of dollars each term.  I replied that I haven't printed one sheet in the 4 days I have worked for them already this year.

She looked at me funny and asked what I used in the classroom.  It is not uncommon for non-CRTs to think CRTs rely on photocopying and blackline worksheets to teach.

I simply replied "everything but photocopied worksheets", made my goodbyes and headed home with that smile still on my face.  I know I am supporting schools in this hard time of financial struggle but even better?  I know the students that I had in my first four days of teaching were engaged, learning, investigating and best of all, having fun!

One day I might let her in on my secret.  Until then, I hope she comes for a visit in the classroom I am in, the next time I am in her school.

Mel

My resource find today!

Anyone that knows me, knows I love to find a bargain that everyone can afford that can be used in the classroom in a range of different ways.  Household items are my passion, items that students are able to purchase at any supermarket and they are not going to cost the earth for their families. 

Education should be affordable for everyone!!

So how excited was I when I came across these little beauties at the supermarket this morning.



These are just two from a small range of different tissue boxes that kids can learn from.  Yes, tissue boxes!  My eyes lit up again when I saw the price.  $2 each!  So I grabbed a couple.  These two pictured above are my favourite.

Now with my mind racing and ideas coming out my ears, I walked in home to declare my find (and excitement) with my husband.  But I had so much running through my head that I wasn't making any sense.

So here I am, trying to put down all my ideas and activities about my resource find today!

I have found there has been lots of talk online around engaging students, managing behavioural issues, activities or lesson for a CRTs bag of tricks and managing early finishers.  These cleverly designed tissue boxes tick all of these areas fairly well. 

Worksearch tissue box

Engaging Students

As a collaborative activity where students work in small groups, having them looking for all the words on the wordsearch box.  All the words are listed on the side of the box.  If you had a couple of tissue boxes, you could get the whole class involved.

Side of Wordsearch box, sorry a little blurry.

Variations.

Cover the side of the box where the words are listed and see how many words the groups can find.  Can they find a word that another group can't find?  How many longer words can they find?  Draw a table on the board for the students to write their words under the individual headings (3 letter words, 4 letter words).  Write a conclusion around the results.

You can use this activity as an Icebreaker activity, in a literacy rotation and as a team building or EQ (Emotional Intelligence) lesson.

For the Foundation students, have them find a specific letter and circle it.  Similar to an activity I do using the newspaper.  Identifying letter in different fonts is great for their immersion of letter and the understanding that letter sometimes look a little different depending on the font and where the letters are used.

A writing activity.  If a students finds a word, that's great.  Get them to keep it to themselves.  Have them write the word they found on the tissue box into a sentence with a picture.  Then return to the box and look for another word, repeating the cycle.

Managing Behavioural Issues.

I am a big believer in setting up engaging activities and lesson, linked to students lives, interests and where they experience enjoyment.  This activity may not connect to all students but which student doesn't like a wordsearch?  By engaging students in the activity, you won't have to manage the behaviours.

CRT bag of tricks.

How many times have you walked into a classroom and you can't find a tissue?  Problem solved and you make an activity out of the box. 

Even if you flatten the empty box and slip it into your bag, making it nice and easy to get out and use.

Early Finishers

I would have this tissue box on the floor at the front of the room for the early finishers.  As students finish their work and join the group around the tissue box, it is not going to matter that students are joining at different times.  The strategies the students need to come up with will include, how will they incorporate a new students, how are they going to take turns, should they use different colours for different students and well as you can see, the list goes on and on.  Co-operation is the key to this activity. 

The colouring in tissue box

I understand this box will respond to the girls more that the boys, especially in the older classes but still a great little resource that can be used in different ways.

Engaging activity/Managing Behavioural Issues.

As a collaborative activity, students need to work together to colour a section of the box.  This isn't an easy task as the tissue box is so small and only a certain amount of room for hands to work. 

Bringing the students together at the end of the session to talk through the different issues with the activities, feeling individuals felt and displayed and different strategies they used that helped.  A nice little Emotional Intelligence (EQ) activity.

Variation.

Have two tissue boxes (same pattern) but one is 3D still and the other flat and empty.  Compare and contrast how working on the different boxes was, were the strategies the same for both boxes and which one was the easiest to work on?  Venn diagrams are useful in activities like these and are easy to draw on the whiteboard or even have the students draw one in their workbooks or on a piece of paper and then fill in.

CRT bag of tricks.

The same as above.  You can flatten the empty tissue box and slip it into your bag.   

Early Finishers.

Again, like above. 

Variation

You could add different drawing materials for the students to work with.  Then ask the students to review which item was the best to use and why, and the worst item to use and why.  Have the students think about the colours, brightness, tip of the drawing item and how small the drawings are.  Did they have control over how and where they coloured?  Did any of the drawing materials give the colouring any texture?  Did mixing drawing items give a better effect to the colouring.  Lots of different art questions for the students to think about.

As you can see, lots of different ways these two tissue boxes can be used in the classroom.  If you can think of some more, I would love to hear them.  Please post them in the comments section.

Mel

New page added!

I've put up a new page about my "one book lesson plans" to help people understand exactly what they are and what they are getting when they buy one.

Regards,

Mel.

Working on "stuff"!

I'm currently working on a few new things.

Professional Development:

First, I'm working on a professional development program for new teachers moving into CRT work.  I'm personally pretty excited about this one as it's centered around helping new teachers to find their strengths and really shine in their careers!

This comes from the feedback of a number of provisionally registered CRTs who are saying that their university course didn't really prepare them for what they are in for.  It covered some of the areas but but they felt that their lecturers were a little out of touch with what's going on in schools for CRTs and the advice that myself and other Wodonga CRT Support Network members keeps offering them is 1000% more helpful to actually become a confident and capable CRT.

One Book Lesson Plans.

There's currently about 5 more in the works to go along with the "When the wind changed" activity and the "Memory Bottles" lesson plan.

The Giants loo roll is nearest completion and I'm quite happy with this one.  Even the name of the book itself grabs the minds of primary students ;).  It's a great book that lends itself to literacy, some more complicated Math and sums as well as an art exercise.

1 Resource - 40 activities.

Using 1 resource to set a theme, each of these packs will have 40 activities (a somewhat arbitrary number decided upon by the fact that the number 40 appears twice in the name of my TpT store!).

The activities will include as many curriculum areas as I can cram in such as:

• Literacy.
• Maths.
• Geography.
• Science.

A preview will hopefully be available soon!

So lots of stuff being worked on and hopefully I'll be having some of it coming out soon!

Regards,

Mel.

One Book Lesson plans: Reading to engage.

With the curriculum getting more and more packed each year, it gets harder and harder to prioritize what teachers can bring to their classrooms.  Teachers are slowly but surely losing the ability to choose the elements of their Student's education as they have to "pack in" everything they are supposed to teach in an efficient way.  The "extras" are slowly going by the wayside and modern students are missing out on a lot of what we used to get in schools as students.

While Teachers scrabble to educate their students in a way that gets them reading, writing and composing? It's getting harder and harder to find the time to make it a priority to give them a passion for books and a love for reading for the simple enjoyment of it.  I get around this by killing two birds with one stone and using my favourite books to engage with my students as a basis for a lesson rather than using books purely as a teaching aid.

One Book Lesson Plans use reading to your class as an engagement tool which is a little different from reading to settle a class.  Reading to settle a class is about focusing their attention away from playground issues and giving their bodies time to stop giving out all the chemicals that make them jumpy and excited for example (although this isn't the only time when it's a good idea).  Reading to engage is a little different in that it is to grab their attention and get them personally invested in the subject matter to provide self-motivation for the following lesson.

One Book Lesson Plans capitalize on the fact that engagement is a very important tool for CRTs as we need a solid way to overcome the fact that we are an "invader" into the classrooms we work in.  We are an immediate excuse for the students to once again start testing boundaries to see what they can get away with so the tools to overcome this are built into them in an intuitive way.  Keeping students engaged with their work is a very effective method to steer them away from testing those boundaries, they are so busy with something else that it just gives so little time for it to occur to them to try and step over one or two.

To naturally and inherently reduce the difficulties that CRTs face in the classroom every day.

Watch this video on YouTube!

The beautiful part about using books in this way is that they are used for "justifyable educational purposes" when it comes to how other view what you are doing in a classroom.  It also gives you an easier pathway to providing your students with productive learning as well as being a step back in time to when it was also easy to make instilling a love of literacy and books in our students a priority too.

Schools will love it.  You will love it.  Students will love it.  A perfect addition to your "Bag of tricks"!

Regards,

Mel.

Is it holidays?

It's been a busy week of working on lessons and activities.  I think my brain has forgotten that it is holiday time.  I have been enjoying some new picture books I found, cuddling up with them, reading and letting all the fantastic ideas come together in front of my eyes.  I am hoping to get a couple of One book lesson plans finished these holidays ready to test in the classroom in Term 2.

Over the next couple of weeks I will also be putting the finishing touches on the new ones I have trialled in the classroom and add them to the bank of stuff ready for TpT.  

I've also been working on a new 12ish page booklet which is my spin on what it takes to be a desirable CRT.  Not a good CRT, there are a whole bunch of good CRTs out there!  It's about polishing off your Professional Identity in ways that help you to have a good amount of career satisfaction as well as getting that professional identity out there so schools can see it and want to put you right near the top of their CRT preference list!

I mean, really, how could I have a store devoted to CRTs without having a booklet like this?

The last project in the pipeline is an interesting one for me to do!  One of the ways I recieve extra work in schools is by specializing in intervention level literacy.  Over the years I've developed my own set of activities, systems and ethics about approaching the students and their education.  It's been a very interesting journey to put it down on paper!  My husband just keeps telling me "You're just a natural born teacher, stop thinking about it because all that makes you do is stress out.  Just walk in and do it and you'll get it right, you always have".  And he's kind of right because I've always taken the CRT approach, used my CRT skillset and modified my methods on the fly to suit particular students.

It's actually where many of my activities come from.  I get stuck, scan the room for simple stuff I can have the student help me quickly make something out of that does what the student needs it to do.  Then I refine and add to it over time until it works for just about all of my students (nothing works for everyone is one lesson I've learned over the years!)

This is where I'm comfortable.  Analyzing it or writing it all down?

Well, I've never studied my methods or tried to figure out why they work so well.  They just do and in the end working out why was always kind of like just making more work for myself.

Teachers pay Teachers though gives me a reason to do it and I'm kind of glad it has.  I knew I was good at what I do, I just didn't realize the pool of knowledge I had to pull from until I was given a reason to pull it apart and look at it!

This one will take a while to produce as to make it as effective as it should be I think the production of a few support videos to go along with it is a good idea!

Regards,

Mel.

Easing into fun (and engagement)!

I am a big believer that CRTs are not babysitters, we are not any less of a professional than any other teacher and we can make a big difference in a student's life.   Yes, I understand that we don't know the students backgrounds, or religious standing, mother or father's name or even if they have a learning difficulty.  But I know, CRTs are some of the best teachers I have worked with and are proud to work along side.  CRTs are some of the most creative and inspiring teachers out in schools, who take every situation as it comes, handle changes at the drop of a hat and quite often, fly under the radar, when thanks are handed out.

On my second day of work the classroom teacher was conducting assessment of her students.  A prep/one class.  She had left me a loose outline for the day and didn't really expect much more than for the kids to be happy and settled through the day.  She was dropping in and out of the room all day, taking students and bringing them back (and sort of checking up on the class).  She was a bit nervous as this was the first time the class had had a CRT for the year and she wanted it to be a pleasant experience.

She arrived in after our writing session and to her surprise, she was swamped by students and their workbooks, trying to show her their work!  She took ten minutes out of her assessing schedule and read as many students' writing as possible, congratulating all the students on their imagination.  The smile never left her face.

This teacher caught me at the end of the day and thanked me, also making the point that each student left the room at the end of the day with a smile on their face.  :-)

What more could we all have hoped for.  Happy, engaged students!  Happy classroom teacher!  And a happy me, after having a day full of fun, excitement and lots of learning!

Mel