I ♥ Native Americans

Native Americans are one of my FAVORITE topics to teach about. When I was student teaching, I worked with a fantastic Kindergarten teacher. We did a Native American Unit that was a total blast! When I got our "History Alive" 5th grade curriculum, I was thrilled to see the focus on Native Americans. I used information from there, but added my own things to the topic.

Here are topics/vocabulary words I try to push:

survival, adaptations, culture, artifacts, shelter regions of the United States, analogies, Native American Legends, natural resources, harsh environments, nomadic, the impact of technology coming into the world, cause and effects: How the land effects the people, comparing and contrasting their lifestyles, Seriously I could go on...You can cover so much and do tons of critical thinking with this topic, and the kids eat it up because it is fascinating!

On Discovery Education (United Streaming Video) there are some wonderful videos for several Native American cultural regions. Just type in "Native Americans, People of the Desert" (and then people of the forest, plains, etc) I am working with my students on taking notes and organizing information, so we use these Cornell Notes as we watch the clips.

Cornell Notes Native Americans

We also added the information to a giant graphic organizer a little at a time. The labeling might seem a bit primary, but my ELLs still need the support.







For tomorrow, my favorite Native American Legends!

Idioms can be a Piece of Cake!!

I have really missed blogging lately!! Adjusting to fifth grade has been pretty crazy, but I feel like I am finally getting in the swing of things.

I wanted to share some material I used to teach idioms. English is FULL of idioms and they can be confusing for ELLs to understand. So last week, we learned and practiced idioms! They are a wonderful language arts skill to teach students, and it also helps their reading comprehension. I have been amazed at how many of my students have brought their books to me to show me an idiom they found in their own reading. Love it!!

Idiom Site has a great list with definitions, so it was hard for me to decide which ones to focus on, but I narrowed it down to the ones you see below. We had so much fun making flipbooks with visuals and meanings of various idioms! We also read these wonderful books...





These books are great for discussing idioms and figures of speech, and kids love the pictures!!

We also used this sorting activity..It is simple, but it was good practice. (The individual boxes didn't show up when I uploaded this for some reason, but it wouldn't matter once you cut it out.)

Idioms


By the end of the week, we were working on using idioms in our writing. We are currently adding more to our Idiom anchor chart, so I will have to snap a picture of it next week! Happy Friday!

CAFE Menu

Last year, I decided to make my CAFE menu spell out FACE, and I referred to it as the FACE of a reader...



I decided to change it up a bit this year, my sweet sister-in-law gave me a little help with the design...Not the greatest picture, but you get the idea...



After I printed these out, I just put a glitter letter in the circle to make the acronym. I used one of my favorite Kevin and Amanda fonts. When I taught second, I always wanted everything to have super clear print for the kids to read, but now that I'm with older kids it isn't quite as big of a deal...Plus, my kids have seen the CAFE menu for a couple years now. I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

CAFE Template

First Week of School Freebie

During the first week of school, there are many great surveys and questionnaire type things you can do. For older students, I thought it might be fun to do something a bit more open-ended with sentence stems! I think my students will really have to think to fill in their responses, instead of giving one-word answers. Let me know if you can think of any other stems to add to this!

Interest Inventory