Infer a character's feelings

I have a class set of Mildred Pitts Walter's Ty's One Man Band. Recently we used it to practice inferring how a character feels. We studied Ty's thoughts, actions and words to figure out his emotions. This objective is very clearly written in the new Common Core standards for fourth graders. This text is rather simple so it is a good choice when working on such a complex skill.

Here is the poster I made for the reading lesson. On the left I put copies of pages from the story where Ty was feeling a certain emotion. (I highlighted the evidence.)

On this page Ty is curious. You can see that he is hiding from the mysterious stranger.

This is the worksheet I used. You can see that the students had to locate the feeling or emotion ( I gave them the page numbers). Later we added the stickies with the information about which emotion he felt and the way it was revealed to us to the poster. Youtube has the story Ty's One Man Band in  a Reading Rainbow episode. We were able to watch it on the Smartboard. See it below. Christine

Reading Rainbow: Ty's One-Man Band

Learning about owls

This is the bulletin board I made for our owls unit. The big owl in the middle is actually a kite I found in a toy store many years ago. My favorite book that I have used for teaching about owls is Owls by Eric Weiner. I like it because the new vocabulary words like talons and species are in italics and the definitions are embedded in the text. Unfortunately it seems to be out of print. Here are some other great books for teaching about owls. Christine

Owl Pellets

This was such a find! While dissecting owl pellets this year we watched this great Youtube video on the Smartboard.

On the same day in the computer lab we did a virtual owl pellet dissection using http://www.kidwings.com/index.htm I love this site!

Taylor Mali on "What Teachers Make"

What are teachers worth?

Are You Sick Of ‘Highly Paid’ Teachers?

November 13, 2011

By Guest Writer From addicticinfo.org

By Author Unknown (if you know who wrote it, PLEASE let me know)
Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do – babysit!
We can get that for less than minimum wage.
That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan– that equals 6 1/2 hours).
Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.
However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
LET’S SEE….
That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).
What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.
Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!
The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!
Make a teacher smile; repost this to show appreciation for all educators.

Reading Rainbow:

I've been having soooo much fun using Youtube in my classroom. My latest adventure involves Reading Rainbow. I remember this series from when I was a kid. The books are read aloud while you view pictures from the story. Many of the books presented are award winners. I've been able to connect many of them to my curriculum. Here are a few of my favorites: