1,000 Followers Giveaway

In the summer of 2013, I put a few comprehension packets I had typed up for novel study on Teachers Pay Teachers.  In July, I made a whopping $2.10.  Nonetheless, I was excited that anyone found my products and made a purchase.  Then in August, with back-to-school, my sales skyrocketed to $72.83.  I was hooked!  I remember stressing with Brent over whether or not to pay the $60 per year fee to be a premium seller on TPT and keep more of my profits.  "We spend that eating dinner out, Deana," he reasoned with me...so I did it.

Slowly, my TPT store became more and more successful and I began to revise, add covers, try new ideas, bundle products, etc.  I toyed with other kind of products, but Novel Units are my passion.  I've always loved schoolwork more than any other kind of work and this extension of my job became my favorite hobby.  In my spare time, without fail, TPT is what you'll find me doing.

Two years later in late summer 2015, I attended the TPT conference in Las Vegas.  After the conference, I paid Megan Favre to design my blog and began tracking my TPT statistics.  Whether they have purchased an item from you or not, buyers on TPT have an option to "follow" your account and be notified when you post new products and receive messages from you.  In August 2015, I had only 300 followers although I was in the top 2% of sellers site wide.

Last school year I took all four classes to get my AIG certification and unfortunately blogging and TPT had to take a backseat.  This year, I'm back at it and aiming to take it to the next level in 2017.

This week, I reached 1,000 followers on TPT!  I've been watching that number track closer to four digits for a long time and I'm over the moon excited!  Realizing that many people are paying attention to my work on TPT makes me want to give back and I'm celebrating with a 1,000 Follower Giveaway!!   Enter below for the chance to be one of TEN lucky winners to have a Novel Unit of your choice ($10 value in my TPT store) emailed directly to your inbox.  There are over 50 titles to choose from!

You'll also receive bonus entries by liking my Facebook page and following me on Instagram and Pinterest.  The contest runs for one week and winners will be announced next Friday, Feb. 24th.

By entering, you'll be subscribing to an email list.  I'm planning a ONCE a month email with updates on new products, teaching tips and, most importantly, giveaways!  You don't want to miss out on all I've got planned.  If you're a teacher, I hope you'll join me and if you aren't, please share with the favorite upper elementary teachers in your life!

A few of my Novel Units include:

   

 

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Best First Week Ever

When I first started teaching, I wondered how teachers did their jobs before the Internet.  A few years later, I got a Promethean board installed in my classroom and couldn't imagine how I ever taught without it.  (What's an overhead projector??) In recent years, I feel this way about Teachers Pay Teachers.  We are so fortunate to live in a time where so much technology and resources are right at our fingertips.  Day in and day out, it's not just me teaching my students but also other experienced, enthusiastic educators whose products and ideas I snag from TPT and their blogs.  I left my classroom yesterday afternoon feeling it had truly been my best first week ever!

Of course we started the week with some obligatory getting to know you activities.  We used a fun K-6 time capsule resource from Mrs. Dessert.  The students listed some facts and favorites on the front and wrote letters to themselves on the back.  My teammate even gave me the idea to spice it up with some other pieces of data, like foot size, height, and multiplication fact knowledge.  We put all our findings in big brown envelopes that we'll open during the last week of school.

While we worked on our time capsules, we enjoyed root beer floats after cracking the code on an activity from my all-time favorite teacher-author, Deb Hanson!  This may have been the biggest hit of the week as students solve reading and math puzzlers finally ending up with clues like, "What part of a plant grows under the earth?" and "What is an antonym for sink?" When they realized we were going to enjoy root beer floats next, they literally jumped up and down!

We spent a lot of time on growth mindset activities this week, as I found out last year that AIG students are just as susceptible, if not more, to getting stuck in a fixed mindset.  I see this problem a lot in math, where primary math has always come easy to these students.  The first time they're faced with a math problem they can't do in their head, many of them shut down.  We used resources from one of my favorites, The Teacher Studio, as we also dug right into partner work in math with her Thinker Tasks.

Not only did we get right into math, of course I wanted to dive right into reading (my favorite)!  We began one of my novel units on the third day of school--Sarah, Plain and Tall- get it FREE here like over 10,000 people already have!  We also began one of Deb's units on Genre (I consider myself on a first-name basis with her even though I only met her once at last year's TPT conference). We complemented our genre study with my very first book tasting, which I modeled after this blog post from another one of my TPT favorites, Teaching with a Mountain View. I, like her, snagged a new Book Tasting Resource from Head Over Heels for Teaching in order to pull this off.  Read more about this worthwhile lesson in an upcoming post.

It truly was the best first week ever, and I think my students agreed.  One of my more athletic boys said to me on Friday afternoon, "You know what's weird about me this year?"  I said, "No, what?" and he answered, "I actually want to come to school!"  We all work hard, especially during the first week, but THAT, my friends, is why we do it.

Hope some of these activities might give you some ideas to make it the best first (or second or third) week ever for you and your students as well!

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ACC Math Task Cards

I love March…it’s my birthday, daylight savings time begins, spring break…and most importantly for us North Carolina folks, it’s March Madness time!

This year, it’s been more like all-year madness for me.  I’m teaching the AG 4^th grade class for the first time and taking two online classes for AG certification each semester to knock it all out this year.  I’ve learned so much from the classes but they’ve taken nearly every moment of my free time.  Sadly, TPT and blogging have taken a backseat to grad schoolwork and regular schoolwork.  I’ve tried to squeeze in a little here and there and I’m counting down until May when I’ll have some free time again.

Last week, my Timehop reminded me that we had some days off school around this time last year for snow.  Then I suddenly had a flashback.  I had spent those snow days making ACC Math Task Cards for TPT and had promised my buyers they’d be updated annually by March 1^st.  I’m going to be at the NCAGT conference Thursday and Friday so my weekend to-do list included sub plans in addition to mid-terms for my AG classes.  BUT I never make a promise I don’t try my very best to keep, so a few hours tonight were spent updating my ACC Math Task Cards.

For the next 24 hours, they’ll be FREE so grab them up while you can.  Tomorrow night (2/29) at 11 pm, they’ll go back to the regular price of $4 just in time for March to roll in.  Enjoy and send the link to a friend!

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How I Learned to Love (Teaching) Reading

I love to read, but I used to hate teaching reading.  The basal textbook bores even me, concepts on the pacing guide are never as clear-cut I’d like, and besides, how do you teach reading to a nine-year-old who hates to read?  (I’m still open to suggestions on that!)

A few years ago, in light of less than stellar reading test scores, our principal encouraged our grade level to try something new.  She promised to support anything we were excited about doing as long as we could promise results.  It was the first time I’d been encouraged to think outside the box in this area and it didn’t take long for me to realize what was missing. 

Books.  Not textbooks, not guided reading books, not books that were written to be taught—books that were written to be READ, to be devoured, and to be discussed.  What my students needed were novels that would transform them, both as readers and as human beings. 

We also needed time.  The only way I knew to accomplish that was to simplify things, streamline my reading lesson plans.  Guided reading, in its truest form, wasn’t doing the trick for my fourth graders.  I was so busy trying to keep different groups on task and juggle five or six different books and readers that I knew I wasn’t really giving any of my students what they needed.  Furthermore, while I knew I still had to teach skills and concepts, I wanted to spend more time integrating them into novel study than I spent teaching them explicitly. 

Out of all this came my novel units.  I started from nothing and created them, question by question, quiz by quiz, and word by word.  What also came out of this was results!  Our test scores improved and much more importantly, our students got excited about reading.  We continued to teach guided reading by pulling our struggling readers into small groups and providing more support, and sometimes we taught two related but differently leveled novels at the same time (such as I Survived the Sinking ofthe Titanic, 1912 and Titanic, BookOne: Unsinkable).  But the fact that we were are all reading either the same or similar books makes everyone feel like they’re on the same team and, more importantly, enables me to take advantage of every teachable moment.  Now I love to teach reading!

My novel units are Common Core aligned and so easy to use.  My students love them too.  At first, I didn’t think I’d be able to use the same format all year long but it’s been three years and I haven’t had a student complain yet.  I’d love for you to try them in your class too.  There are several different freebies available on the tab above.  Please let me know what you think by providing feedback, and I’d love to hear what books you’d like me to put on my list for the future.   

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