Hello, my name is Sara. Welcome to my website! I am currently about to finish up with my student teaching experience and the entire purpose of this website is to post as much stuff as I can that I have used so that maybe you can steal it from me and your student teaching, methods, or real teaching will go a little smoother. Nearly everything is for fifth grade language arts, reading, or social studies, but some is for 8th grade in those same subjects. Nearly every link brings you to a Word document, but a couple are PDF or Excel files.
I was forced to go through the entire education program (5 years worth) including methods and student teaching even though I never plan to be a teacher. I thought this was an incredibly stupid policy, so I vowed to try to help out anyone else in my situation (or maybe just someone who may need a little help). I hope you find something you can use! Feel free to steal anything you want... that's what it's here for! If you find something helpful, let me know by signing my guestbook!
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Miscellaneous Education Papers
Download the first of my Educational Philosophy papers or my Second Educational Philosophy paper here. They had different requirements and they're full of a lot of BS, but hopefully you can modify it a little and use it.Here is my Resume (edited a bit so you can't track me down!) and a Cover Letter I had to write in one of my classes.
This is a Getting to Know You kind of activity paper you can hand out in your first week that has the students answer questions about themselves so you can get to know them a little better.
Here is a Letter you can send home to the parents of your students, letting them know who you are and how long you will be teaching their children and asking them for permission for their children to appear in the photos and videos you'll take for your portfolio.
5th Grade Reading
I did a Book Talk activity with my students where they had to pick a book they had read and do an oral report on it. This was a worksheet that helped them get their ideas down on paper before they had to give the speech in front of the class.
I use Bio Poems often. It can be a good activity for the students to do about themselves, but it is also a good activity to use about a character in a story you are reading. It can get the students to think more deeply about the character and what they are really like.
This is a KWL Chart that can be used for anything, but I happened to use it to find out what the students knew about Shakespeare, wanted to know about him, and then (at the end of the unit) what they had learned about him.
Also for the Shakespeare and the Globe story, I had the students fill out a Worksheet on Shakespeare and we also had a day where we talked about the meanings of various phrases Shakespeare came up with and then they wrote a Paragraph using as many of the phrases he came up with as possible. I put a small list of them at the top of the page, but there were many more listed in our reading book.
I had the students read Pandora's Box and then each group made their own. Here is the Assignment Sheet that gave them the directions on what to include and how to do it. Here is a diary assignment I did for a short story called Hattie's Birthday Box. This is the Rubric that explained the assignment and here is the Checklist that I handed out to the students that showed how I would grade the assignment.
I don't know if anyone will be able to use this, but it's a Context Clues Worksheet I made over the story "Off and Running." It lists a lot of the Spanish phrases they used in the story and has the students use context clues to come up with the meaning of the phrases. Here is also a Worksheet Over "Off and Running"
I did a review on recognizing the difference between facts and opinions. Here is a Fact and Opinion Overhead that is a paragraph where I had the students pick out what statements were facts and which were opinions. I also made a Fact and Opinion Worksheet.
Our students all have reading workbooks that have a test for each story we read, but I always write extra test questions to add to the tests a little. Here are the extra questions I added to Evelyn Cisneros: Prima Ballerina, and Little By Little, and Off and Running, and William Shakespeare and the Globe, and Satchmo's Blues, and The World of William Joyce Scrapbook.
I did a huge Hatchet Unit and had to turn it in to my advisor. The first link was to a summary of each day. I had to do long lesson plans on three days, so here is Day 3, Day 6, and Day 8 in the long lesson plan format. Here is a Quiz over chapter seven and the final Test that I gave.
One activity I did while we were reading Hatchet is that I broke the class into groups of three and we read a couple of chapters outloud together. I had picked specific spots for us to stop at, and at each spot, the groups filled out the Summary, Questions, Predictions Chart I had given each group. The summarizer gave a summay of the section we had read, the questioner asked questions about the section, and the predictor said what they thought would happen next. The students switched roles each time so they all had a chance to do each job.
5th Grade Language Arts
This is a review over Adjectives. It includes a guide for what I was going to cover and talk about, an overhead I used, and a worksheet I passed out.
Here is a Creative Writing Story assignment that I created to encourage the students to use more adjectives and adverbs in their writing.
I also did a review of synonyms and antonyms. Here some worksheets over them: Synonym Worksheet, Antonym Worksheet 1, and Antonym Worksheet 2.
I did a really fun assignment where I had the students write a story using a picture as inspiration. I gave them quite a few Norman Rockwell Pictures to choose from and then they used a Prewriting Sheet that asks you to list all the characters, the actions, details about the setting, etc. about the picture, and then a 5 Senses Chart to help the students list all of the sensory details they can use in the story to make it more detailed.
I did a big letter writing unit. Here are the assignment sheets that describe the Letter to Someone You Admire which includes shows the friendly letter format and a sample letter, an Invitation letter, a letter to Request Information, a Letter to the Editor, and a Thank You Letter. Here is also a paper showing the proper format of a Business Letter and a Letter Writing Test that covers the parts of letters, friendly letters, and business letters.
I had the students write a Mini-Autobiography about their favorite hobbies and things like how they got interested in it, how often they practice, why they like it so much, etc.
The students each wrote a mystery story and they really enjoyed it quite a bit. Here is the Mystery Story Rubric I used to grade it.
The students also did a personal narrative where they wrote about a specific event that changed their lives in some important way. Here is the Personal Narrative Assignment Sheet and the Checklist I used to grade it.
5th Grade Social Studies
One thing that I do every day is I start Social Studies with a Today In History fact. The students really got into it and would always remind me right away if I happened to forget. The ones I have here cover January 23rd - May 4th, but only the school days. So if you're using it for a year other than 2006, which I assume you are, you may have to add a few days yourself.
I had the students write Letters From Valley Forge as if they were soldiers/doctors/nurses stationed there. The first document was the assignment sheet and this is the Rubric I used to grade it.
This is a Review Worksheet that I made about the Revolutionary War.
My students didn't seem to be very good at reading charts and graphs, so I made a Charts and Graphs Worksheet that covers bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts.
