I have found a way to use a classroom Mascot with 5th Graders

My college supervisor aassigned that I plan and teach a ELA lesson.  Language Arts is not my strong area and I dread having to plan lessons in this subject.  Looking back at my previous posts, it came to me to use my classroom mascot to help motivate students to right.  I thought to help students make a connection to the mascot, named Wage, they could create the backstory for him.  While aligning this with the Common Core State Standards, I found that Narrative Writing was one of the components often looked over.

My next thought: how can I guide these students to write a detailed narrative without given them too much guiding information.  My goal was for students to use their own thoughts and imaginations to write their own background stories for Wage, but in a guided way.  How was I going to do this?

Storu Cubes!  If you have not heard of these, they are a set of 9 dice with 54 different pictures on them.  When the dice are rolled they can be used in various ways, but I thought I would have students choose 6 out of the 9 images to use for their narratives.  The choices are selected by the students rather than guided by me, which gives them a level of freedom, but guided academic choice.  OF COURSE  I would model what I was looking for first, and give students the instruction they need to complete the task, but I think giving the students the CHARACTER and PARTIAL INFORMATION would challenge the students enough to be engaged in the activity, enough choice that they feel free to write their own style, AND enough choice that they can draw on their own strengths.

I would be willing to make the lesson plan public, just ask in the comments.

I will write an update post after I teach the lesson on Wednesday (which I will be teaching twice).

Week 3: Why are we having 5th graders practice their counting?

It is week 3 and I have been given the change to teach daily the introduction/warm-up session for all three 5th grade homerooms that come into the Math classroom I am student teaching in.  I find it a great way to break into  the students getting to know me and my styles, as well as getting to know their abilities and quirks.  It begins with the students coming in and choosing a popsicle stick that tells them where to sit.  This is followed by a Problem Of the Day (P.O.D.) which the students complete on their whiteboards independently, then check their answers with peers, then I go over the answer with them on the big whiteboard at the front of the room.  We review any tricky spots and move on to homework checks.  Once again the students check their answers with peers, and any tricky problems are gone over as a class by request of the students.

Then we practice counting.  Initially, this seemed like a silly thing for 5th graders to be doing, but by practicing their skip counting, their fact family awareness has increased.  The current topic in math is division, specifically the traditional standard algorithm, which takes a bit of mental math.  By having the students practice skip counting (of 60, 70, 80, 21, 17, etc.) both orally as a group and on paper for a 1 minute sprint, students become more and more familiar with the number patterns that can be seen throughout math.

Being skeptical, I asked my cooperating teacher to show me some data backing up the claims that practicing counting in the 5th grade could help students with their math.  She pulled out tracking and data sheets with a baseline and the increase of student performance increased beyond what I would normally thought to happen or have seen happen in other classrooms I have been in.  While it was slow to start while students learned and practiced the counting, when multiplication and division problems were introduced, students had a steady and strong increase in their academics without fail.  This means even struggling students were making gains beyond what had been expected for them.

All from something they were introduced to as younger students, and creating practical applications.

Quick Question for Fellow Educators.... Please help.

So I am looking for a fun and helpful tool to help with classroom management.  I have seen and personally used a classroom mascot to help with classroom management that was attached to a point earning system.  I saw it working great with younger students (Grades 1-3), but I am now in a 5th grade classroom and would love to introduce a classroom mascot.  How can I do this without it being too "childish" for the students, AND how can I incorperate it in such a way that it can be helpful to classroom management?