A Peek at My Week Linky

Hi, friends :-)

I'm linking up with Mrs.Laffins Laughings again to share what we have going on in our room this week!

Our new literacy program, ReadyGen, has still not arrived.  I have student workbooks and a set of books for unit four (which is the LAST unit of the year).  I do not have a teacher's guide, other than what I downloaded onto my iPad, or a class set of novels for the shared reading.  I'll leave my opinion about this fiasco out of it and focus on the most beautiful part: I'm reading the books *I* want to read to my class.  We are going to finish up Sarah, Plain and Tall and begin Skylark.  They are loving Sarah, Plain and Tall and we've done some great work on questioning this week!  I hope to share some of our work with you later this week :-)

On Tuesday, I'll launch guided reading.  Even if we had a program, I'd still have to plan for guided reading, which is fine by me, since I LOVE guided reading!  I created five groups based on running records data and we are reading: Tuck Everlasting (that will be two groups), The Tiger Rising, Schooled and The Witches.  I am super excited!

I saved my self some planning time this week by "shopping" in my own TpT store!  I made sticky note comprehension books for all of these titles (except The Witches ) last year....so that saved me quite a bit of prep work!

Guess I'll be spending tonight folding the booklets!

If you want to take a peek at the booklets, here are the links: The Tiger Rising, Schooled, and Tuck Everlasting.

 I forgot my school calendar, but I think Wednesday is goal setting day.  School-wide, we set aside time to confer with the students about their data and set goals.  Of course, we ask students to set SMART goals, so we will do a little sorting activity to get warmed up. I'll hand out goals such as "I want to improve my handwriting" and goals such as "I plan to read three books by Kate DiCamillo by October 31st" and have the kiddos sort them into specific/measurable and nonspecific/non measurable.

 On Thursday, we are going to extend the work we began with student created rubrics by offering our classmates feedback from the rubric for their paragraph of the week.  I use Stephanie's  (from Teaching in Room 6) amaaaaaazing Paragraph of the Week packet.  We will finish our paragraph on Monday, work on rubrics on Tuesday (take a break Wednesday for goal setting) and then offer feedback to our classmates on Thursday.  I plan to play a game of musical chairs so students read a variety of papers.  I'll give them time to read four or five paragraphs before they return to their seats to read the feedback they've received.  Then they will sort their feedback into helpful and unhelpful feedback.  {This lesson idea is not my original idea.  I read it on someone's blog, but I can't remember which someone.  If you know, please tell me!}

Friday is RTI day in math and last week I saw my class really struggle with 5.NBT.A.1: "Recognize that in a multi-digit number, a digit in one place represents 10 times as much as it represents in the place to its right and 1/10 of what it represents in the place to its left."  They understood the idea, but when I asked them to for the number that is ten times 0.4 or 1/10th of 1, I got quite a lot of blank stares.  As I was teaching the lesson, I found myself wishing I had number tiles for the kids to manipulate, similar to how you might teach  making words with letter tiles.  So I made this little place value mat and number cards to use during RTI.  You can grab the place value mat and number tiles HERE.

There are three pages of number tiles, so you can call out numbers and have students build them as well.  For my lesson, students will practice moving the digit to the left (to multiply by ten) and to the right (to divide by ten) and then they will fill in empty spaces with zeroes.

That's it for now!  Have a great day of watching football and enjoying some gorgeous fall weather!  Oh, and Dexter!