Peek At My Week Linky

Hey all.  It's Sunday night.  All my plans are written.  Copies are made. Laminating is {mostly} done.  And I'm ready to share my week with you all!

 We are nearing the end of our unit of ecosystems!  I found a cute book called What if there were no sea otters? that I'm going to read to begin a conversation about cause and effect and conservation.  The students will have an option to create either a food web, food chain or energy pyramid with the information they gather from the book!

Photo Credit: Amazon

 On Tuesday, we will begin the writing portion of our first performance based assessment.  We've spend the last few weeks learning about characters and their responses and reactions and writers' techniques for crafting interesting stories.  This week, students will craft their own narratives!

 I've been working with one group of kiddos on Lovin' Lit's Citing Text Evidence lesson.  On Wednesday, those students will become the experts and they will teach some other students what they've learned!  My experts are really my lowest level readers, so I'm excited to give them the opportunity to show off what they've learned.

 Halloween!  We invited parent to the classroom for morning literacy on Halloween.  We are going to ready Creepy Carrots (so cute) and work on Runde's Room Plot Pumpkins.

Photo Credit: Amazon

Our admin invites everyone to dress as a storybook character, so I'm going to be the bee from Thank you, Mr. Falker.  (A stretch, I realize).  But I've always love the line "Honey is sweet and so is knowledge, but knowledge is like the bee that made the honey.  It must be chased through the pages of a book."  So I suppose I'm really dressing as a simile!

On Friday, we'll be making some crafty ocean animals.  I spent a good chunk of time procrastinating researching.  You can check out my pinterest board if you are looking for some crafts.

And after school, I'll hop on a train and pick up my packet for the NYC Marathon on Friday.  OMGoodness.  I can't believe it's almost here!!!

Be sure to check out Mrs. Laffin's Laughings!
I hope everyone has a great week!

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!

A Peek at My Week Linky

It's SO quiet in my house right now. My little girl is napping, my husband and son are at the grocery store.  And I'm printing off my lesson plans and getting organized for the week!

Here's what's up in our classroom this week:

 On Monday, I'm going to begin center rotations in literacy.  We will begin with expectations (of course!).  I'll work with the class to create a T-chart showing their job and my job.

I made four easy to use center activities to help the kids build their independence.  You can grab the editing station for free at my TpT store.  It's eight cards with a variety of errors (missing punctuation, capitalization, apostrophes; no spelling errors), a recording sheet and an answer sheet.  I paste the cover on a manilla envelope and place all of the center materials inside.  On the back, I'll clip a sign in sheet to keep track of the students' work.

 On Tuesday, we will (finally!) begin our math program.  I feel like we've already been in school for weeks, rather than just 5 days!  We begin with Topic 1: Place Value.

Our literacy program, ReadyGen, isn't quite so, um, ready.....so we will be reading Sarah, Plain and Tall.  I didn't want to launch into a long novel, with the hopes that our materials will arrive this week.   I haven't read this book to a class in years, so I really enjoyed rereading it this weekend :-)

 Not really planning related, but this Thursday is our Open House.  So I'll be spending lots of time perfecting my room this week! Hopefully I'll actually post some pictures of my classroom by next weekend!

Ah, Friday!  We are doing RTI in math every Friday, which I think is an awesome idea.  I anticipate working on task cards with small groups.  I'll be using Place Value Task Cards with my kiddos.

Have a great week, all!

Be sure to link up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings!

In My Planbook: A Peek at My Week Linky

Hi everyone!  Happy Sunday!  (Or is it Happy Sunday?)

Tomorrow is my first day with students!  I'm pretty excited to get this party started!  I feel like I've been planning for this for, well, an entire summer...so I can't wait to get back in front of a class!

Here's what's in my planbook for this week:

We'll be reading my FAVORITE first day of school book: Appelemando's Dreams.

Pic Credit: Amazon

I love love love this book. We use it as a jumping off point for building trust and understanding the rules in a community.  Rules and routines are the name of the game for Monday.

We will work on some all about me posters from Scholastic and a Math About Me activity from Runde's Room.

 On Tuesday, we will be reading The Day of Ahmed's Secret.  This book never goes over the way I want it to, but I keep trying.  The kids are never impressed by the secret Ahmed has (that he can write his name).  So this year, I am going to try a compare/contrast activity to help the kids understand why it's so great that Ahmed can write his name.  You can grab the Interactive Notebook Foldable Here.  (Credit to Erin at Lovin' Lit for the template!)

Pic Credit: Amazon

In math, I'm going to introduce Math Centers and begin our Beginning of Year Inventory Test.  The test is 80 items long, so I'm going to have the class work on it over the course of 4 days.

My extended day group (that's a group of ten students who stay 50  minutes after school twice per week for intervention and tutoring) will start reading Because of Winn Dixie.  I'm more than halfway through creating response booklets for them and I bought a copy for each kiddo on amazon.  I love this book, so working on this project has been really fun!

from my Instagram ;-) 

 On Wednesday, I'm looking forward to doing some rubric work with my class.  Teaching in High Heels had a great lesson she shared last school year about a rubric for making your bed. I kept pondering this lesson since then and decided to do it this year using my 4 year old's bed as a visual.  He was delighted that I was 1) taking pictures of his bed and 2.) making his bed look so neat!

I'll be sure to share the pictures and the blank rubric after we do the lesson!

In reading workshop, I'm going to introduce sticky mats to my kiddos. We will do an easy one to get started: making predictions.  You can grab the prediction page here or check out the full product here.  {The full product is editable, but the file on Google drive is just a pdf.}  The students will use a 1.5x2 sticky for the small box and 3x3 stickies for the larger boxes.

 On Thursday we will keep going with our rubrics.  This time, we will apply the rubric to an image of a bed so we can offer feedback to the bed maker about their beds.  Using rubrics to offer feedback to peers is a big focus in our school, but I thought it would be nice to keep it lighthearted and fun.  If time allows, we are also going to create a rubric for a clean desk!

On Friday, we will work on book recommendations to share books we love.  You can grab my form here.  They are pretty basic!  I will model  and then ask each student to make one contribution this month using the half size page.  The book and the form go in the books we love bin in our library.  

We should wrap up our beginning of year math inventory on Friday!  Woohoo!
 I'm teaching art on Fridays, so I think we are going to go over the rules in the art studio and then jump right into color theory!

What's in your plan book this week?  Be sure to link up with Mrs.Laffin's Laughings!