Five for Friday: Done with Testing!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday! 

Woohoo! We just finished our last day of State tests today.  I am so relieved that all of this is behind us and SO ready to get back to some (REAL) teaching.

We still have two.full.months until vacation, so it's not quite time to relax.  Here are five things I plan to do between now and the end of June:

1.) Re-design my room, a bit.  Check out this hot mess:

So many things had to come down off of the walls for testing!  Right now, my room is pretty bare.  The desks are back in groups, but we need new bulletin boards up ASAP and a ton of decluttering will take place this week.

2.)  Cinco de Mayo!  I love to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with my students, even if it will really be May 3rd. :-)  We will start working on a (very) mini Mexico unit.  We've been learning about the Mayans for quite a while, but we haven't really studied Mexico at all.  So I made these posters to use for a gallery walk:

I'm going to hang them around the room and have the students walk around and take notes.  The information is very basic and very easy to read.

After they have their notes, we are going to create brochures:

The brochures are going to be so cute!  I let two of my girls pick the line art from Scrappin Doodles and they have been spreading rumors about next week's activities!

Check it out on TpT.

 

3.) Friday Surprise!  I find the end of the year to be really challenging in terms of classroom management.  My students are graduating, so there are SO many activities for them starting at the end of May, but often they lose focus in terms of academics.  This year, I'm going to try something new.  Each (or most) Friday there will be a special surprise to reward the kids that are focused.  This Friday, we will make guacamole! 

4.)  Reinvigorating my reading workshop.  I've been working on new literacy centers for what feels like ages.  I started in February with a basketball theme for March, but they never got completed!  This weekend, I'll get them finished and ready for my kids to get reaquainted with reading workshop.

5.)  Finish Wonder.  This book is all I've talked about lately.  My students are enthralled.  They are SO quiet while we are reading and so empathetic.  We read Via's description of August's face this week and I really appreciated their reactions.  I could see them touching their faces to understand her description.  And no one had anything unkind to say, which, frankly, I was very worried about.  But they listened. 

Enjoy your weekend!!!  Be sure to link up with Doodlebugs to share five random things!

Prepositions Mini Unit and a Sunday Sale!

I finished teaching and editing my Prepositions Mini Unit for Fifth Grade this week!  Hooray!  I was really happy the level of engagement on a grammar topic.  I also felt like it really benefited my ELL students to get more experience using words like "with" and "for."  Even some of my advanced ELL students learned something new during this unit. 

I only have about 15 minutes a day to address grammar, so this unit took me 8 days to complete. I outlined the first few days of instruction in this post.

After we sorted sentences, I sent students home with a 1/4 sheet of paper to write their own sentences that used a preposition that told when or where.  The next morning, we sat in a circle and passed our sentences around and wrote the sentences on this chart.

I asked the kids to circle the preposition, as many of the sentences told when and where.  I collected their papers to check up on their progress and was very happy that even if the sentence had two prepositions, they were able to circle the one that matched the way they place it on the chart. They did a great job!

Next up: prepositional phrases.  Since they were already comfortable with prepositions, this mini lesson was a breeze!

Oh, sorry for the glare!  We  were circling prepositions, underlining the phrases and writing if the sentence told us when or where.  I had the students complete their sheets first and then come to the SMARTboard to review.

On our last day of instruction, I introduced prepositions that show relationships.  This is the area of need for my class going forward.  We looked at sentences with prepositions such as "of" and "from."  Then the students completed a worksheet and then we discussed all of the possible answers that made sense in the sentence.

In this package, I've also included an assessment and all of the answer keys to the sheets.  I opted not to give the assessment just because we've been doing a ton of mid year assessments and I really feel bad for my kids :-(

To say thank you for following me, I'm posting this mini unit and my Common Core and Commas mini unit (also aligned for Fifth Grade) for 25% off from now until Tuesday night, around 9pm.   If you do decide to pick it up, I'd love it if you left me some feedback!

Have a great Sunday!

A quick introduction and literacy centers in the upper grades!

Well, hello!  Welcome to my brand new blog!  I decided to take the plunge into teaching blogs after having been a running blogger for the last few years.  Like most teachers, transitioning into Common Core has eaten up a lot of my free time and so I've decided to move my running blog to the bottom of my priority list (not running itself though.  I'm still in {love} with running!) You might think that starting a second blog would not be the smartest move, but I'm hoping to connect with some other fifth grade/upper elementary teachers to improve  my practice for next year!

So who am I? I'm in my eleventh year of teaching.  I work in a big city, many stops away from all the fun tourist hot spots.  ;-)  I taught fourth grade for a few years before moving up with one of my classes and becoming a fifth grade teacher.  For the last two years, I've taught the ELL class.  It was an eye opening adjustment, but I really love working with ELLs!

When working with a group of English Language Learners, you will have an incredibly diverse classroom in terms of prior knowledge and abilities.  In September, I had students with reading levels from E to Z!  I've found literacy centers to be really important in my classroom in order to meet everyone's needs.  I'm actually really fortunate that in my school we have several pull out programs during the morning literacy block.  Some of my students go to Intervention and others go to ESL, leaving me with a nice small group of 13!  {And don't I wish that was my class size all day!!!}

I use my lovely SMARTboard to help students find their center assignment for the first rotation.  Ideally, I'd like everyone to read during Guided Reading, but instead, I use part of that time for students to work on spelling, vocabulary, grammar and writing.

I drag their names to their center so they can see where they need to go.  I love that it doesn't take up any wall space, and I can clone the page over and over so I have a record of where I've sent them!

Here are my four favorite centers that I think work really well for kids who struggle in the upper grades:

1.)  Contraction Cupcakes - There are many versions on TpT.  I made my own based on some worksheets I found on education.com.  My students liked the Contraction Shrink Ray Sheets and with the cupcakes, they were able to self check their work.  Students self checking = less work for me!

2.) Working with prefixes, suffixes and root words- I make up cards for the students to use with dictionaries.  It isn't the most thrilling work, but I've actually found the kids to be really engaged with working dictionaries because the words sound very sophisticated to them.  The best part about this center is that they can visit it several times before they really finish all of the work.

3.) Sorting Activities - We've sorted types of sentences, simple/compound/complex sentences and verb tenses.  The first step in this center is to sort the cards, then the students have sentence practice worksheets.  As long as the cards are cute, the kids are productive!  Funny, isn't it?

This student is sorting verbs by tense.  After she completes the chart, she will have some sentences to write and a paragraph to edit.  Don't you love her neat and organized little piles!

4.) Making Words - I get the words from Month by Month Phonics and I changed the name to Magic Word.  If you aren't familiar, it's one longer word scrambled and the kids write three letter, four letter, five letter and six+ letter words.  They can sort the words they've written into groups that rhyme.  If they figure out the scrambled word, then they've figured out the magic word!

The kids love this activity, so I use it as an incentive to finish the less fun center work first.

So that's my little introduction into my classroom!  If you read through all this, please say hi!  And tell me about centers in your classroom :-)