Five For Friday {The Rewind}

 

Another crazy week has come and gone and it’s November.  I honestly don’t know where the time goes.  I feel like school just started a few weeks ago still.  I would have had this post ready on time…for the 3rd week in a row….but last night was the annual My Favorite Things Party that I go to, so that is my excuse!  So here it is…on a Saturday….in rewind.

 

 

Unfortunately, I don’t have any cute Halloween party photos to share.  We received an email from admin that said no dressing up, small parties, low key, and keep the day running as normal as possible.  Now, there is something you should know about me.  I am a rule follower.  If a rule exists or I am told something by my boss, I obey.  That’s just me.  And on top of that, someone down at district office decided, in their infinite wisdom, that Halloween would be a great day to open the reading benchmark testing window.  So, I took one for the team and took THE WORST testing dates available.  The afternoon of Halloween and the morning after the sugar coma.  I am proud to say that my kiddos ROCKED it.  Every. Single. One. improved upon their score from last time.  I see a big celebration party in our future!

 

 

Thursday, Cory came again.  Since it was Halloween and I was trying to to be a total Scrooge, instead of reading we played a game.  Usually we call this game, “Beat the Teach,”  and they are trying to beat me.  Today, it was, “Beat the Football Player.”  It’s a fun game to practice place value and comparing numbers.  They love it!  You can check it out in my TpT store, it’s super inexpensive!  Anyways, Cory finally got the hang of it and they played one last round.  And every last one of my students made a number lower than his, which was his challenge that round.  Not sure if he quite understood how it worked.  Here is a picture of all of their happy faces surrounding a pouty football player!

 

 

 

 

This week in reading we worked on The Planets in our Solar System, from our reading series.  We did our close reads, and on Wednesday it was time for our culminating task.  I gave them the prompt and a place to organize all of their sticky notes from our readings and they got to work.  I was so impressed as I walked around the room.  They just blow me away with the hard things they can do!

Here is one of the diagrams……

 

 

One of the things we worked on this week was non-fiction text features.  Part of their task was to use the text as a resource to create an illustration or diagram of the Solar System and label it.

 

Then, using the text as their resource they had to write a summary that included some of the most important details they read.  I loved this kiddo’s desk.  He was organizing and then reorganizing his sticky notes until he had them in just the right order!

 

 

If you are interested in getting a closer look at this task, I included a link to a free download in last week’s visual lesson plans, you can check them out HERE.

 

 

We started the week with our annual character pumpkin gallery walk.  Parents were invited to come check out our pumpkins.  We had spent the previous week working in class on writing our character descriptions and support our ideas with evidence from the text.  I had some amazing and creative pumpkins.  But, I must say that I was far more impressed with their writing!  I couldn’t believe what an amazing job they did using text evidence!  I was one very proud teacher! 

 

 

The popular choices this year seemed to be Greg Heffley and characters from our favorite read aloud, Sideways Stories From Wayside School!

 

 

More Character Pumpkins!

 

 

I had to save Stick Dog for last.  This is from one of my gifted kiddos!  Talk about thinking outside the box.  She wanted to know if she had to use a pumpkin, she was thinking that a squash better fit her character!  Just one more reason I love teaching these kids!

 

Happy November everyone!  Have a great weekend and I’ll see you Sunday with more visual plans.