Visual Plans 11-11 and a SALE!

Happy Veteran’s Day to all of the hardworking military men and women out there, especially my daddy!  Thank you for all of your hard work, dedication, and service.

 

I am also incredibly thankful for this day off of school.  It was much needed.  This was me this weekend…..

 

 

I spent hours snuggling with my daughters and getting caught up on Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team.  It’s my guilty pleasure, don’t judge!

 

 

Today is all about getting done all of the things that I put off all weekend, including my visual plans for the week.  So, here we go! Remember, if you want to be able to click on all of the links, you need to click the pics of the lesson plans and download them!

 

 

This week we kick off our new ELA framework, Author Study.  We will use the story Author: A True Story from our Treasures reading book to kick it off and start a discussion about what authors do. For our first read, we always read independently and code our text using our “Not So Secret Codes.”  I have a poster with our “codes,” but some of my kiddos in the back always complain that they have a hard time seeing them.  So, I made smaller ones, printed them on cardstock and taped them to desks.  Viola!  Problem solved and now everyone has them handy!

 

 

The following week we will dive into to our author study.  I am so excited to get this started.  I have been working so hard for the last month planning and prepping for this.  Each third grade class (there are 5 of us) will be studying a different author and then we will have a culminating celebration to share our authors with the whole grade level!  Since I have the gifted cluster class, I chose the author with the highest lexile level on the list, Roald Dahl!  I also happen to have class sets of James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory so it worked out perfectly.  My James unit is almost finished and I am so proud of how it turned out!  I am hoping to have it uploaded to TpT by the end of next week.  It will include lots of editable files also so that you can make it work for your room!

 

Our mentor sentences this week are all about vivid verbs again.  We will also do some work with those grammar rule breakers, irregular verbs, with some lessons and activities from this pack…..

 

 

 

Click on the pic above to check it out!

 

 

Our Daily 5 time this week will start with a little review of our charts and expectations.  They are getting a little wiggly and off task during this time and need a little reminder.  Does anyone else find that they have to do this every couple of months? 

During small groups this week we will do some more work with context clues using activities from….

 

 

There will be some tough vocabulary coming up in our Roald Dahl books and I want to make sure they are equipped to be word detectives! 

I will also put activities from this little pack…..

 

 

in the bucket for Read With Someone.  We will be benchmark testing in a few weeks and I still have some kiddos working on improving their fluency! 

 

In math this week, we will work some more on subtraction with regrouping.  Last year, when we were working on regrouping across a zero, one of my kiddos asked me if there was a quicker way with fewer steps.  He kept trying to explain to me what he was thinking about looking at the hundreds and tens as one unit (for example; looking at 503 as 50 tens, instead of 5 hundreds and zero tens).  I was having a hard time understanding  where he was going and following his thinking and he was getting pretty frustrated with me.  That night at the dinner table it finally clicked for me!  I called his mom who happens to be a good friend of mine and got him on the phone!  I then went online and found this video on YouTube.  I had never seen regrouping across a zero done using this strategy, but it makes so much sense.  It cuts down on a step and can also cut down on mistakes with regrouping that dreaded zero!  The kid is a genius!  Maybe you’ve already seen this and I’m just late to the party, but if just one of you hasn’t then it was worth reposting!

 

 

Workstations will still be all about the Robertson clan!  They are making my students Happy, Happy, Happy, and that makes for a happy teacher!

 

 All of the products highlighted in my plans will be 15% off for the rest of today and tomorrow!  Head on over to my TpT store to grab them and have your week planned!

Fluency Friday….and a Giveaway!

Every Friday in our room is “Fluency Friday.”  I LOVE routines and so do so many of my kiddos.  They love to know what is coming next and exactly how do it.  Our fluency routine is a great 5 minute fluency practice that we do each week.  I start teaching them the routine early in the year by introducing one thing fluent readers do each week.  That is then our focus for our practice. 
We start out on the carpet reviewing the things that fluent readers do.  We then move to our seats and get our “Fluency Folders,” out.  Our folders have our passages and our fluency graph.  The students put on their “fluency ears,” to help block out their neighbor’s voice and I time them as they read aloud for 1 minute.  As they are reading, if they come to a word they don’t know they circle it.  I walk around the room listening to them read and jotting down notes.  When I say stop, they draw a line after the last word they read.  We then talk about a few of the words that I noticed circles around and read the passage again for 1 minute.  After the second read, they count up how many words they read and I ask them 2 questions for comprehension.  The last part of our routine is their favorite!  In their folder they keep a graph where they chart each week how many words they read.  They LOVE watching the bar graph go higher each week and celebrating their hard work!
I have put together a packet of all of the things I use in my weekly fluency routine.  It includes posters with the 3 things we review each week and includes an explanation of the hand movements we use as we say them (love WBT…I will have more to say about that in another post!).  There are 2 sets of posters, one with cute little monsters that I just couldn’t resist, and another more traditional set.  Also included are the parent letter I send home, a fluency folder cover, and a few different graphs.  Not included are the actual fluency passages.  I use the ones that came with our reading series.

The “Fluency Friday,” packet is available at my TpT store here….but I am giving away  free packets to the first 2 people who comment on this post and become a follower!