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!

Visual Plans 11-4 {FREEBIES Included!}

It’s Sunday so that means I am linking up to share my plans for the week.

 

 

I also have a confession.  I am an over planner.  Every week I plan way more than it would ever be possible to get to.  So, when you peek at my plans if you see things that are still on there from last week, that’s why.  Well, that and we had reading benchmark testing last week and math benchmark testing this week.  I never know how long it is going to take my kiddos to complete these so I plan just in case!

 

This week in ELA we are combining our ELA with our science.  I LOVE when it works out that we can “double dip,” and get science done during our ELA time!  We will be reading some passages about plant life cycles that our science curriculum department wrote for us.  My team made a foldable that we will complete and then students will choose 2 plant life cycles to compare/contrast.  I will post pics of the foldable (and the parts to make it) later this week!  I want to make sure it works as planned first!

 

 

To prepare for writing the compare/contrast paragraph about plants, we will use one of the activities from my Compare and Contrast pack on TpT.  This pack has reading passages as well as writing activities to practice the skill.

 

Also included in my visual plans is our “Be a Ten Sentence Challenge.”  I have used this activity every Thursday in my classroom for over 7 years.  I love that they are working on so many skills all at once!  Download the visual plans and then you can click on the link to grab it for FREE!!!  It is an editable version too so that you can change the sentence rules weekly to fit the skills you are working on!

 

 

Math will be light this week as we review and prepare for our benchmark testing.  My kiddos will be so excited to see that they Duck Dynasty Math Centers will finally be in our math workstations!  They have been waiting patiently (if patient is asking me every day when they will be in there ) for weeks to do these! 

 

 

Here’s hoping that testing this week goes as smoothly as it did last! 

 Happy Sunday everyone!

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.