Five for Friday {November 22}

Happy, happy Friday!!

One extra week of teaching before Thanksgiving means one less week after!  Not a bad trade-off.  It feels so great knowing that, when we come back after Thanksgiving, we'll only have three weeks before Christmas Break!  Crazy!  But, so FUN!

Anyway, I'm linking up with Doodlebugs for Five for Friday...seems like these posts are the only ones I can get around to lately!

1. I love me a good graphic organizer.  My reading group this week completed this bubble map after reading a story about a picnic.

2. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by moving onto our second writing unit.  My kiddos are sweet as can be and learning so much, but I just didn't feel they were ready to be writing personal narrative books independently yet.  So, we began writing a book together, as a whole class, this week.  I chose a topic that we all have experienced, and we worked together all week.

Last week, our school held an event called "Donuts with Dudes".  Students brought their favorite "dude" for donuts before school in the morning.  We used the Story Hand from Deedee and Deanna's writing unit to plan out our story.

 

We completed one page each day, and will finish it up next week.  I am so glad that I've taken the time to do this as a class.  I'm hoping it will really help my kiddos know what to do when they get to writing their own.

 

My kids have gotten SO good at drawing very detailed pictures.

3. We've been working on "Thankful Journals" this week.  As a class, we've come up with something each day that we are all thankful for.  Yesterday, the student I selected said that he was thankful for school and everyone agreed!  I've really enjoyed doing this with my class this year.  It was a last-minute decision, but one that I plan to do for years to come.

 You can find this journal for free HERE.

 4. I was adding this week's words to my word wall today when I was reminded how much I love the tip that Kim Adsit gave at her conference that I attended in the Spring.  She said that she uses different colors for the words on her word wall.  It just serves as one more visual for students that might need it.  They can learn to distinguish the words by color for some added support.  My kids could learn that "a" is green, "am" is lavender, etc.

 

 I went through my word wall words over the summer and put them together in a document that separated them by color.  Click here to grab it if you'd like!  We follow the Scott Foresman Reading Street language arts curriculum, so it aligns to that.

5. A sweet note from one of my littles at the end of the day today.  The perfect way to start the weekend!

Two days of school next week!!  Enjoy your weekend!!