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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Wordless Wednesday - 5/14 - Teacher friend fun?

Linking up with Miss DeCarbo for another Wordless Wednesday!
 
This past weekend, one of my best teacher friends across the hall and I ran the Ft. Lauderdale Color Run. When we aren't swamped at work, we enjoy running together. The Color Run was more fun than I expected and MUCH more fun than running a half marathon...believe me!
What do you and your teacher friends enjoy doing together outside of school?

Be sure to check back with Christina and many more wonderful teachers here!

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Wordless Wednesday - 5/7/14 - Cafeteria Reward

Linking up with Christina at Miss DeCarbo's Second Grade Sugar & Spice for another Wordless Wednesday!


The cafeteria is definitely not a place where I want to hang out. It is L-O-U-D, LOUD! Administration at my school uses red, yellow, and green cups to promote good behavior in the same way that we do in the classroom. Luckily, my kiddos are always on green when I come pick them up. The classes who are on green all week, receive ice pops the following Tuesday. Here we are chowing down in the tiny bit of Florida shade!
What does your school do to control cafeteria expectations/behavior/rewards?

Friday, May 2, 2014

Five for Friday - 5/2/14

Linking up again with Doodle Bugs Teaching for another Five for Friday post from this week!


We've been working like BIG KID readers on our rainforest close reading passages. We are hard core highlighters and text evidence-finders! These close reads have also been a hit in my TpT store which is great news to me!
I just recently started having my students lead the questioning part of small group on the second or third day of our close read. They love acting like the teacher and are even using my sayings while they are in charge...."Are you sure that's the main idea? I think it's a little too specific." Cracks me up!
This would be my lovely yoga-teaching, karate-black-belt, marathon-running mother. I managed to snap a picture when she was embarrassed and showing me her Mom's Dance. Yes, Mom's Dance. She is taking dance classes at my brother's hip hop studio. The class is all moms, and they will all be performing a Michael Jackson song at the recital in June. I don't know what else to say other than, oh.my.word! Can't wait to see that! HA.
My kiddos and I have found the best math game for counting coins. Need to give kids practice with trading coins for other coins? Want some competition? Make sure you check it out here. Instant hit!
This afternoon I got all dolled up in one of my dresses that requires dry cleaning (eeekkk!). More details to come in the future!

Enjoy the weekend!

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Informational Writing - Red Eyed Tree Frog

We've been working on informational writing for the past week or so, and today I taught a mini lesson. Here is the process in images...

First, we read a big book called Red-Eyed Tree Frog. Then, we decided to write about it! I created this chart with the kiddos. As I wrote, they tried to guess what words I was about to write and chanted them out loud. They thought it was hilarious...although I'm not quite sure why... 
Gotta love 6 & 7 year olds!
I picked a few students to write example sentences on Post Its for each part of an informational writing piece: introduction, key details, and closure. They then came up and put their Post Its on the chart.
We read all of the Post Its and talked about why some were "super duper" and why others needed a tiny bit of fixing. Then we put them in order. Other volunteers came up to write those Post It sentences onto our chart paper. We used different colors to color code our paragraph into three parts. These parts matched our anchor chart.
 Believe me. Give a scented marker to a kid, and BAM instant hard work!
 And of course I needed some form of assessment at the end of the day, so my students completed an informational writing piece about the red eyed tree frog. Here is one piece of hard, hard, hard work. I'm so proud of them!
Grab this writing freebie here!

And of course, we had to make some little frogs to match! This craft was made using this free printable tree frog from Learn Create Love.

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This writing assignment is part of our unit on the rainforest. We practiced close reading using these passages while we learned about the different forest layers.
At the end of the week, my students were asked to write about the emergent layer. I explained the importance of looking back to our anchor chart to make sure that all three parts (intro, details, conclusion) of their writing were included. Two samples of students at different levels are shown below. Click here to see a preview of this rainforest unit!




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