A Peek at My Week...

There's a new linky party in town! Mrs. Laffin's Laughings is hosting a A Peek at my Week in which bloggers get a chance to link up and give everyone a peek at their week either inside or outside of school.

Today, we continue with the first twenty days of launching reading and writing workshops. We discussed ways to choose books and why writer's write. In social studies, we drew pictures of how we see the world without looking at any maps! In Social Studies the rest of the week we're going to be discussing geography all week - landforms, geographic features, physical features, part of a map, etc.

Tomorrow, we continue launching reading and writing workshops. We're discussing "Just Right Books" tomorrow and performing the Goldilocks test to see if a book is "Just Right." During reading time and intervention, I'm also pulling kids and working through The Reading and Writing's Project's Reading Assessment's to try and find my student's actual "Just Right" level. If you need any reading assessment tools from A - Z Columbia offers them for free on their website! You can find multiple passages, score guides, and directions here. It can be a little overwhelming but it's worth it!

In writing we're going to generate ideas for writing by reading the picture book, I'm in Charge of Celebrations. My students are "heart mapped out" by fifth grade and need a fresh approach to gather ideas. We read about how we can "celebrate" different events - event the simplest things in our lives can be celebrated and written about. The book also has connections to our Native American unit in Social Studies so it's a perfect cross curricular tie in - plus they've NEVER seen it before! YESSS!

Our first trip the library! I hope the librarian is ready for us! We're going as a team this year - so we're bringing two classes together. Bonding at it's finest :) We also get to pass out our new reading logs today and discuss our expectations that students should be reading at least 20 minutes a night for homework per a new district wide policy. If you would like your own infographic, you can snag the PDF by visiting the High-Tech Teacher's Blog.

Thursday begins our wrap up of our launching units. I'm reviewing our workshop procedures and having students get into reading and writing! I've downloaded and printed Jivey's Sticky Note Thinking bookmarks and we're going to practice this strategy together as we start our discussion on reading is thinking on Thursday! You can grab her amazing bookmarks and check out the post by visiting Ideas by Jivey: Sticky Note Training. I just love sticky notes!

The students are going to write an on demand personal essay as a benchmark piece before our unit. We're still working out the structure but we're going to make sure it's set up so that students are not "stressed" out by this "essay" format. We want them to be successful but still see that they have room for improvements. They wrote one essay in fourth grade at the very end of the year. In reading, we have some time scheduled for silent reading and the all important discussion on what "reading looks like" in our classroom. We're also taking our very first spelling test and passing out study guides for our first geography quiz next week! Whew! Can't wait to start digging into our personal essay unit in writing and character unit in reading next week!!!

What's your week look like?