Five for Friday: 30th birthday, Cynthia Lord, and much more!

I had to link up with Five for Friday this week because it's been a very busy week around here! We've had a lot going on...hence the delay in blogging this week. So here's a quick recap of my eventful week of festivities!

This week I celebrated my 30th birthday! It was a big birthday and it happened to fall on Columbus Day. I was happy to have the day off work. I spent the day with my mom at the zoo. I also got to celebrate at the Melting Pot (Yum) and then have some chocolate cake! 

Cynthia Lord came to our school again this year! I think I was just as excited as the students! She does such a great job with the kids. The students love interacting with her! We learned that in Russian the title of Rules is "Keep Your Pants on in the Aquarium"... We also learned she'll have a new book coming out next year, Half a Chance. However,  best part was that she Facebooked our team after the presentation and personally thanked two of our students for writing the introduction and conclusion to the presentation - what a wonderful person and author! It made our students' day! 

This week we studied theme.... Students used Rules as the mentor text and then found themes in their own book club novels. We learned from Rules that friends should like us for who we are and that sometimes it's okay to break the rules...especially if it's rules we create to keep others from getting to know us! We also started using Nicole Shelby's Reading Interactive Notebook for theme - two thumbs WAY UP!

We launched our Northeast unit this week...or attempted too! We got our unit started but we didn't get very far on our train tour! Students did create words for our word wall - look at this cute picture for population density! 

I was able to get some new nonfiction resources to share between the language arts and social studies department at our school. Our curriculum leader just dropped these off - our district really is so amazing! Right now, we only have one set but hopefully maybe next year we can get a few more because these books from National Geographic are absolutely amazing. Can National Geographic do no wrong? I can't wait to use them and share them out!

 

.... What a week!