High Fives for Friday!

It's time for another wonderful installment of Five for Friday brought to us by the wonderful and talented Doodle Bugs Teaching! This week was a complete whirlwind. It seemed like we had so much to do and so little time to squeeze it all in to meet some of our time tables... but somehow, I actually stayed almost on schedule. Here's a peek at the highlights: 

We've been working on Mentor Sentences. My students are loving grammar! They also really love the great names they get to come up with and the their own sentences that get put on the Grammar Rocks Wall of Fame! This week studied adjective modifying adjective hypens but I haven't laminated our sentence yet.... the laminator was down! But here are some student all-stars from our Serial Comma Wall of Fame.

We've been focusing in on character all week in reading! Students are noticing how complex characters can be! We talked about how characters have "layers" and students found "opposites" of a previous character trait and posted them on the Jot Lot this week to prove that characters go through changes in a story. Look at this rock star student citing the page number! Love it when they follow directions!

Students also used stronger word choice as we wrote about characters in reading writing thanks to Joanne's at Head over Heels for Teaching's interactive character analysis posters! Students did a great job choosing higher level character traits from Rules and citing evidence. They are now choosing some of these traits for their character essays which they are writing about their book club characters!

I ended up with two of these as gifts this week... I noticed now there are necklaces as well as bracelets. So far these are more crafty and fun than out of hand like the silly bands. Plus, only the girls are wearing them at our school right now. And they don't seem to be as big of a distraction since you don't need to take them off to see what "shape" they make. Evidently, I still need a star-burst design to complete the "the look."

A clean desk saves my sanity... it was worth staying after a little longer on a Friday to get everything in order and cleaned up. It's like a breath of fresh air!

Does anyone else tidy up before the weekend?