Five For Friday

It’s the best time of the week…Friday and Doodle Bugs Teaching linky party!  I’m so excited to share my week with all of you, especially what I’ve been up to just today!

We are moving right along with our long vowel focus during phonics.  We did a lot of practice with building, blending, and writing long i words through different activities.  Even with the snow day, we were able to write our long i words like pros towards the middle of the week!  I’m trying to have my first graders work more independently so they were able to build their words with partners this week instead of as a whole group.  They are growing up before my eyes!  So proud of these little tadpoles.

Wow was skip counting a difficult skill this week!  We moved and grooved to this song on School Tube that I mentioned on the blog earlier this week.  We also found Koo Koo Kangaroo’s Skip Counting song to help us count by those tricky 2’s!  I don’t know what I’d do without those brilliant minds!  We used a lot of connecting cubes, counters, and student volunteers to act out skip counting for us.  By the end of the week we could skip count in our sleep!  Wahoo!

This week we spent a lot of time studying informational texts, specifically text and graphic features.  This little cutie did an amazing job creating a diagram of a turtle.  She added her own labels and completed it without any help.  I was even more proud when I saw her informational chapter book in writing workshop had a diagram page for her “All About Soccer,” book!  We are crushing those cross curricular connections in Room 11!  Score!

 I am so honored to be a part of the Teacher-Leader group through Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project.  I met my group today for the first time and it was such a wonderful experience!  I am so excited to be able to share my experience as a writing workshop teacher with other educators who also love this way of instruction!  It’s so inspiring to meet with fellow educators from across the state and find amazing ideas amongst each other!  My favorite time was during our share where we each presented a little “literary gift” with each other that we use in our classrooms.   Here are a few examples of what some people brought.  I’ll go more in depth about these meetings in a later post.