Five for Friday!

Let’s kick this holiday weekend off right! We are linking up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching for a little five for Friday fun!!

Have you ever read a book that has just hooked your kiddos? A favorite that they just read over and over again? The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg was that book for us this week! We are currently reading the books that are up for the children’s choice award. We rotate them through the primary classrooms so the kiddos can hear them. Well, one day we didn’t have one so I pulled out The Stranger. Let me tell you…these kiddos spent the ENTIRE week trying to figure out WHO this stranger was. I heard everything from a Shepard to a farmer to a cousin. They were rotating this book trying to guess who he was and why they thought that. It was AWESOME! You know…a lot of times I wonder, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME????? Then they get a book like this and all the stuff we have been working on just pours out of their mouths. AH-MAZING!

When we started our TPT and blogging adventure we really wanted to create products that WE needed. We figured if we need them at our school, then other people might need them too. We work at a very different school…we have a very high population of English Language Learners and also a very high population of low income families. This means we have a wide range of reading levels in our classroom. We wanted our kiddos to be able to ALL read the same story but at their own level. That way when we had a discussion they ALL had information to share. This led us to our passage sets.

These kiddos are all working on the same passage, all about George Washington, but the levels of the text are different. Each set we have has passages like this, at level A to I. I LOVE to use these in groups, like the picture, but I have also used them for assessments and whole class discussions. Plus, the text dependent questions are all the same. So the kiddos can answer them no matter what level of passage they have.

Here are our February passage sets…

We also have winter themes and polar animals. We hope that everyone that uses them finds them as helpful as we do.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! For us, the kiddos are off tomorrow and then we are all off Monday and Tuesday. Let’s hope for some rest and a re-charge!