Happy Friday friends! It’s a teacher work day for us today! Woohoo! Let’s kick this weekend off with Five for Friday, hosted by Doodle Bugs Teaching!
So last week I wrote my plans. Then at the beginning of this week, I thought “Oh wait! It’s Groundhog’s Day this week.” Then, of course, I totally forgot about it! In I walk on Thursday morning and “Oh shoot!” Totally forgot. So, I ran to the copy machine and printed off our Groundhog’s Day passage set. Phew! We didn’t get any cute crafts done but we did learn about it and watched the groundhog video. Boom!
These past few weeks, we have been working hard on asking and answering questions with literature. We have come a long way! I use the anchor above as a way to organize our thinking. We build it together and then refer to it for our entire unit. This week, we started working with question webs. I really like to use a web because it requires some deeper thinking then just a straight question and answer page. It helps me to get an insight on if they are using their schema and if they are inferring. They are required to come up with possible answers to their question before deciding on their final answer. This strategy comes from Debbie Miller’s Reading with Meaning.
We started Black History Month early, because really it should be taught all year. I have my students use our Black History Quick Reads as an independent center during our reading workshop time. Here, this kiddo is reading about Abraham Lincoln and slavery. He is writing facts from the text. These are really great as independent tasks and they are leveled so all students can access them.
This week, we also posted our brand new expansion pack to our Freedom’s Hero pack! These are levels J-M and are a continuation of our A-I pack. These are fantastic for guided reading but you can easily use them whole group, which is what I did with the Groundhog’s Day passages 🙂
Each week we do a STEM challenge. This week, we completed Brook Brown’s House of Cards activity from her February STEM pack. This was a huge hit! I love doing these STEM activities each week. The kiddos are getting so creative and they are using all that they learn with each task and building upon it for each new activity. I love seeing them so engaged and interested in a task. Their conversations are so interesting and I love the way they work together! If you are looking for some STEM activities, I highly recommend this one!
