A Hodgepodge of Activities

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Good Snowy Morning!  The snow is really coming down here today so we will have the perfect setting for our snowflake similes and winter poems activities we are planning for next week.

This past week and next week we are doing a hodgepodge of activities to try and wrap up our social studies, guided reading, and math units.  Here are a few things we did this past week.

We listened to the story Pearl and Wagner Two Good Friends by Kate McMullan from our reading series.  This is one of the cuter stories in our series and went along perfectly with our science fair kickoff.  We decided this was an ideal story to review the very challenging skill of comparing and contrasting.  As we were reading the story to prepare for our lesson, we realized that we could easily compare and contrast the two main characters.  This was easy for us, but not so much for the students. We had to guided them through with our questioning.  Hopefully when we compare and contrast two winter poems next week, the students will have a bit more of an understanding of this concept.

As a follow-up activity, the students will partner read Pearl and Wagner Two Good Friends by Kate McMullan and do an extended response on Monday.  This is one of our free activities that you can find at our teacherspayteachers store.

The kids are getting "squirrely" as our winter break approaches, so we decided to do a favorite word study activity by Pat Cunningham.  The activity is called Does It Look Right? and we used it to solidify some long o spelling patterns. To begin, we spelled a word with three different long o patterns and the students needed to decide which spelling looked right and record it on their record sheets.  Then, they looked it up in the dictionary. The first person to find the word got to spell it to the class.  The kids have turned this into a race and have loved the competition.

Teacher's Sheet

Student Sheet

This week the perfect Aims  lesson came through Kim's Bloglovin' feed.  It mirrored a lesson we do in Everyday Math.  It is a hands-on math lesson that provides students with a concrete, real-world way to add two-digit numbers together.  It was also a fun way for students to count back change.  It's worth checking out if you have time.

Finally, we thought we would share a fun winter craft we are doing with the students.  It is a wreath made from sandwich baggies, a wire hanger, and a ribbon.  This is a gift they take home to their parents.  We have been making them for years and they are always well received.   The students manipulate a wire hanger into the shape of a circle, and then they tie on about 150 sandwich baggies.  When they are finished you just need to tie a ribbon around the top of the hanger.  This is  a great way to get them to learn how to tie.  Most kids get the hang of it after a few tries.

One more week to go before winter break!  We are planning to take a few weeks off from blogging to  to spend time with our friends and families over the holiday season.  We will also be working on lessons to gear up for the new year.  You may see some of them on our teacherspayteachers store.

Happy Holidays!
Kim and Anne

Revising and Themes

Saturday, December 7, 2013

We had a successful and productive first week back from our Thanksgiving break.  We had one of our best lessons in writing. A revising lesson that we have done for years, took on a life of its own and turned into a lesson on the writing process. The lesson comes from the book, 6+1 Traits of Writing  by Ruth Culham. In the planned lesson, students are instructed to make something out of clay. That is the only direction they get. As they are creating, we are recording comments and questions they have. After ten minutes, time is up. Then, they have two minutes to add something to their creations. After those two minutes, they have two more minutes to take something away. Finally, they are told to change something about their creations. When this is done, students title their creations, and then give each other feedback. This was the best part!

Usually, we just focus on the connection between adding, taking away, and changing their creations to revising in the writing process. But, this year, through our dialogue about their conversations, we ended up making connections to the whole writing process, especially the importance giving specific feedback during peer conferencing. It was such a success, and for life of us, we can't figure out how we couldn't see this connection before!

The following day, we had students revise a piece of writing that they had been working on during writer's workshop.

We again talked about theme in guided reading. Once we finished Unlovable by Dan Yaccarino, we tied in the target skill of story structure to help us find the theme of the story. The students then had to write what the theme was and provide evidence from the story to support their ideas. This activity is another extension that we are planning on adding to our Unlovable  lesson plan on our teachers pay teachers store over winter break.

Good luck with your holiday shopping these next few weeks! We know this can be a crazy, hectic time of year!

Kim and Anne