Phew! Today we are so grateful we had time to catch our breath and get back to blogging. It feels great! It has been nonstop since the end of the school year, with shutting our classrooms down, math curriculum work, tutoring, and going to another awesome Smekens' workshop. On a personal note, Anne's daughter had a baby boy on July 1st. This is Anne's first grandchild. So, for her, things just got busier.
We finally put up a free TpT activity. It's called Adverb Headband Hunt. This is a game that was inspired by the popular game Hedbanz. We played this game last year with our second graders and they loved it. This coming year, we will play it again, but with our third graders. We found out at the end of the school year that we would be moving up to third grade. We are thrilled! This brings us back to our looping and multiage days where we would always switch between second and third grade curriculum.
Once again, we attended a fabulous Smekens workshop. This one was the SmekensRetreat. Once again, we recommend going. We received tons of ideas for reading and writing, up-to-date research, valuable resources, and even free give-aways! We are trying out some of these ideas this summer with the kids we are tutoring.
One of our tutoring students chose to read Cracked Classics X Marks the Spot by Tony Abbott. This book is based on the classic Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. We decided to use the familiar summary of Somebody Wanted But So Then (SWBST). This strategy was mentioned during the Teaching Visualization of the Text during the conference. We know teaching the strategy of visualization has been around forever, but at the conference, they breathe new life into old strategies. An activity to go with SWBST was called Digital Stories. We decided to incorporate that with Wixie. Here is the project.
We got more ideas from the session called Deepening Understanding with Nonfiction Notebooks. We have always used nonfiction notebooks as we've taught social studies and science, but this session had a bunch of cool ways to record informational text. On a side note, one of their resources is a book titled, I See What You Mean by S. Moline. We are planning to order and read this book this summer. In a tutoring session, we used their idea of using boxes and color codes to record, and organize information. They also showed how you use arrows to connect information. We read a nonfiction book about pirates, took notes, and then connected to our fiction. We noticed that the authors of Cracked Classics, and Treasure Island portrayed pirates in a realistic manner. They must have done research.
Next week, Kim is going to Colorado for a Steve Spangler Science Conference. Stay tuned for some new science activities, hopefully fun ones to kick off the new school year!
Happy Fourth!
Kim and Anne
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