Another Busy Week!

I made it through another BUSY week!  This week was the start of my new online ipad class, a flu clinic at work ( for the kids and us too!),  2 professional developments on our new writing curriculum, and finished my Friday with the longest ride to my parents summer house EVER!  Thank goodness there is a long weekend here and now!  Read on to see what we were up to this week...



1.  Partner Reading

Now that we have finished learning Horton read books independently I wanted to teach the kids how to read books with a partner.  I like kids to either read to themselves or to a partner during one of their literacy stations each day. However partner reading can be tough to manage if kids are not sure of the expectations- especially since I am working with small guided reading groups  during this time. I am using the second pack from Kim Adsit called Powerful Partnerships. This week we focused on how to look at books with a partner. Each day we practiced one item on the chart. 
I made this chart to help kids know who their  reading buddy is. I took the pictures off to be able to put it online, but you get the idea. I used Velcro to attach the pictures so I can switch the partners easily. 
Next week we are going to be learning how to talk to our partners about books! They are loving this so far!!

2.  Lucy's Writing - personal narrative bend 2


We only had three days of writing this week due to two professional development afternoons ( but the training a were on scoring our kiddos writing so that was helpful!). During those lessons we continued to work on bringing our stories to life. The kids did great with a second day talking about making the characters talk and move. Speech bubbles are invading our writing!!  At the end of the week we sang "the itsy bitsy spider" and talked about how the song tells us every little thing the spider did. We then tried to do this with our stories. It was hard, but we are working on it!  


Next week brings 2 more lessons with strategies to bring our stories to life, but because for once I'm ahead!!, I have the mini poster up now in my store. I plan to bundle them once I have all the narrative posters done!

Take a look!  Find it HERE

3.  Fire Safety


This week was fire safety week. The firsties at my school don't have a visit from the firemen, but I tried to mix in some friendly fire safety reminders. We did fire safety themed abc order practice and sentence scramble. Then on Friday the kiddos made cupcake for a teacher's fire safety craft. They were SUPER easy for the kids to make and they loved them!  

4.  Complements of 10

As you all know the Common Core expects first graders to be fluent with math facts to 10 (that means no fingers to help!) by the end of the year.  We did assess the kiddos to see who knows their facts to 5 (Kindergarten standard) and are starting RTI groups with the results next week.  In the meantime, we are moving on to find all the ways to make 10!  Here are two activities we did this week to kick it off (More to games to come next week!)

This picture shows a rainbow that when colored (any color) will help kids see the combinations of 10.  This helped some kids, but some just really enjoyed the coloring :).  

Then all my students got 10 Unifix cubes in a stick.  Their job was to break the cubes into 2 piles and figure out what the two numbers that made 10 were.  The recording sheets were differentiated to make the activity accessible for all learners.  

5.  Phonics Packs - Coming Soon!

I was away for the last 2 days, so I had wanted to be able to share my first phonics pack as #5, but it's not QUITE done yet.  Hopefully by tomorrow night, but definitely by Wednesday!  I will have 3 packs coming out this week with ready-to-use phonics practice pages - pack #1:  lowercase handwriting pack #2:  CVC words and pack #3:  words with digraphs (ch, th, wh, sh, and ck).

Have a great week teachers!  

A Teacher Mom!

No comments:

Post a Comment