5 For Friday with a BIG BIG BIG Thank You!

Happy Friday (a day late!)

TGIF!!!!  Today was cloudy and rainy here!  We only made it out for recess this morning, so our afternoon was FILLED with wiggly bodies!  But we made it through!  AND do you know what helped???  Some honest person bought my spelling bundle and then bought 8 additional licenses!  WOW!!!  THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!  You have motivated me even more and am planning to start some fall and Halloween center packs tomorrow!!

Now...5 For Friday!

1.  Making Our Characters Come To Life

Today we started working on BEND 2 in the Lucy Calkins narrative writing unit.  Bend 1 focused on the how to's when you are writing a basic story.  Bend 2 seems to focus more on the craft of writing.  Kids are going to try to bring their characters to life.  Today we kicked this off by "Unfreezing" our characters.  We talked about making the characters move and talk (speech bubbles or quotation marks).  I modeled this with a basic BORING story and BASIC pictures.  The story was about our most recent fire drill.  My first page said "I heard the farm alarm."  The kids (through elbow partner discussions and some prompting from me) helped me change this to "Clang, Clang, Clang went the first alarm.  I jumped up and said "Line Up!".  The kids did great with this whole group, but I am not sure any of my writers are ready for this step in their own writing quite yet, since most of my conferences are still about watermelon/see stories and adding more details (who? what? when? where? how?), but I was impressed with how well they did fixing up my story!  Here's the start to my "Bringing Stories To Life Chart".  I will post again once I finish AND be on the lookout for my mini-chart that you can add to you students' writing folders!

2.  Reader's Celebration!  Our favorite kinds of books!

For the last 4 weeks of school we have been learning about books!  We learned how to be a book lover and not a book bully.  We learned 3 ways to read a book and how to be respectful readers.  We learned how to make "just right" book choices and we learned about sentences (how they begin, how they end, spaces between words, etc.).  We are ready to be independently looking at books!  SO what does that mean??  CELEBRATION TIME!!  Again from the  Blasting off with Reader's workshop pack, I made these SUPER cute readers!  The kids started yesterday by writing and drawing about their favorite kind of books.  

Then today we assembled our person (slightly stressful) and were ready to share!  The kids shared their person and writing with their table mates.  It went SOSOSOSo well!!!  The kids were really invested and excited about their projects.  So much so that I forgot to take pictures of their people! EEK!!  

Here is a peek at mine.  The badge says "Mrs. Bannon loves reading this much" and the hearts are glued at one end and are paper clipped at the other so the shirt can still be opened!  I LOVED this craft and will def be doing it again next year!!

3.  Apple Sentence Scramble

Last week we spent time talking about what makes up a sentence and how a sentence begins and ends.  I though during out RTI time (power block) I would have some of my medium/medium high readers work on fixing mixed up sentences.  They did great!  The hardest was "Can I have an apple?".  Almost everyone had "I can have an apple?"  They need some more practice with question marks ;)

4.  Rainbow Ride

I found this game on one of my favorite teacher blogs, Freeblicious.  Its a groups of K-2 teachers who post regularly to share items that are free!  Each month they do freebies on the first and this was one of them.  I got this last spring, but just knew it would be perfect for my firsties to use at the beginning of the year!  It's based on Chutes and Ladders, so most of the kids already knew the rules!  

Here's a picture of the kiddos playing!

5.  Currently....October

Did this Thursday night and linked up with Oh Boy in 4th Grade!