Five for Friday & a Freebie!

January 29, 2017

Happy Weekend! I thought it might never get here!!! I know it’s Saturday, but it seems like a good time to recap the week, so I am linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching for a Five for Friday post.

It was Literacy Week this week. It was the first week of common assessments, the 100th day of school, the week that a district walkthrough was scheduled, and probably 300 other things that I am forgetting because I am so tired from this long week.

Back to Literacy Week. Our fire marshal is REALLY strict. We aren’t allowed to hang anything from the ceiling and we are very limited in what we have in our classrooms and how much paper we have on the walls. So… this was the first time our school has ever had a “door decorating” event. It was very exciting. People came up with super-cute ideas… I will share some photos in another post later this week.

As the cute doors started going up I realized that my “stick something up on the door at the last minute” idea wasn’t really going to cut it. I am not very artsy and this stuff is hard for me. I was happy with the way my door turned out. I thought it was “super-cute” (ha-ha). It was absolutely “Pinterest inspired” but I actually put my own little spin on it and got it put together on my own. Shocking, I know… no one was more surprised than me!

This week was our math common assessment. We have had math strategies coming out of our ears. The little graph pictured above really helped inspire a lot of great math conversations. We work on a word problem each day (which isn’t pictured… not sure why… sorry). When the students finish the problem of the day they put their name on a post-it under the strategy they chose. Then, they move on to the “bonus questions” (which are pictured). Once everyone has had a chance to work on the problem of the day we discuss which strategy was chosen by the most people today (which strategy “won”) and why we think so many people chose this strategy. Then everyone explains to a math partner how they worked out the problem and why. It seems to be helping the students to analyze what they are doing and make more conscious math decisions. I have also noticed that they are able to describe their thinking in mathematical terms much more easily after only a week or two… So far, this is proving to be a valuable addition of our math instruction!

Thursday was the 100th Day of School. The years I have taught kindergarten and first grade the 100th day was a really, really big deal! However, we had district testing (my least favorite thing in the world) on Thursday… and I have been SO tired and overwhelmed and worn out this year. I really couldn’t see how I was going to make anything extra or anything special (especially anything extra special!) happen on Thursday afternoon.

Pinterest to the rescue! I “sold” the kids on the idea that we would leave the 100th day celebration to the “little kids” 😉 in kindergarten and first grade and since we are such grown up second graders we would have our own special day on the 101st day of school. (Which also happened to be a Friday and I can make myself do almost anything on Friday.)

So, we made Dalmatian shirts and ears. (There was a huge debate over floppy vs. attentive, straight up puppy ears. I had no energy to partake in the debate. You will notice a variety of ears… We’ll call it self expression or creativity or something that sounds better than I was too tired to care about puppy ears…)

We played lots of math games, wrote 101 things that are special about us and called it a day. Whew.

Actually, we had a surprise tornado drill before calling it a day because that’s the kind of week it was. (About 20 minutes before dismissal on Friday afternoon… after the longest week ever).

My 9 year old twins would like to make a public statement that they are available for autographs… in fact, Danny has even been practicing his cursive just in case (how cute is that?) Yesterday was an exciting day for the boys. They were invited to the ABC Action News studio to be interviewed for a news segment called “Positively Tampa Bay”. They were part of a 3 minute segment about the Young Eagles program.

It was SO much fun and everyone at the news studio really went out of their way to make the boys feel special. I will explain more about Young Eagles next week. It is an AMAZING program that introduces kids to aviation by teaching them about flying and giving them FREE flights!

It didn’t hurt that the boys were interviewed on the MORNING news… so they had to miss a few hours of school. Their class watched their segment live. So, when they returned to school their whole class started clapping when they entered. They said that was the “best part”. SO SWEET.

One of the things I loved about this week, was my annual jump start to Black History month. Every year I find that my students are very moved when they begin learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a little “extra” unit that means so much to so many students. They get the incredible significance of the difference that this one person made on all of our lives. I have always felt like it is the perfect “jumping off” point for a Black History month unit. There were so many other inspirational leaders in the civil rights movement at the same time as Dr. King. It only makes sense to keep telling students the historical story that they are curious about.

So… this week we moved from Dr. King to Rosa Parks. Next week we will learn about Ruby Bridges. I just love teaching my students about “ordinary people” who made “extraordinary changes” in our world. It just fills me up. (Especially on a week like this week when I am exhausted and don’t feel like doing anything extra. This doesn’t feel like extra… this feels like the “good stuff”… the “why I became a teacher” stuff.)

Please download this FREEBIE if you would like to kick off your Black History Month instruction with an introduction to Rosa Parks! It is includes a reading passage that is written on three different levels of text and vocabulary complexity levels so the differentiation is done for you! It will work great for students from grades1-4. It also includes text dependent questions and writing prompts… the whole lesson is ready to go 🙂