Five for Friday- WOOT WOOT!

Hey! Teaming with Doodle bugs for her weekly linky. Click on her button at the end of the post to check out others! Here it goes!

1) We had yet another 3 day week. Monday and Tuesday was bitter cold- wind chills hovered around -45 degrees both days. Thursday, we got a lovely snow storm that dumped 6 inches of snow during our morning commute. Spring can get here annnnnnnytime now.

(The light just turned green... I promise, I wasn't driving and trying to take this picture.)

2) We packed our 3 days though with lots of fun. We needed to wrap up our country studies project for reading. Students took all their notes and sorted them into two baggies- important notes and interesting notes. They then had to choose which of their important notes went where on their brochure. There was a "fast fact" section where they could add some of their interesting notes. We worked on this for about an hour- the were all so focused and produce really good work considering the lack of time and choppiness with this unit due to all of our 5 "cold days."

 They showed great cooperation as they looked at post-its and sorted them out.

 I loved seeing them go back in their books for inspiration on drawings as well as using the books to help them spell things correctly. 

 Some partners practiced cooperation by reading post-its to the writer. It was really neat to see how well they all worked together.

Here are some of their finished products!

 These photos are examples of all 6 panels they had to fill out in an hour. We made noticings on my example so they knew the expectations of color, neatness, sentences and talking to their audience. I created this brochure with some of my own clip art and am so glad with how it turned out! It was perfect!

 Here are some different covers.

 Some inside panels...

All in all, I'd say it was a great success. To celebrate, we did a gallery walk, read each others brochures, and left positive feedback on post-its.

3) We've been hitting parts of speech during our morning meeting message. We don't really have a chunk of time dedicated to grammar and my kiddos desperately need it. It is slow and steady, but I'm hoping this, plus continuing to do Mentor Sentences from Jivey will help my students with their writing. My amazing teammate, Kate, over at McDee's Busy Bees, introduced me to Mentor Sentences and is helping me out. She was the one who thought of working parts of speech into our morning message!

This is an example of what our morning message looks like each morning. I always have the same visuals for their morning tasks, other reminders, etc. I've been highlighting parts of speech (just one kind a day) and then we quickly name it, define it, and add examples on my giant post-its. (LOVVVVVVE GIANT POST-ITS) We have 6 as of Friday!

4) Now that our country unit is done, we are jumping into our next unit- one of my favorites: Mysteries! However, this is also a book club. I struggle with book clubs- usually because of a lack of books. However, our district readopted Teacher's College RW and WW, so we got some $$ to get more resources. My team and I divided up a ton of books and we now are ready to get into some book clubs!

 I snagged that cart from the hallway. I'm going to give it a fabulous makeover this summer!

5) Now, for probably the most exciting day! On Thursday, we launched our mystery unit with a real life mystery! We've been reading Jigsaw Jones and have been exposed to some mystery vocabulary. We created this real life mystery to reinforce some of the vocabulary and to excite our students on this new genre. Can I just say- it was SO perfect today! They loved it so much, had so much fun, and they are pumped to start mysteries. Here's a run down on how it went down:

Students saw I had donuts this morning on my desk. I told them it was for a meeting after school. After morning meeting, they left to go to STEM. The STEM teacher was in on my little scheme. When the kids came back, I told them someone took my donuts. I asked what I should do and they suggested I retrace my steps. I wrote out where I was during my prep and it clicked to them that our STEM teacher had a donut! We began to chart out our suspects, clues, and possible motives. Also, they noticed this note on the table where the donuts were. We brainstormed all the people who could be Ms. G. They brainstormed ways we could narrow them down and with some discussions, we thought we should try to get handwriting samples from them. Throughout the day, more clues and more suspects popped up. We called and questioned some of them, tiptoed around the building looking for trails of powdered sugar, investigated handwriting samples, and "dismissed suspects" that didn't fit anymore (they came up with that term). Then it was revealed through our last clue that I had just left them in the teacher's lounge!! We all went down to the lounge, and sure enough- there they were! We celebrated their hard work by having a donut and laughing about this fun mystery. Many said it was the best, day EVER!

So although it was a short week, it was a busy one! Hope you all had a great week as well!

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