Just dropping in quickly to share my visual plans.  I only write the ELA plans for our grade level, and Rayann writes the math plans.  I don't have her math plans to share, but I'll post them as soon as I get them.  I've been asked what my students do during small groups.  They are either pulled by another teacher for a small group or they do the daily 5 rotation.  I don't put that stuff in my plans, so that's why you don't see it below. With Halloween this week, we decided to take a break from the basal to do all things BATS!  I love Halloween!  I can't wait to do Abby's Candy Corn Bandit  on Thursday.  It was a huge hit last year.  We will also be having witches' brew and putrid punch that afternoon. We use What the Teacher Wants' recipe for the witches' brew.  She has a super cute freebie for it!  Check it out by clicking on the pic below. You can get the punch recipe by clicking {HERE} . And to see the original idea...
Hello, sweet friends!  We are on fall break this week, so I am curled up on the couch with my coffee doing one of my favorite things-blogging!  I have missed it the last few weeks.  I wanted to share some things with you I have been working on this year.  I have always kept some form of a data notebook with all of my students' various data.  We have a sixth grade teacher at our school who went to individual student portfolios last year and she had great results from it.  So, I decided to do something similar with my students this year.   My focus was more on students tracking their own data.  It makes them accountable for their learning and gives them a great visual for where they are and where they want to go.  I must say, this has been a great tool for my second graders.  This is the first year they get grades on their report card so it's hard for them to understand how they work.  This tool has made it all make sense for them and most importantly, it's made them car...
I am back from my little huge blogging break.  I want to apologize for not keeping this little blog up lately.  I promise to post more for you all!  To celebrate fall and to have an excuse to get away from the basal, we decided to take a week to review and do it with apples!  I love this time of year!  And so do the kiddos! We did a little KWL activity to get us started.  I got the KWL for the students and lots of other activities  I used from Cara at First Grade Parade . Here are a few of the books we used throughout the week.  We used Amelia Bedelia to work on multiple meaning words. We labeled apples. For Johnny Appleseed's birthday, we devoted our day to him.  We did a directed drawing of Johnny Appleseed and attached our author's purpose flap book to the bottom.  They are now begging to do these all the time! (original idea) We found the author's purpose of another story, too, and made these little hats to wear for ...
Hello all!  Isn't the beginning of the school year just crazy?!  Has it always been this crazy?!  This post is going to be a little long, because I feel like I have so much to catch up on!  And I am using way too many exclamation points!!!  Anyway..... Common Core really emphasizes digging deeper into the text.  It's very hard to motivate students to do just that.  It's a lot of work!  This year, I decided to really push the fact that they have to be reading detectives.   I thought this little book was great for teaching what detectives do in a fun and relatable way for them.  We brainstormed what detectives do after reading the story. I knew they had to have something that made them feel like a detective.  Last year, I made little badges for the different skills, but I found these super cute hat templates online for free!  I just cut out the hat image and attached it to a sentence strip.  You can find them {HERE} .  Such a cute little resource and the kids...