Five for Friday

The week is finally over and Spring Break has officially begun! I think I was either too excited about the break or too busy to remember to take more pictures. But here we go anyway!

Monday is our Starting Arts rotation. We've been through theater, dance, music, and are now on art. Our most recent arts project is creating a color wheel using watercolors to mix the colors. 

We also planted seeds this week! Of course, I did some poor planning here because our rye grass seeds will probably end up sprouting and growing over the break. Oops...

I've made it a goal of mine to try to create bright and colorful anchor charts that I can laminate and hold to for future use. Some anchor charts are based on ones I see on Pinterest while others just come straight from my head. We talked about compound words this week so of course, an anchor chart was needed!

Since I am out of classroom pictures for this week, I will share this awesome dinner I had on Thursday during our weekly dinner dates. Softshell crab sliders! I believe that's a whole crab in each slider! Absolutely delicious!

I'll leave you all with a picture of our family pup, Snap. We adopted him last August and he's brought a lot of excitement into this household since then. We've been told he's a shih-tzu/terrier mix. More research online makes us believe he might be a Jacktzu (Jack Russell Terrier mix). I just created an instagram for him so follow him if you want to see more pictures of this awesome and cute dog!

Well friends, it's time for Spring Break to officially begin. It will start with a Vegas trip with the boyfriend for three nights (Sun-Wed). Can't wait! :D

Five for Funday

I tried to make the Five for Friday post on Friday, I swear! Unfortunately things got in the way and I didn't get home on Friday until almost 10! Then I tried for Saturday (had all the pictures uploaded for the post), but didn't get to writing either because I was out all day. And it's Sunday now, but I can finally sit down and write about week! Good because I'm spending some quality time away from schoolwork, but bad because it's making it hard to get back into blogging!

Ok, enough of my blabbing, time to Five for Sunday (or Funday!)

Last week's phonics focus was on "ar". Besides blending some "ar" words, we also did an "ar" word sort.

Last week's comprehension skill was on inference. Since it was the week of April Fools, I thought riddles would nicely tie into the week. What better skill to practice than inferring when it comes to solving riddles?

We ended the week by writing our own riddles about ourselves and having our classmates guess (I mean infer) using the sentence frames to see if they were correct!

Can you guess this one?

Math is all about place value right now. This week was focused on comparing two-digit numbers. I've always used the "Allie the alligator" method with my students in the past. However, during my district's summer institute this year, I learned a different little trick involving drawing dots and connecting them to create the greater than and less than symbols. It made so much more sense so I tried it out and it definitely worked!

We also started our opinion writing unit this week. I base my lessons off of Lucy Calkins Units of Study for writing. The opinion unit starts off with writing about our collections. The kids brought in collections from home, judged them fairly, and chose a winner. Then they had to write about the winner and state reasons for it winning. By the end of the week, we were self-editing our writing to see if we had 5 star+ writing. It's been so much fun watching all my students become more independent and taking more ownership of their writing! I also really love this writing rubric. I was a freebie on TpT! The pack also comes with a rubric for informative and narrative writing, which I will definitely use next year!

With all our time filled with some other activities, I was able to slip a short and simple art lesson in. The students were given a simple template and asked to turn it into a creature hatching from an Easter egg. There were some sample outlines that I displayed on the projector (a minion was one of them so plenty of students drew that), but some students went above and beyond and created there own!

Finally, I will end with some not so nice and nice pictures of food.

Found this lovely friend inside my mussell. I think it's a tiny crab?

A yummy chocolate tart!

The weekend is almost over, but I hope you all had a good one! Happy Easter and have a wonderful Spring Break for those of you who are lucky to have it already. I still have to wait another week. Hopefully I can make it through! :)

Five for Friday: Parent-Teacher Conference Week

The This week was parent-teacher conference week! That means a full week of extra early minimum days (11:20am dismissal) and around 1.5 hours of daily whole group instruction! Yet somehow, we still got quite a bit done (language arts-wise, of course). So on to Five for Friday!

My school has a partnership with a non-profit organization called Starting Arts which brings arts education to schools. Our class meets once a week with a Starting Arts instructor and goes through four different art rotations. Our first rotation was theater. The kids learned some acting skills and practiced being performers and audience members. Our current rotation is dance. The kids have been learning some stretches and dance moves. 

On Wednesday, I took the day off (but came back for conferences!) to attend my boyfriend's swearing-in ceremony. He is now a corrections officer! So proud of him, yet also not sure what to think of what might be ahead of him in his new career. 

One of the many things we did for Language Arts this week, learning and practicing sight words! We read the word, spell the word out loud, write the word in the air, write it on our whiteboards, and write a sentence using the sight word. Whew! Tons of activities!

We also talked about plural nouns and the rules for adding -s and -es. 

Despite the weird schedule, one thing we kept consistent for the week was Daily Five. I normally assign kids to their Daily Five rotations for the day. On Friday, though, we had a short time for Daily Five due to some morning ceremonies, so that kids were given the freedom to choose their own Daily Five rotation. Boy, were they delighted!

And that concludes my week! All but one (a no-show) parent conference are done and now my files can go back in the cabinet!

Now, to just make it through the two days before Thanksgiving break! (Wishing I was back at my old school right now, because we got the whole week off there!)