Five for Friday

I'm back for another Five for Friday post! :D

We started our Legends unit this week. The kiddos are currently "researching" legends by reading various legends and looking for certain components in the legends.

Can you see where this research is leading us to?

If you guessed, writing our own legends then you are correct!

We are going to be publishing our legends into a hardcover book, just like the Cinderella stories I did when I taught second grade! So exciting!

We've already brainstormed ideas for our legends....

...chosen our topics...

...and brainstormed characters and their traits.

 Next week will be all about the writing of the story itself! I'm excited to see what the kids come up with!

This week was my favorite week of teaching math so far...because I was teaching strategies for adding three-digit numbers!

I also absolutely LOVE interactive notebooks! If you haven't tried it out yet, you should definitely give it a go! We have Math and ELA notebooks. Interestingly enough, I use the two notebooks very differently. Maybe I should write about it some time! :)

Just FYI, I use Blair Turner's 3rd Grade Interactive Math Notebook for my class. It's great! Check it out!

Is anybody else tired of benchmark assessments yet??

This is my first year of doing DRAs (I used Fountas & Pinnell at my last school). Deadline for scores are next Wednesday. I have two English classes so I have 47 students to test. I only have 2 hours and 40 mins of instruction time with each class every day. Where do you fit in the testing?? I have no idea...

This Sunday is the Mid-Autumn Festival that's celebrated in Asia. My school is Mandarin-immersion, plus the third grade classes have been learning about the moon with their Mandarin teachers. Of course, that means we should be celebrating the festival! Got some mooncakes and other treats from a parent as a result. :)

Okay, I'm EXHAUSTED. Two more weeks until Fall Break! I cannot wait!!!

Five for Friday

Friends...I'm EXHAUSTED! Aren't short weeks supposed to be a breeze??

Guess not when there's a whole bunch of learning happening every day! Which means it's time for...

Omg...I can't tell you what a great feeling it was to know that I had extra day to sleep in! Especially since my body apparently needs a day to realize that sleeping in is okay so I typically only get to sleep in on Sundays. My body naturally wakes up around alarm time on Saturdays. Makes me so sad...

Anyways, Monday was spent having lunch with my colleagues from my first school back in Oakland. Also meant I got to go back and visit college stomping grounds. We've been getting some intense heat this week in California so that only meant I had to go get me some froyo!

Orange creamiscle, yum yum!

Speaking of my school in Oakland...look what I found in my current teaching neighbor's room. 

See that name..."Thornhill"?? That's the name of my school in Oakland!!! Of course, I had to ask my colleague where the box came from. Turns out she got the box from a coworker in her previous district whose husband worked as a music teacher in Oakland. I didn't recognize the name but still...such a small world! Also a sign that this school was meant to be.

So after hearing all these bloggers rave about Stitch Fix, I finally decided to give it a try. I am SO not a fashionista, let alone clothes shopping. I basically buy all my clothes at Old Navy so I was very interested to see what I would end up with. 

Here is the style card that I got with my package.

After trying everything on, I ended up keeping two of the clothing articles, the cropped pants and the cardigan.

Fun experience overall, but way out of my budget to continue on a monthly basis. But I am definitely up to get another fix maybe like six months later! Haha.

Okay, I suppose I should talk some school now. We had our first "Art in Action" session this week. This whole program is new to me, but it looks like a great program, especially because the parents do the teaching! 

Our first lesson was on Van Gogh's "Starry Night". The students look at the brush strokes, talked about depth and perspective, and then recreated their own version of the masterpiece.

 Pretty cool! Looking forward to all other future art sessions!

Math this week has been all about mental math strategies. Practicing mental math means I get to do my favorite math activity...number talks!

I absolutely LOVE number talks because I love to see the different ways students visual the problem. I learn so much from them this way! I told my students that I was not taught to think out of the box when I was learning math in elementary school. That just wasn't the focus then. They are so lucky that the focus has changed now and that they are given more freedom to look at numbers in different ways without being told to stick to one specific method. It's not about the answer, my friends. What's important is the journey to the answer!

After looking over homework writing from the last two weeks, I quickly realized that we need a refresher on paragraph writing. Never was quite sure how to approach it but thank goodness I stumbled upon Mrs. Prince and Co's entry on stoplight paragraphs!

First we talked about the different features of a paragraph and relating each part to a light on the stoplight.

We recently compared two different articles on creating acorn food products in our Ohlone unit. It only made sense in my head for us to write a class paragraph about it. What a difficult task to complete but the students all felt SO accomplished when we were done!

Since I teacher ELA to two classes, I decided that one class would come up with a comparing paragraph while the other class came up with a contrasting paragraph!

After creating our paragraphs I rewrote the sentences on color coordinated sentence strips (didn't have red so substituted with pink). Then we pieced all the sentence strips together, making sure all the words fit on our "paper".

Next week, the kids are going to write their own paragraphs using the colored strips. Can't wait to see their stoplight paragraph puzzles! 

So way more happened in the classroom than what was mentioned, but I forgot to take pictures! I have even remembered to bring my camera to school, but never actually take it out! I need to remind myself to start taking more pics so I also make myself blog more often!

But for now, I will end with a picture of my new staff id. Officially a staff member of College Park Elementary! But, oh, my hair! @@

Five for Friday - Back to School Style!

Hello friends! Boy, that whole week of blogging really took something out of me because I went MIA for two weeks!!!

But I'm back today for some Five for Friday action! 

I'm hoping that I will be able to get back into the blogging mode soon!

This Five for Friday is all about Back to School since that's what I've been working on these last two weeks.

Monday and Tuesday was all about supplies shopping! On Monday I hit Office Depot, Staples, Walmart, and Target. On Tuesday I went to teacher specialty stores. Let's just say, don't ever do major shopping all in two days. You will definitely feel the money impact right away. But it's all worth it of course!

Since I have two classes rotating through my room every day, desks have to be shared between two students, which also means less desk space for each kid. I used to do pencil boxes in the past but with this new scenario, I decided to try pencil pouches instead since they can just fit nicely on top of each kid's stack on their side of the desk. Hopefully this idea works!

Some creating happened this week!

Pinterest inspired. Love these frames from Ikea!

Always need to create something on Vistaprint! Made myself a new tote bag, a notebook for student notes, magnets with my school and contact info to give out at Back to School Night, and another mousepad for the classroom.

Binder clip labels for the students' mailboxes! This was also Pinterest/blog inspired. Since I have two classes I decided to go for a bird "theme". My homeroom class will be the owls while my other class will be the birds. So things around the classroom are labeled by owls or birds to differentiate which class it belongs to. I've already created the owl labels which can be downloaded for free in my TpT store. Needed bird ones so I decided to go ahead and make them!

I printed the labels on cardstock and just taped them on the binder clips. Halfway through, I realized I should've printed the labels on those Avery® White Full-Sheet Labels (affiliate link), cut them out, and directly stick them onto the binder clips to keep them from falling off. Oh well, next year!

Just a look at the owl ones in action. 

Who else purchased tons of products during the TpT Back to School sale????

Yep, the shopping didn't end with physical stores!

Online shopping had to happen too!

Below are some of my purchases. Click on the images to check them out on TpT!

Posters

 

ELA Interactive Notebooks

     

For Homework

  

      

Quite a haul since this is my first year teaching third. 

I can't wait to use them all!

Since I am new to the district this year, I had to attend the district's new teacher orientation. 

Meet all the district people, along with our union who provided us lunch and gave us these goodie bags with supplies and awesome merchant discount cards.

Orientation was also the time for me to pick up my work laptop. 

Are you ready to see what it is?

What for it...

A giant chunky Dell! 

Now I don't know about you, but I was a PC user before I started teaching. 

Once I began teaching I slowly got converted to a Mac user because everything was Mac. Even bought myself a Macbook Air this summer.

Four years of teaching later and apparently I am back to using a PC. Have to start remembering how to navigate through Windows again!

The main reason I've been MIA for so long is that I've been working hard in my classroom and getting it ready for school!

I spent the entire last week moving into my new classroom and getting it set up. 

It is ALMOST ready for a classroom reveal (still some decorating left to do!) but it definitely has to be ready by Wednesday since that's when school starts!

I will have a classroom reveal post next week.

Here's a sneak peek for now!

Alright, it's my last weekend before school officially starts!

Have to make it worthwhile! :D