Five for Friday - Two Week's Worth

I missed last week's Five for Friday due to jetting off right after work for a baseball game that didn't end until 11pm! So I'm combining these past two weeks into this Five for Friday post. That's okay, right? ;)

Earth Day was last week! When Earth day comes around, I HAVE to make my coffee filter Earths. They always turn out some awesome! I love the fact that everyone's Earth looks different.

Writing template from A Cupcake for the Teacher

We have also been working on opinion writing. Last week, to follow the theme of Earth Day and recycling, we tried to convince our readers why they should recycle.  After going through the writing process, the kiddos got to "publish" their writing in their "published" book. Remember seeing those blank books in the Target dollar section? Yep, those are the books! We pick a final draft from each writing unit and put it in our "published" books. Also becomes the perfect writing portfolio too.

This week's opinion writing was about our favorite pizza. I love the reasons this student gives for liking pepperoni and bacon so I just had to share.

Template from There's No Place Like Second Grade

Oh, the logic of a first grader. Didn't burst her bubble about the truth behind bacon coming from pigs. She can learn about that at another time. 

Continuing on last week's activities...We read 10 Things I Can Do to Help My World. After reading, the students brainstormed their own ideas on things they can do to help the world. Then we made a book about it. One of the ideas listed in the book we read was to reuse recyclables. So it only made sense if our own books were made out of recyclables too, tissue boxes!

Want to learn how to make a tissue box book? Learn from Mary at Teacher Treasures!

We had some special guests arrive after school last Friday...painted lady caterpillars! These little critters have only been with us for a week and they have already grown so big! I hope they don't turn into chrysalises over the weekend!

Day of arrival

Four days later.

Six days later. They grow so fast!

We also started working on our Mother's Day gift this week. I absolutely loved how our toilet paper roll frames turned out last year so I'm doing it again this year! The students helped me with painting the toilet paper rolls. I need to spray paint the frames and cut the toilet paper rolls this weekend so that we can put it all together next week. 

I can't believe it's already May! This month is going to go by so fast! Not only that, Open House is in two weeks and I haven't even started planning for that yet! Feeling the stress level rising as I speak (type)! Friends who are on the same boat, we can do it! :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! :)

Cinderella Unit - The Story Planning

[So trying to wrap up the week before Spring Break got in the way of finishing this post! Oops!]

Alright, on to part two!!! Cinderella story planning!!

(If you are just visiting, it might be helpful to visit my previous post to learn about all the research we did to get ourselves ready for this step.)

So now that everyone has read at least seven or eight versions of Cinderella, the students had a pretty good grasp of what a typical Cinderella storyline compromises of. With all that in mind, it was time to start planning our own Cinderella stories!

To get the kids started with their planning, I made a story planner book for them to put all their ideas in.

The book itself consisted of some pages I pulled from The Sweetest Things's 3 Week ELA Unit: Cinderella Around the World. Those pages included some character trait worksheets for the big characters in Cinderella. 

However, instead of having the students fill this out for the characters in the original story, I told them to use these pages as planning for their characters in their cinderella story. So what you see above is one students' thoughts about he/she wanted his/her Cinderella character to be like. They did the same for the evil character, the royalty, and the magical helper. I tried to use more generic terms to encourage the students to be more creative and not necessarily stick with a evil stepmom, a prince, and a fairy godmother.

After brainstorming ideas for each character, the next page was for sketching their characters. Many of the students wanted to describe the appearance of their characters so this was the perfect venue for that. They also had to sketch the setting of their story too.

There are a couple of other pages in the book that aren't displayed. The two not displayed were worksheets about point of view and role reversal (what if Cinderella was a Cinder Fella?). 

The point of view worksheet gave me the opportunity to do a lesson on point of view with the kids. They were told they could decide which point of view to write their story in. Of course, everyone did it in third person omniscient, which is expected. :)

The boys were especially happy with the role reversal worksheet since they realized they didn't have to make Cinderella a girl. In fact, once I mentioned that Cinderella doesn't even have to be a human, that really got the kids excited. In the end, I think at least half of my class made their Cinderella an animal (cats were very popular).

The first half the the planning book consisted of more directed planning. Once we reach the halfway point, there was less direction and more freedom with the planning. I provided a list of questions gathered from some other Cinderella/fairy tale related resources to get the kids thinking about ideas for their stories. Blank lined paper was given after this list for the kids to jot their ideas down on.

As you can see, some kids really went crazy with ideas.

Once all the ideas had jotted down, it was FINALLY time to start mapping out the story. But of course, we had to first talk about the elements of a story and the story arc.

Before telling the kids about the story arc, I had them first fill out a basic story map that they were familiar with (we used it during our fiction story writing in the beginning of the year). This at least helped them break their story down into three parts. 

Then, we talked about the story arc

I also found a great bulletin board set on literary elements that used Cinderella as its example. It was super helpful with all this planning, especially when talking about the story arc. 

Once we talked about that in detail, the kids filled out their own story arc map...

...and off they went! They were told that the expectation was to write a five paragraph story (one of the paragraphs being a descriptive paragraph that describes one of the characters). I broke down each paragraph for them to give them somewhat a guideline to follow.

With all that said, the kids were let loose to start their writing. We had been practicing writing informational paragraphs prior to this, so I simply used the same paragraph graphic organizers for their story planning.

Every time they finished a paragraph, they were required to go back and revise and check with a correcting pen (blue ink). During Writer's Workshop time, I would also go around and conference with students and add my own comments too (in pink). It's nearly impossible to get through all 26 student during 50 minute periods so I would also take the planners home to read so that everyone would get timely feedback.

Just had to show just how into the planning some kids got. Once the entire planning was done, I had many students with paragraph planners that looked like this, which I honestly think is great! It shows they are really thinking about their story and looking to see how they can make it better.

By the way, I do have to mention that this whole planning process took around 1.5 weeks so it was definitely not done in a short amount of time. Some students also had to take their planners home to finish planning so that they would stay on schedule.

And another long post has been completed. However, we are still not done with the Cinderella stories yet! This is only the rough draft! Guess you'll have to come back another day to read part three. :)