The Daily Five Second Edition and Free Printables

I've been spending some time this weekend getting ready for the first week of school (T-minus four days people!) and what I want to teach and how I want to teach it. The beginning of the school year is so critical in getting procedures and routines in place. I feel like there's a small window of time to get the structure I want in my classroom so I like to be very thoughtful in how I go about implementing things. 

I'm recommitting myself to implementing The Daily Five this year and spent some time this summer reading the second edition of the book. 

I've poured over Pinterest and found a lot of great information through some book studies as well. There are so many great resources out there that so many wonderful teachers have put together. 

I finally convinced a friend of mine to join Instagram and Teachers Pay Teachers and they have some great printable posters for your Daily Five room in their store for free! 

Check them out here!

I am excited about these because once I teach the students the basics with all of my anchor charts, I run out of room to put the chart paper posters and my reading bulletin board isn't that big. These printables will be perfect for my size wall. I printed them out and laminated them and am excited about them going up on the wall after I introduce the information.

If you're an Instagramer, take a minute to follow my friend. Lots of flash freebies and giveaways happening on there.  

Glitter Text @ Glitterfy.com

Author's Purpose PIE!

If you're like me, you're counting down the days until the end of the school year. We are currently at 13 days! I have made sure to keep this information to myself and not share it with my students however. We are still hard at work learning concepts and reviewing and I don't want them to get any ideas that they can pull back just yet.

Today I'm going to share with you a great activity my class worked on for reviewing author's purpose with a fun craftivity from Deb at Crafting Connections.

Deb has put together a meaningful activity for 2nd and 3rd graders to review the different parts of author's purpose and I tried it out with my class for her Classroom Tested series!

My kiddos and I have been talking about author's purpose each week this school year as we read in our anthology and with any text that comes our way. Some of the kiddos were still getting stuck on "to persuade" so I pulled examples of the three different types of text. We reviewed the texts and the students wrote what they thought the author's purpose was for each on their whiteboards.

Next, we moved on to Deb's Author's Purpose Activity- PIE Version! We reviewed the definitions of persuade, inform, and entertain once again and the students got to work on writing the definitions in their own words on the inside of the pie. As they were working they were buzzing about whether their pie was pumpkin, cherry, chocolate and more.

The students then worked with a partner to read three examples of text on the inside of the pie. They needed to decide what the author's purpose was for each text. It was great hearing them justify their answers. I don't know how many times I've said this year, "What's your evidence? Prove it to your teacher!" It seems to be paying off!

After they were done with the writing, they glued the pie crust on top over the correct part of the text. Next, they used their crayons to color the crust making sure I could still read their answers. Some of the students even colored the top edges of their crust darker brown because "the crust usually burns the fastest." Future chefs maybe?

This activity is a great review for students and a fun way to put their learning to paper. If you're interested in winning this activity for free, head over to Deb's blog and enter to win it for free! If you're an upper elementary teacher Deb has this available for the older kiddos too. 

Whenever your last day of school may be, I hope your end of the year wraps up smoothly and that you get some time to enjoy your family and friends this summer!

Glitter Text @ Glitterfy.com

Focus

I fully intended to listen to a lot of my little ones read with expression today as part of their fluency folders. I managed to get through three today. Three! Here's why...

Me: Student A, you're my next victim, come on back.

Student A: Victim? Haha. One time my dad and I missed the bus by his work so we had to hop on a bike and try to make it to the bus stop to catch up. We were on the same bike, a double bike and flying down the street trying to catch up.

Me: ...O.K...(wondering why a double bike happened to be outside his dad's work but wanting to get going on the reading passage). So today we are going to read and I'm going to listen to your expression.

Student A: We didn't make it to the first bus stop, so we went to the second bus stop. We didn't make it to the second bus stop in time so went to the third.

Me: Sounds like quite an adventure. Let's go ahead and read and then you can tell me the rest at recess.

Student A: O.K.

Me: Ready? Read. (I flip over the timer).

Student A: (Reading) It was almost time for the school science fair...(stops reading). Hey! Yesterday I wasn't here because I had a stomach ache. It went away but it was almost the end of school so I just stayed home. I feel better today.

Me: (Turns the timer on its side to stop it. Smiles.).

Student A: I'm going to have a little brother soon. Then my little brother is going to be a big brother and I'm going to be a bigger brother to my baby brother. And my baby brother will have two older brothers. We don't know when my mom is going to have the baby. She says she isn't going to make it to March 8th. We have a field trip on March 8th so I hope it's not that day.

We ended up getting through the passage, but it kind of went on that way with my other two "victims" as well. I love that they want to share their stories, byt focus, my friends, focus! Oh to crawl in their minds for a minute. What a party that would be.

Penguins and Valentine's Day

Here's to hoping this short week isn't one of the dreadfully long short weeks! Y'all know what I'm talking about. 

This week my class is knee deep in a penguin unit. Hopefully I'll remember to take some pictures of some of our activities. Penguins are always fun to teach about! Speaking of penguins, here's a little penguin clipart I made. Snatch it up for free by right clicking and save it if you want. 

I pulled out my February files this past weekend to purge the things I've had in there for the past six years and have never used. I swear I do it every year, but for some reason it never seems like it the following year. I'm not really sure how that happens. 

Anyway, I came across the Valentine's Day pages I made last year so I added a Valentine's Day mini language arts pack to my TPT Store. It has five pages of Valentine's Day activities such as: ABC Order, Compound Words, Reading Comprehension, and more. Check it out for only a little over a dollar!

If you're interested in the mini language arts pack leave me a comment. I'll give the first two commenters the pack for free. 

Happy Tuesday!

Reading Beads and Candy!

This year I decided to use reading beads in my classroom a la The Teacher Wife. The kids (and adults who've come into my classroom) have been really excited about the dog tags and earning beads for reading at home. For every 100 minutes read they get to pick out a bead. 

I have some little friends who have made goals for themselves at home for how many minutes they want to read for the month. The parents, and their teacher, are pretty jazzed about this. To keep up the momentum, and because it's almost Halloween, I taped some Smarties to the back of their dog tags this month. 

If they meet their goal for reading minutes, they get the Smarties. You could also use cute erasers, stickers, etc. Well...let me tell you...you'd think there was a $100 dollar bill taped to the necklace because they are super excited. 

I picked up some fun beads with letters on them so they can pick out their initials and such, but that's a future carrot to dangle. 

[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]