Read and Write 180-Day 82/83

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

I.can’t.catch.up. 🙂

Short recap of what we’ve done yesterday and today.

Writing-Finished our research for our reindeer(caribou) reports. Did the outline today, and they are actually having to write the report tonight for homework. This is what I’m going to change for next year. I’m going to extend the time that we devote to this report. I started out good and took baby steps with them for the research part. BUT-time got away from me so I zipped through the outline with them today (and my afternoon class REALLY suffered because we took them outside after lunch since it was in the 70s yesterday and today)! I think I would actually need to devote about 3 full weeks to this writing project for the research, outline, rough draft, editing, and final copy. Live and learn. I will also make sure we finish it BEFORE the week before Christmas break! But let me tell you what we did yesterday with our final research that they liked and I liked!!! I had 3 stations that I rotated them through. 2 of the stations had copies of articles, and the 3rd station had encyclopedias. Since I had guided them through the process of highlighting info and taking notes from articles, they got to do these stations by themselves. They had about 10 minutes at each station. You should have heard them reading (some were reading out loud) the articles/encyclopedias and getting excited about new facts AND thinking about what they were reading!!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!! Here are a few pictures:

We finished making our Christmas cards for the military personnel who have been injured and cannot come home for the holidays to be with their families. Here is a picture of our finished products!

Here we are with our cards:

We practiced our readers theater script today-we will be performing it Friday in our classroom. I read it with them today so they could hear fluent reading! 🙂

We made Christmas ornaments for them to take home and put on their family trees. They turned out so so so cute!

We didn’t put up a Christmas tree in our classroom-I know, I know-I’m a BAD TEACHER! Time got away again!! 🙂 But my homeroom class made this ADORABLE “book tree” today. One student called it “The Tree of Knowledge” to which I responded that some people don’t seem to partake of it too often! 🙂

 Of course I got this cute idea from pinterest.com.

Good night! 🙂