These are my students, round 3

Our awesome counselor started an after school peer support system with our fifth graders.  Her goal is to have some of the higher students help the struggling students with organizational skills and academics.  The program is a few weeks old but our counselor is receiving lots of positive feedback from the students.  Having a peer assist them privately after school is ideal because one, it's not a teacher so they feel they can connect better without feeling frustrated and two, it's a private support system where no one has to know.  As far as the rest of the grade level is concerned, it's a homework club...which is partially true.

One of my students from my small groups was assisting another student with his fluency.  He was giving him productive feedback as we've practiced, but then privately asked our counselor this:

"Should I model first, so he can hear what good fluency is like? I've been working on my phrasing."

I love that it's ingrained in them to model a skill or strategy first so that students know what is expected.  Considering I model different skills daily, I'm glad the importance of this explicit instruction is sinking in with my students.

Another one of my girls not only made her peer mentee a homework folder to keep himself organized, but she also assigned him homework.  Yes, she found her old fluency practice passages and instructed him to read them nightly and keep track of his errors.  Furthermore, she created a survey for him about his strengths and weaknesses so she could better assist him.  She also wouldn't accept "reading" as his answer for what he was struggling with.  Oh no, she flat out told him to "be more specific". I'm not sure he appreciated it, but I sure did!

This must be what mothers feel like.  

My students are verbatim, echoing things I say on a nearly daily basis.  They are internalizing the need, as a teacher/mentor, to provide positive, concise feedback, model strategies, help with organizational structure and be reflective about one's own learning.

I've created little minions.  I couldn't be more proud that not only are they willing to help their peers, but they have productive strategies to do so.  I love that they're willing to help their peers succeed as well.  High fives for team work.

Posters

I'm pretty sure I spent my entire prep today working on anchor charts.

Here are some updated images:

Our phonics wall:

We've been working on /s/, /z/ and /ch/ sounds this week.  I'm trying to use different colors each week for our phonics skills so that students know where to look.

Here is our updated writing genres poster (Being a Writer):

We're working on narratives during this writing unit.  We also just got new writing partners, so hopefully that help our writing time.

We also are working on buddy coaching for writing and fluency:

So I made a new pink sign to guide their conversations.

Here is another chart to help them with their partner conversations:

It was created for writing but can work for other academic subjects as well.

Next, here is our sentence starters:

In fifth grade, some of our standards (RL 5.1/RI 5.1) require students to "quote accurately" and "make inferences" from literature and informational text.  We have been working on responses to literature and constructed responses, so hopefully this will help my students with their answers.

Lastly, I changed the background on my classroom blog:

It's polka dots :)

CUPS

One of the few strategies I picked up during my first year of teaching was CUPS.  This is a strategy for editing and revising in writing.  I have students go through the editing process with looking for capitals, usage/grammar, punctuation and spelling.

I have them re-read their drafts and use the anchor charts we co-create to look for these common errors.

I have them use colored pencils for the editing and revising, which makes the writing process much more exciting!