Week 2 Recap

Somehow, yesterday managed to be even longer than Thursday.

My to do list also grew, which makes today a catch up day.  When I'm not working on something for school, my procrastination (besides this) will be chores around the house and errands.

We have our groups made since we start switching for math and small groups (reading) on Monday.  To help my students, I put sticky labels on their desks with where they go for AM and PM as well as what they're supposed to take.  I'm hoping it eases down on the rushing back and forth to classes because something was left behind. 

My students are great.  Talkative, but great.  Truth be told, I'd rather have a group that talks with one another then one that sits and looks blankly at each other.

Here are my Batman birthday flowers from a student:

And a Batman Powder Puff girl drawing from another:

I am a very lucky teacher :)

We've spend the second week continuing to establish norms, build community, go over the math practices, practicing good reading strategies, working on our notebooks, reading aloud Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and doing beginning of the year benchmark testing.

Here is one of our fluency lessons, focusing on phrasing:

Phrasing is a component of fluency where students read in meaningful phrases.  The goal is not to read words one at a time, but rather in chunks that aid in comprehension.  Students received a passage and put in lines to indicate where they as readers would want to pause when reading aloud.  We went over pausing at commas and stopping at punctuation marks.  We did the first paragraph together, then they worked on the rest as table teams.  When we were all done, we practiced chorally whisper reading.

The lesson comes from the CORE source book...

...which is amazing :)

We also have started this anchor chart on interesting words from our reading:

As well as this one on what good readers do:

This one on metacognition and reading strategies:

And this one on what mathematicians do: 

My classroom has lots of anchor charts :)

Week 2 is done, 9 days in.  I'm excited for all the exciting learning we have ahead of us on our academic journey :)