Anchor Charts Updates

It's Monday and my to grade pile is looming at a good three inches high.  We had our first unit test for reading last week and well at 8 pages per test and close to eighty exams to grade...I'm happily procrastinating with blogging :)

Here are some updated anchor charts from my classroom:

Our writing ideas poster:

This goes along with Being a Writer. My students are absolutely loving writing time.  There is so much freedom during the first unit and my students are feeling like real writers.

Here is our finalized verbs chart:

They're still working on linking verbs but have a good grasp on helping verbs!

Here is another chart for our small group reading notebooks:

It's helpful to have one place to remind students of my expectations for them.

Lastly, I decided to show some collegiate love for my undergraduate alma mater, Arizona State University:

(yes, there's also a Deathly Hallows icon in the window).

Our school is rather close to UNLV, where I earned my masters, so there is a lot of hype surrounding the Rebels.  To balance this out, I wanted to have some ASU love too :)

Verbs

My students did a great job with helping verbs yesterday:

Today's mini-lesson of linking verbs didn't go as great as I wanted, but linking verbs with conditions are a tricky concept for adults sometimes, so I shouldn't expect my students to master this concept on day one (even though I have some brilliant munchkins!).

Tomorrow and Friday we are doing a formative writing task, so our verbs mini-lessons will need to continue next week!

Verbs

One of our fifth grade standards is working with the three types of verbs: action, helping and linking.  Obviously this is too much for a single day of writing instruction, so we broke it up into 3 different days of instruction.

Yesterday, we worked on action verbs because that's what students are most familiar with:

Today, we worked on helping verbs:

One of my awesome coworkers found this helping verbs song to the tune of Jingle Bells:

My students are having so much fun with our mini-lessons on language :)  After our lessons, they revise their own work and are sharing their published pieces.  I really like that our Being a Writer  unit has built in time for students to share their work with others.

I'll post more pictures after our anchor chart is done :)