I'm BAAACCCKKKK! With a Little Five for Friday, Too!

Oh boy! I just looked at the date on my last post and cringed.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind! I thought I'd stop by and share some of the things we've been up to during the past three weeks of school! And I'm linking up with Five for Friday to do it! (I'm very exclamation point happy tonight... Probably because it's Friday!)

We have been launching the Daily 5 in our classroom! I've been using Daily 5 for several years now and I just LOVE it. My students have already been building stamina for Read to Self, Work on Writing, and Read to Someone. I wanted to recognize students who were making good choices in Read to Self, so I put their photos on one of our anchor charts!

Next week, I'll introduce our Word Work choices. I wanted to be able to easily rotate our materials in each bin out as my students move into more advanced materials. I used to have bins labeled with a photo of the game or puzzle. This year, I made numbered tags for each bin, and a poster with matching number tags. Each tag has a clear adhesive pocket next to it that holds a 4x6" photo. Those will house pictures of what's in each bin, and I figure they'll be uber-easy to change out as materials change!

(Love the FREE posters from A Year of Many Firsts!)

As part of our community building unit, we've done a lot of work with rules and how to deal with different types of scenarios. We made this chart (again, a big shout out to A Year of Many Firsts):

We also read Julia Cook's The Worst Day of My Life Ever and Tattle Tongue, as well as Have You Filled a Bucket Today? and The Recess Queen. We role-played scenarios and talked about how bucket fillers would handle the situations. We have award-winning actors on our hands! :)
 
My kiddos made mathematicians from Amy Lemons' "Let's Get Started" packet... Aren't they just too cute?!

This year, we really focused on launching the math workshop. We previously used Everyday Math but are now moving to a more workshop-based format aligned to the Common Core, and to get students to be more independent problem solvers and mathematicians, we worked on several skills, such as building stamina for math games, how to work as partners, and what mathematicians do when they're through solving a problem.

Well, I'm off to have a late dinner and head to bed... We're off to Disney on Ice in the morning! Good night!