Five for Friday: WHAT A WEEK!

What an awesome week!!! Linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for another episode of Five for Friday!

We have been working super SUPER hard this week on our writing. Our current unit is writing in response to literature. This week we practiced with the short passage in the writing books, but then also with our mentor reading text Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens. I LOVE this book! It's such a wonderful text that can be used across grade levels to teach characters and character development, sequence and retelling, and also central message or theme. I know my kiddos will be prepared and ready for 4th grade's writing expectations! Quick tip, it takes a little while but I love to type up passages, excerpts, or the mentor text in it's entirety so students can have their own copy of the text to annotate and refer to. 

I saw a post from Teaching in Room 6 a few weeks ago and fell in love with how she used Tagxedo in her classroom with theme. We have used Tagxedo when writing about main idea and details but I just knew we had to use it for our study on central message this week. The students used the picture book Mr. Peabody's Apples by Madonna and wrote short response paragraphs about the central message or lesson in the text using key details from the story as evidence to support their answers. IT WENT GREAT! When they were done they created their Tagxedo pieces in the shape of an apple and printed them for display! 

Besides all of our awesome reading and writing this week we also studied geometry! My students are officially quadrilateral experts. We ended our week with one of my favorite cooperative activities where students take on the roll of teacher and create anchor charts (they love this) identifying the critical information about a concept. Typically I have them present these to the class and pretend to be teachers a little longer, but I decided to switch it up. The anchor charts were posted around the room and the groups rotated around critiquing each other's posters using the "I NOTICED.... AND I WONDERED...." methods. Such a success! 

" I noticed they created a web to share their information. I like this."

"I wonder why they chose to leave out some of the attributes. I think those are important." 

And on Fridays we take selfies! Wandered around the room to facilitate this adventure and just had to stop for some group shots and quick selfies for our end of the year video!

The husband and I went on another one of our planned date outings last week. We did a walkabout or progressive dinner. We started at one location for a small bite, and worked our way around the block or neighborhood, visiting several locations throughout the evening. It was rather interesting. We also enjoyed Monday (President's Day) off from school. Such a nice extra day to get work, errands, and time with our boys in.