Five for Friday

I'm doing 5 for Friday after my downer post yesterday - gotta think about the positive!

I did my {unintentionally on my part} emergency DRA testing last week. Some of my higher kids either didn't pass or barely passed. So this week, we were reading what I considered a rather blah story during Guided Reading {our district requires that we follow the Journeys curriculum}. Anyway, these little guys were retelling and asking each other questions and really acting like they knew the story. So I said something to them - and they told me the reason why was because the story was interesting {?What??} and they could talk to each other about it, so that helped them remember. Ah, that I can understand. And really, if you think about real world collaborations - talking is how we figure things out a lot of times. So that makes me feel good about all the times I have them stop and talk to a partner while we're reading our story for the week.

To go along with that - this week, I gave the kids sticky notes before we started our story - 



and asked them to write a question that could probably be answered as we read the story. It was fun to watch how interested they were - especially when they got to read their question to the class and we'd discuss the answer.

To go along with that, during guided reading, after we had read their story, I gave them a sticky note and asked them to write a question for the other kids in their group to try to answer. The best part of that was when I asked the child with the question - did that answer your question and they would say no - we'd have to keep digging.

I had this grandiose plan to encourage better writing from my kids, following some ideas from Sugar and Spice but I think I was rushing a bit and my kids didn't get it, so I stopped and regrouped {yeah, me, sometimes I'm not smart enough to do that!} So they each had a magazine - Ranger Rick - and they had to do simple research on their animal. Then they were to write about where the animal lived, what it looked like, something the animal does, and something unusual about the animal. Then, I had them find a picture of their animal and put it on a powerpoint slide. And then - oral presentations - with their animal picture showing on the slide behind them. They turned out pretty good, so yeah there!

 

I made a cute little poster/sign thing for my blog. I just love being creative - especially when I like how it turns out!

If you've got some good stuff to share, you can link up!