Parent Teacher Conferences

Parent Teacher Conferences today - and I've been up since roughly 2:30 this morning. That makes for a lovely combination, doesn't it? More like a toxic one! 

So what's a gal to do when she can't sleep? How about a little personal Professional Development? 

This first one, I have no idea what I was looking at that gave me this idea. I think it was turning over of my mind from yesterday's Grade Level PLC where we talked about how to step up the rigor. My students have Reading Journals. I've tried, at the end of the week, to have them do some writing about our story from our anthology, or to complete a graphic organizer. Last night, I got to thinking, why don't I have them write every day - or at least more often? I was thinking that on Mondays, I could have them write a prediction on our story. Maybe on Wednesday, I could have them write a short bit about their favorite part, or something that would tie into our comprehension strategy for the week. I don't know for sure, it's a work in progress, but I like this idea. 

Second, I ended up at Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits and she had a nice post about teaching phonics, which led me to different places on her blog, and in the midst of that, I saw some little books she had made. Each one of the little books focuses on one set of phonics skills - like Y says i {we just did this recently}. And I was thinking that this might be something that I could make into class books. My thought was I could do the first page, and student could do their own page. I might even make this a bit competitive - I have some little 8x8 photo albums. I don't know how many pages are in each one, but I could say that the best - say, 10 get in the book! I'd love to have my kids practice reading sentences that have phonics that we just learned. {OK, that's a terrible sentence!}

Now I've got to run so I won't be late for conferences! Happy Thursday. Hoping I can stay awake and alert all dang day!

Five for... 10/25

 

Five for..... whatever day it is!

1 - Work day yesterday!

That's a Happy dance for any teacher. My district probably comes out pretty good, because it's really only a half day, but a lot of us stay past. I got a lot done - grades entered, my file box emptied, a little room straightening, and sorting some books for my mentee. Am I the only one -- I feel like I'm moving and grooving for the first two-plus hours. Then I look at the clock and I only have an hour left, and whoosh! It's gone in a minute.

2 - I have these four little friends - their reading skills are low, low, low. And I had this thought. I was thinking about how my daughter learned to read - we read fun books that she picked together. OK, I read, or her dad read. So on Fridays, or the last day of the week, I gather my 4 little friends, and we read something fun. I read to them. No expectations of them reading. We look at the pictures, and talk about them. Yesterday, we read about Bats. And we looked in the table of contents, and only read the things we were interested in. It's probably naughty. But I want to bring some joy in reading to these little friends.

3 - This turned out pretty good - 

and I'll admit, I totally stole this idea from some anonymous person {anonymous, because I don't remember who}. 

They are little spiders with our phonics pattern from last week. I assigned one of the double consonants to buddies and they made a list of words that had those letters. I checked the words for spelling, and then gave them the parts to make spiders. If I do it again, I'll probably make the legs a little thinner. I like how my little friend in the top picture gave her spider 8 eyes. Making it realistic! Of course, these are a couple of the better ones. I had a couple that looked like spiders that had been stepped on. :)

4 -

I'm trying reading journals this year, sometimes with a little help from Deanna Jump, like here. We were looking at main idea and details about thunderstorms. It's so funny, they enjoy the coloring part so much, but we can't do that until our reading block is done. You know how that goes.

5 - We started this book

and I found that owls are rather fascinating. I'm hoping we can get through the rest of the book and then try to draw an owl and label it's talons, ears and some other parts. 

Hoping you are enjoying your weekend. I'm thinking mine's going to be a lazy one!