It's Friday! That means it's time for...
1. We had a Snow Day on Tuesday! It was nice to have a surprise day at home with my two girls and my two dogs. Check out Chip enjoying the snow.
2. My soon to be four year old daughter drew this picture of me. Those of you who know me would know right away it is me! So cute.
3 and 4. You know the lesson that seems so perfect you wished the principal made a surprise visit at that very moment? That happened to me twice this week.
First, we were finishing up some reading in our social studies textbook...boring. I found an activity from Rachel Lynette called Fact Swap and it's a freebie on her site.
In a nutshell, each student writes three facts. Then they walk around getting six new facts from other students. My kids were so engaged and wanted to share their new facts with me. It actually made reading the textbook fun!
The other activity was a lesson about great beginnings for a piece of writing. Each student was given a sheet with four beginning sentences all related to alligators. They had to rank them 1-4, with 1 being the most interesting beginning. Then they got together with a partner and together had to agree on the rankings.
Next I put the two kids together with another two kids...groups of four. They had to do the same thing. There were some heated debates going on in some of the groups.
In the end, we came together as a class and discussed their rankings. We never came to a whole class consensus, but it was close. Some of the kids were already talking about how they were going to change the openings to their research reports they're working on. Pat on the back for me!
5. I finally put together some foldables I have been wanting to make. The kids in my class LOVE to fold paper. We have gone through so many Post-Its this year. So naturally, they loved it when I introduced them to the informational text foldables. We used them this week and I felt the responses I read were more meaningful than when I just give them a worksheet. We'll see if it lasts.
I hope everyone has a great weekend and don't forget to "spring" forward on Saturday night.
I love that "great beginnings" activity! It's awesome that it made them look at their own writing with new eyes! I might try something along those lines this week...we're going to start writing new informative text. :)
ReplyDeleteLet me know if you need more information about the activity. I could email you a copy of what I used.
DeleteI am totally going to use the fact swap activity. That is awesome! Our social studies curriculum is so boring and this activity sounds perfect for livening it up!
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Rachel Lynette has some awesome ideas on her site. Make sure you check them out. This activity definitely made social studies a little bit more fun.
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