Brain Dump...

First of all, I would like to apologize to all of the Reading Street teachers out there.  I intended to keep posting all of my documents throughout the year, but this is like my first year of teaching all over again.  Except this time, I know what I've done in the past, and I am being my own biggest critic and worst enemy.  :)  So, again, I am sorry! This school-year has been a LOT more difficult than I anticipated.  Thanks for sticking with me throughout this really transitional time of my life.  As you are about to see, I am making use of all of the wonderfully creative ideas out there on the web, because I haven't had the time to reinvent the wheel this year! :)

Anyway... this post is basically a hodgepodge.  I am piled under a ton of stuff on my desk, but I wanted to take a quick minute to update you all on some of our recent classroom happenings. Please excuse my crummy Droid-tastic photos!  :)

We just started our new unit on Communities...so we made this Pinterest-inspired flip book.

We learned about how exciting, strong verbs make our writing more exciting and vivid, so I taught a highly condensed version of The Teacher Wife's verb packet.  We brainstormed verbs and created a web, they made action heroes, and we took a few "boring" verbs and found more vivid synonyms before writing.

We did a little mini-version of Abby's Mystery Box lesson too... and the kids loved it!

We talked about how our prior knowledge or schema works a lot like a file cabinet.  Thank you Debbie Miller for helping me access my students' knowledge about penguins prior to reading Penguin Chick.

We also just wrapped up our Pumpkin Book Reports!  I used Hope King's bundle... and it was super cute and organized.  :)  The only setback?  Trying to store 48 pumpkins between my room and my teamie's room.  If you aren't afraid of a little pumpkin encroachment, I highly recommend this project!  With 48 kiddos, there were soooo many cute pumpkins.  Here's a sampling!