The Long and Short of It...

I hope everyone enjoyed their Labor Day weekend!  I don't know about you, but my long 3-day weekend turned out to be super short!  It just flew by in the blink of an eye!  :)  As much as I would LOVE just one more day at home with the mister, I AM looking forward to lots of learning this week with my kiddos!

Since we had an in-service day last week, I wrapped up activities with my students last Thursday.  We spent the day delving into writing and working on the four types of sentences.  It's always amazing to me that, of all things, punctuation seems to be totally absent at the beginning of third grade.  Ever single year.  It's like it goes on vacation... just like the book.  I am SO glad that our pacing guide and curriculum addresses punctuation, sentences, subjects and predicates first-thing, because it's always something I want to clean up and set high expectations for right away!

This year, I suppose you could say, I got by with a little help from my friends.  I used a few things from Amy Lemons' Strengthen Your Sentences pack.  We did a quick review in THIRD GRADE with her pocket book.  I had them label the pockets with "Question" and "Statement" since that's what they are expected to learn.  We constructed our pockets a little differently than Amy did with her kiddos, but I really like the way they turned out.  I had the students read each sentence strip before cutting them out, and they held up a giant question mark or period to show me what they thought the punctuation should be in each sentence.  Then they added the punctuation to each slip, and when we were finished, they cut them out and sorted them into their respective pockets.  This was great for a quick review.

The third graders also filled out flipbooks from Fourth and Ten!  This was another great activity.  I had them write the definition of each type of sentence on the back of each flap, and then they wrote multiple examples on the lines inside of the foldable.  Can you tell we've been talking about metacognition a little bit?!

The third and fourth graders went on "scavenger hunts" for the four types of sentences during independent reading.  The terminology was different, but the activity was the same.  :)  One of the smartest things I ever did was align skills for the whole year.  It's working like a charm!  This sheet was a freebie from Janet Rainey.

Otherwise, like I said, we spent some time digging into Writing Workshop.  We reread "Author: A True Story", and the kiddos created Venn Diagrams comparing their own experiences as authors to Helen Lester's experiences.  This led to LOTS of great discussions, and now that I am done with the "We Are Authors" pack, I am officially ready to launch personal narratives this week!  Can't wait!

I am also really excited to launch another layer of my interactive notebooks.  In addition to the flapbooks and some Nicole Shelby's goodies, I have created a few multi-step, higher-order thinking prompts to take my instruction a little deeper.  As aforementioned, I went to an in-service on Friday, and during the first morning session, we took a look at the Smarter Balanced website and previewed their assessments.  Now, in Ohio, we will have PARCC assessments, but I don't anticipate them being TOO different based on what I have already seem on PARCC's website over the past year.  Essentially, they are shifted to more multi-step directions and more application based questions than we have had on our OAA, and even though we won't be taking them this year, I really want to start preparing my students NOW.  Let's face it, multi-step directions are hard for kids.  They need practice!!! I am SO excited to implement the prompts I've created because they address multiple skills on each sheet, and they all have some kind of writing connection.  The best part?!  As the name suggests, you JUST GLUE IT!  Yep, you just glue it into an interactive notebook and write on the opposite side.  I did not create templates for the responses because I want my students to exercise their creativity and critical thinking skills as they interact with each prompt.  If you want to know more details you can check it out below, or you can head on over to my shop to check out my new packet...Just Glue It: Multi-Step, High-Order Response Prompts for Interactive Notebooks!
I'm hoping to pop in later this week with examples to share with you!  In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your Labor Day, and have a great week!