We're Posivitely BLOOMING: Five for Friday!

I'm linking up with Doodle Bug for a little Five for Friday post!  :)  I have a TON of projects to work on this weekend, so I am opting to keep this post relatively short and sweet!  You'll see that we haven't been up to anything fancy... but nonetheless... there are great things happening in our classroom real estate!  Here's a little peek!

1.  We had more "Just Glue It" fun this week!  The kiddos read a nonfiction text, and created their most vivid mental pictures.  They had to give a rationale for their choice, and they turned out really well.  I should have known better though. The fourth grade boys LOVED one particular fact about seahorse digestion, and it showed up in mental pictures over and over and over again.  Did you know that seahorses don't have stomachs, and they digest their food so quickly that sometimes it comes out of the other end still alive?!  Well, now you do, and you may never be able to get this image out of your mind!  ;)

2.  The third grade kiddos also worked on visualizing.  As I mentioned before, I have aligned the skills to maintain some semblance of sanity this year, and so far, it is saving my life.  :)  Dramatic?  Maybe.  True?  You betcha!  So, I used a lesson that I adapted from Deanna Jump to use with my intermediate kiddos.  I've done it for a few years.  In the past, I used it to launch our poetry unit.  This year, I used it to teach visualizing as we read a fable.  No matter how you slice it, "Green Giant" is a great way to teach how authors intentionally use sensory language to help us visualize!  The kids always love it!  This year, I just used the template from Welcome to Room 36 to project on the SMARTboard and make my life a little easier.  It's also cuter than my old template, and I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, so I had my kiddos glue the poem to their mental pictures as well.

3.  I also started team-teaching with our gifted teacher.  She comes into my room once every eight days for part of the day, and we taught the kiddos about Bloom's Taxonomy!  We wanted to get their gears turning about higher-order thinking skills... and we wanted them to begin to take ownership of their own metacognitive processes.  Here's a little sampling of activities!  The kiddos received cards for each level of Bloom's Taxonomy, and they were encouraged to use the verbs to sort the cards into the correct order.  Then, we went through a PowerPoint presentation with them to teach the levels and give examples.  After that, the students adjusted their levels (if needed), and they sorted "activities" by each level of Bloom's.  We finished up with a reader's theater and a quick formative assessment from my Formative Jot Spots pack!

4.  We have also been busy working on personal narratives, and looking at mentor texts for inspiration.  One of my favorite mentor texts is "Eleven".  We went through the close reading process with this text this week, and it has already started to transform the way some of my students are approaching their writing with a writer's eye.

5.  I attended a county Literacy Lead Teacher meeting on Tuesday, and look who I ran into!  Christina from Sugar and Spice!  :)  She is just precious!

Well, I suppose that concludes the little mini-wrap up.  I really need to buckle down and get some work done tonight!  :)  I hope you all had a great week!  Happy Friday!