My Carson Dellosa Stash!

Hello, friends!  As I mentioned before, I am currently serving as a Brand Ambassador for Carson Dellosa.  That means that I get to check out really awesome products to review and share with all of you!

Today, I am going to be sharing a few wonderful resources that I've been able to get my hands on for this school-year.  When I was able to, I went for fifth grade materials since I teach third and fourth grade gifted clusters, and I am so glad I did. 

First of all, let me tell you about the Common Core Assessment Book.  It's a great way to track the standards you have hit throughout the year to ensure that you don't skip anything.  It's also a great way to track progress and mastery.  As someone who is just making the switch to standards-based report cards this year, I think this resource is a time-saver.  It is ready for you to fill it up to the brim with documentation by standard, by date, and it also has the standards at a glance and the crosswalk to compare standards across grade levels.  I love that, because we know that are kids don't come to us as carbon copies.  We sometimes have to take a step back or kick it up a notch, and I love that I can quickly flip a page in the book without having to look it up online.  That's a time-saver, and as a new mom, I am all about saving time.  Oh, and it's cute.  That's a nice little bonus.

But don't just take my word for it.   Check out a video highlighting the Common Core Assessment Record Book below!  You'll quickly see exactly what I mean!  It's such a great resource.

Awesome, right?  I also had the opportunity to check out Carson Dellosa's Language Arts Interactive Notebook resources.  I chose the 5th grade set because I wanted to stretch my kiddos, and I LOVE it.  The pages are simple yet eye-catching.  The directions are clear, and I think the content is spot on.  I appreciate that they always list the term at the top with a definition of some sort, have a meaningful component for students to actually interact and annotate and provide opportunities for note-taking.  I think note-taking is so important, and it needs to be taught explicitly in upper-elementary.   Interactive Notebooks provide this in a fun, dare I say it--- "interactive"--- way without doing all of the thinking for your students. The thirty lessons contain teacher notes to guide the lessons, but perhaps more importantly, they provide space for students to create their own meaning on the opposite side of the page.  The way interactive notebooks are intended to do. I'm sometimes hyper-critical of the "interactive notebook" stuff that ends up being basically a fill-in the blank fluffy resource, but this is NOT THE CASE with this resource book.  It's a great resource to get your students thinking.  You can see it in action below!

 

The last resource I had an opportunity to review was their Spectrum Focus Reading for Main Ideas and Details in Informational Text resource.  I, again, chose fifth grade to review as an enrichment piece.  I like that it's relevant to the standards .  I appreciate the focus on citing evidence and having students articulate why they chose the evidence they did. I loved that higher level thinking skills like inferring were emphasized heavily.  They used excellent text features, which is a must-have for informational text resources.  I also liked the variety of responses and graphic organizers.  Overall, I was impressed by the complexity of the texts and responses.  I know that this resource could help stretch my kiddos in a multi-dimensional way.  It's not the same approach to main idea over and over again, and I like that it addresses the complexities of finding main idea and details in informational text.  There is only one thing I was a little less enthusiastic about...and it's the layout of the pages.  I just feel like they could have used a tiny bit more white space between questions to make it less visually overwhelming to students.  That's small peanuts though.  I'll take great content over a great layout any day... and that's coming from someone who believes "cutesy" DOES have a place in the classroom.  Here's the great thing though.  You can actually check out the inside of the text HERE to see for yourself.  You can preview every single page!  You can actually do the same thing for every print resource.  Just find a resource you are interested in, look under the photo on the page, and click where it says "Look Inside" just like the image below. 

This is actually part of a larger collection of texts for math and reading that address various skills, so if you like that you saw in the fifth grade resource, it's worth searching the site to find one that fits your grade level needs, plus it's a very inexpensive resource!  You can't beat that! #winning  What are you waiting for?  Head to Carson Dellosa to check it out! :)

Review Disclaimer: I participate in the Brand Ambassador Program for Carson-Dellosa and have received these products for free to review.