Snapshots on Sunday! A Linky Party!

I am linking up with up Clutter Free Classrooms Snapshot Sunday!

It has been a great week in 3Z! We have been in school for a month as of today! I feel that my wonderful students and I are just about on the same page in regards to expectations and procedures! I don’t think I had to tell anyone to do his or her class jobs on Friday!

I love this transition from having to keep reminding students about procedures to them just coming in from recess and them sitting down at the Gathering Place. This is the FUN part of teaching!

And BOY did we have fun this week!

 

We worked on Lindsay Flood’s amazing Story Element product The kids LOVED the activities and it was so easy to use it as well in Guided Reading Groups. The activity sheets that Lindsay created are simply AMAZING. I even asked her if she could create a few more and she said YES! I can't wait for them to be ready! I love it when you can do a Balanced Literacy lesson in whole group and then connect it to each guided reading  group for more practice or for your advanced group to go in DEPTH! LOVE, LOVE! 


We also worked on Character Traits! I used One Extra Degree's "Many Luscious Lollipops!" packet  to talk about adjectives! The kids were hooked when a REAL lollipop appeared! I have a student who's folks own a mexican restaurant in town. I sat down next to Michael to work with him on his guided questions paper about his lollipop. Questions such as "What does it smell like? what does it taste like? what does it feel like?" Michael said "Miss Z it smells like La Fiesta  (the name of his parents' restaurant)."  I said, "Michael, your lollipop CAN'T smell like La Fiesta!" and he was so sure of himself "IT DOES! SMELL IT." Well, his lollipop was PINA COLADA flavored...yep it smelled like La Fiesta! 

On Thursday we had our WINTRY DAY! It has been in the 90’s and I really wanted to do Abby Mullin’s activity “Inference Investigation” about Tim’s Snow Day, BUT we kind of needed to get in the mood for it! The kids came in scarves, hats, and gloves! I had Christmas music playing ALL day long and hot chocolate cooking in the crock-pot. We made “carpet” angles instead of snow angels, we built imaginary snowmen and then we jumped into the investigation. The students were amazing inference investigators. I am pretty sure this is going to be one of those activities that we will be able to go back to throughout the year, “Remember our Wintry Day? How could what you did to figure out Tim’s snowy day help you with your Guided Reading book?” The inferences that came out where AMAZING! I will do this activity EVERY YEAR, no matter what grade I teach!

Friday was a special day as well! Students came dressed in red, green, and yellow as we celebrated Mexico and Brazil’s Independence Days! I lived in both countries so it is a great opportunity to share my love of the countries while covering some of our writing and social studies benchmarks! We wrote stories about the countries, we made salsa, we decorated Carnival Masks, we made the flags, and the list goes on and on!

I guess I had not realized ALL that we accomplished this week! No wonder I am tired! 

What did you do this week?       Be sure to link up with Clutter-Free