Five for Friday!!!

It's Friday and I remembered to link up for Five for Friday!  Thank you Doodle Bugs Teaching !

Also, I totally forgot to take pics of student work so thumbnails of the file will have to do!

 

My second graders were reading the story "All About Robots" from the blue LLI kit.  They moved through it pretty quickly and did really well on their DRA based summaries of the story.  They were all able to get two good facts from the story for each section.  Since we moved through it faster than expected, I needed something for them to do today while I assessed them.  Most were finished with their summaries and interpretation/reflection questions.  I decided to have them create their robot.  They had to tell me what their robot does, where we could find their robot (sea, space, etc. because that was in our story), and most importantly, how does their robot help people.  Then they had to compare and contrast their robot with a type of robot in the story.  It was cute to see what they came up with!  Also very interesting to see who had trouble with an open ended question.  One of my little friends told me he already had robots and didn't need to think of a new one.  I explained to him that that's not an acceptable answer.  I told him he is going to come across a lot of questions that ask him to "Tell a time when you felt the same as..." or "What would you do if..."  Even if he doesn't have anything to say he needs to come up with something to say!  I find all grades that I've worked with over the years really have trouble with this.

Holy AIMS WEB!  I had to paper assess my kids today instead of doing it on the iPads.  We're having group changes again so this was the way that worked best.  I hate having lots of papers sitting with no home yet :(

Big boy alert!  We took my 3 year old to an open house at a local preschool.  We are looking to put him somewhere now and wanted to check it out.  He loved it!  He starts next Tuesday for two days a week.  I'm so excited for him and I really hope this helps deepen his love of learning!  Best part is, they actually had an opening for mornings AND I get to bring him!  So excited!

In my kindergarten group, we've spent the past week on short 'e'.  They LOVE the sentence building book!  The short 'a' book was a hit with my previous group and my short 'e' book did not disappoint my new group either.  Both groups also enjoy the decodable texts and activities I created.  Besides just reading the text, students must read, write, and trace the words, respond to a comprehension question, build words with letter tiles, match words with pics, and their personal favorite, highlight all words with the featured vowel sound.  I had some very happy campers this week!  I better get a move on with my short 'i' decodable texts for next week!  You can find my short 'e' book here and my short 'e' decodable texts and activities here.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I purchased these phonics books to use with my groups.  I have and our department has their Common Core Comprehension books so I thought these would be good.  I really do like them however, their activities are very quick (I think they're meant to be) and would by no means take up an entire block of time. I think the other issue is that my groups are not as "low" as the groups I think the books are meant for.  I make adjustments by either not sticking to the grade level on the book and simply looking for something that will work for what I need and by adding to the worksheet/activity. I sometimes make them take it a step further.  For example, second grade was doing final consonant clusters.  Several of the activities were super easy and just asked them to write the final consonant cluster they heard in the word.  I made them do that AND spell the entire word.  That was great practice because I noticed, for example, that they could identify the /nd/ in the word like the activity required BUT couldn't figure out that the /ow/ they heard needed to be /ou/ and not just /o/.  I also felt that even though the nonsense word assessment I gave my third graders showed that several of them needed magic 'e' help, the weekly lesson/activity in the 3 grade phonics book was too easy.  It looked like something I would give my 1st graders (and just might!).  Again, I just made them take it to the next level.

Happy Friday!  I'm off to work on bundling and posting my consonant digraph books, completing my Bossy R activity packet, and creating my Short 'i' decodable text and activities packet!