Five for Friday!

Quickly checking in for the weekly Five for Friday, seems to be the only day I am committed to blogging :)  Here it is!

First, I am very excited to be offering my Thanksgiving Math Pack for FREE, yes, I said FREE in my TPT Shop.  The only thing that I ask if you download it, is please rate me.  I would love to know how I am doing and if my products are useful.  You can check it out HERE.  The Literacy Pack is available for $3.00 too.

My kids are loving our realistic fiction unit.  Since this is only year 2 of fully implementing Lucy Caulkins' Writers' Workshop, I had not taught Realistic Fiction before.  I had a lot of fun creating my 2 week unit for this.  The kids created characters and plots this week.  Most of them began writing.  I can't wait to see how they turn out.  The Unit is also available in my TPT store.

My kids rocked the fractions test today!  I am so glad because I feel like this is SUCH a hard concept to teach.  Check out the centers I used at my Fraction Post.

This Bingo Board is really helping with homework completion.  It's simple.  Whenever the child does all their homework (reading and word study), they get to put their name on the Bingo Board.  Then, I simply pull a number on Friday for a winner.  They like it, I am hoping the Novelty doesn't wear off.

This is our re-telling road!  The kids love when I pull it out.  Right now, they walk down with a buddy so they can retell the whole thing.  One day, we will shift to walking down alone.

Have a great weekend!

Annie

Five for Friday!

What a quick week!  Here's a quick recap to link up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday!  Here we go:

The most exciting thing that happened is that we got beautiful hardwood floors installed!  We bought the wood in August with the intentions of doing it ourselves, which we totally would have had we been able to nail it!  Since it was a concrete base, we had to glue it and that made us really nervous so we spent the money (well worth it!) to have the floors done in a day!  I LOVE them!!!  Now we just need area rugs :)  We have also noticed that it is actually warmer with the floors than the carpets, who knew?!

Pretty!

It was parent/teacher conference week!  We had Monday and Tuesday to meet with parents/get report cards done/work in our classrooms/do a million other things (you know how it is!)  I always like meeting with parents, even for just a brief time because it reinforces the kids are learning and still excited about school.  The other good thing about parent conferences is report cards are done :)

We did a great Veterans' Day activity this week too.  I found a super cute craft on pinterest (but just tried to locate the source and it just links to a jpg so if its yours, THANK YOU!  We wrote to soldiers and I am sending out the package this weekend.  I thought it was a meaningful way to learn about the Day as well as cheer up our troops.  To any service members who are reading this, Thank You!

I LOVE to travel.  It helps that my husband is a teacher and also loves to travel so we get to spend or summers on the road.  Anyway, I love bringing this into my classroom so every Friday is "Travel Friday."  Today we went to Hungary, which is the country my husband taught in for a year as an international teacher.  My kids get SO excited to "fly" to a new country every week.  We fly in our airplanes, learn the language, see the sights, and do different activities.  It is so fun.  If I can get my act together, I hope to share more about it on the blog :)  I'll keep you posted!  Next week we are off to Peru!

A few things to be excited for this week/next week!  First, tonight my husband and I are celebrating our first anniversary (a week early!).  We are spending the night in the city (DC) to see John Oliver.  I am so excited.  I wish he would hurry up and get home.  I am also excited because this magical picture showed up in the forecast for Wednesday: 

Apparently we may be in for a snowstorm!!  Last year if this had happened I would have had a minor meltdown because I wanted my wedding outside and snow was not an option... This year, I say BRING IT ON!

Enjoy your weekend :)

Annie

Fraction Action

I was browsing bloglovin and saw a couple posts about Workshop Wednesday.  I am excited to link up with Ideas By Jivey for the first time... and it worked so well because I just finished my Fractions unit, which is this week's theme :)

The county switched our curriculum around this year and we are knee deep in fractions right now!  I am always so intimidated by fractions before I start... so many big words, numerators, denominators, fractions of a whole, fractions of a set... lots to teach!  However, today, as I met with my kids during week two of fractions I noticed they have it!  They picked it up pretty quickly and I am hoping its because we've been busy bees playing games in my new fraction unit!

My Fractions Unit is three weeks.  We started with a pre-assessment.  In week one, we focused solely on fractions of a whole.  Here are a few screenshots from week one games:

In Week Two, we are moving onto fractions of a set.  They are understanding the link between fractions of a whole and fractions of a set.  Many of the games are the same for week two, but fractions of a set.  Here are some other ones:

In week three, we put it all together with a mixture of activities!  My favorite activity is Mystery Fractions.  Here, they get a fraction piece and they need to trace it in the circle to see how many times they can trace it to figure out the fraction.  It's fun for problem solving.

These games have worked out really well in my class.  You can purchase them in my TPT Store.  If you have a promethean board, buy this pack because in addition to the games, you have a daily mini lesson as well as daily number talks.  If you don't have a promethean board, you can buy the PDF version and put the games in your centers.

A post-assessment is included in both sets!

Enjoy!
Annie

Comprehension

I always have done the standard read-aloud and asked follow up questions.  Most kids could do it independently after a few months of these questions, but not every kid got it.  This year, I accidentally stumbled across something that worked.  I put hand motions with everything for comprehension.  We review them all the time, and we took reminder pictures of the actions to help the kids remember.  I see them using this all the time without even prompting!  I thought I'd share in case in can help anyone with group comprehension skills:

In the beginning, in the middle, in the end (three fingers!)

 Problem and Solution

 Characters and Setting

Connections

Hope you found this helpful!  I love it :)