Sunday, October 9, 2016

Peek at My Week

My fall break is coming to an end and I'm trying to gear myself up to get back in the classroom! October is one of my favorite months and I'm excited to get some of my Halloween goodies out when I get back to school. Here's what I've got planned for next week. 


For morning work this year I've taken the idea of Daily 5 and put them into center options. My kiddos have a schedule that they follow and they can have one of five different options for morning work. my favorite to get organized each week is word work. This week students have the option to choose from Jennifer Findley's Halloween Language Task Cards or her Pictures to Review Halloween activities. 

Reading RTI is a little different for me this year since its been incorporated into my reading workshop time block and I'm working with Tier 2 students instead of my usual Tier 3 kiddos. This year we've been using our treasures books. Since we are learning about Native Americans in social studies building their schema during reading RTI is a must. 

During reading my kiddos will continue with their book clubs within our Interpretation Book Clubs unit for Lucy Calkins. If you would like to read more about how I implement Lucy in my classroom you can do that by clicking here. 

I have a love/hate relationship with writing. I'm really looking forward to teaching dialogue on Monday. My students are knee deep in their personal narratives and one of the biggest struggle that I've found so far for my group of kids correctly using dialogue.  I did some googling and found this awesome idea for  Halloween themed dialogue activities. First I plan to have a mini-lesson on when, where and how to correctly use dialogue in writing. Then have students practice with partners writing dialogue with Halloween knock-knock jokes. Next, since its October, I knew this would be the best place for a "Said is Dead" lesson to make our writing more interesting. 


I wanted something for my students to have in their writing notebook to go back to when they were using dialogue in their writing, so made this "Said is Dead" anchor chart. You can grab this freebie by clicking here or the image above. 

The rest of the week we will be continuing our narrative writing unit with Lucy Calkins. Again, if you would like to read more about Lucy in my classroom, click here! 


Native Americans is one of my favorite units to teach in social studies. This week we will focus on the Plains Native American Tribes. I'm going to be using a website that I found called Pear Deck to make my introduction PowerPoint more interactive for students.  This will be my first time using this website and hopefully everything will go as planned. I'm also excited to use my Native American Exit Slips product as well as my Native American Task Rotations.  I find that my kiddos really love the task rotations because they can show what they know in a variety of ways! 

Math this week is an intro to multi-digit multiplication. We've spent the first 9 weeks of school working with decimals so it will be a nice change of pace to work with whole numbers. I'm going to be using Jennifer Findley's The Complete Guide to Multiplication for most of the week. This is a wonderful product for so many reasons. I have 27 students in my class and I'm the only 5th grade teacher in my school so I have a wide variety of learners. This product is differentiated in so many ways that I can easily fit the needs of all of my students. We will work this week with spinners, word problems and self checking exit slips! I'm also excited to use her Spin a Word Problem Math Centers at the end of the week! 

Finally, Math RTI. I work with Tier 2 and 3 kiddos every day of the week. For my Tier 2 kids we will work on review skills and for my Tier 3 kids we will use Number Worlds. Everyone else will rotate through 5 centers during the week. Again, I had to find a place to incorporate my Halloween centers. You can find all of my 5th grade Halloween activities by clicking here or the image of my newest Halloween addition below. 



I'm really looking forward to using this Halloween resource in my classroom next week. Anytime that I am able to engage my students in learning while providing review and problem solving skills I am a happy teacher! 

What do you have planned for this week? 

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