A *Peek* at My Week - January 6, 2014

Time for another one of my favorite linkies - Mrs. Laffin's Laughings: A Peek at My Week. 

Head on over to Jennifer's great blog to share a peak at your week. 

So, we were supposed to go back to school last Thursday, but school was cancelled on Wednesday night for Thursday and Friday thanks to Hercules. I have never been much of a fan of snow days, but it was really nice to have 2 weeks off. I know I teach 4th grade, but I have a feeling that we are going to need to begin the week with some routine review...I feel like I have been out of school for a month, I can imagine how those kiddos feel.

READING

I mentioned back in September that this year, as a district, we are using Comprehension Connections by Tanny McGregor to teach our comprehension skills. Well this week I will finally finish the lessons from this book. I will be introducing and working on synthesizing all week in Reader's Workshop. 

Click on the book for the link to Amazon. I fully intend to do a blog post or two in the coming weeks about my lessons from this book. It is a quick, easy read and very beneficial...check it out!

MATH

Before vacation I introduced 2-digit by 2-digit multiplication to the kiddos using arrays and tables. They L-O-V-E-D it and actually did quite well with it. This week we will be reviewing and working on expanded and standard algorithms. 

WRITING

This week in writing we will begin our biography unit. As I'm sure most of you know, it is often a struggle to fit Social Studies and Science into the day, so in order to incorporate our Social Studies U.S. Regions standards, we will be doing our biographies on famous people from the south. 

I also hope to fit some fun New Year's writing in before we get too far into our biographies. These are the two activities I have planned. Both are great TPT freebies!  

The first is New Year's Resolutions/Goals found on TPT. Click on the name to find the item. Addie Williams did a great job creating this little guy! (Click on Addie's name to link to her TPT store).  I think my kiddos will love it! Or check out her blog below

The second is New Year's Resolution Freebie, again click on the name for the link. This one is created by Judy Wright. (Click on Judy's name to link to her TPT store). This one will be a bulletin board! 

WRITING INTERVENTION BLOCK

For the last three months, we have been working on the fundamentals of writing in our intervention block. Now, I hate to even utter this word, MCAS *eeek* is creeping into view. So this week, we are going to work on writing some good leads/hooks, because that seems to be what the kiddos struggle with the most. I love Melissa Forney writing printables - she has some great examples of "grabbers" to get the kiddos started. If you don't know her, check her out {HERE}. I especially love her Young Writers Survival Kit. 

Hopefully, by week's end, we will get to how to respond to different types of writing prompts. 

These are all skills that the kiddos learn/have learned in writing, but we have the time to do a bit more small*ish* group instruction in these areas for the kiddos in need. 

Finally, I have a meeting with the Human Resources department on Tuesday after school at my college because...I am going to teach my very first undergraduate class this semester! I hope both very nervous and very excited about this new experience. Luckily class doesn't begin until January 27th...so I still have time to prepare myself! 

Thanks for reading!