All this writing leads to a celebration!

So here's a quick picture update on my class this week so far!

We've been working out my Bear Snores On pack....

We listened to the non-fiction bears on Bookflix (did you see my video on it!?)

They've been doing some labeling - with caption writing....

And word sorting - with sentence writing....

And some sentence scrambles - which they LOVE!

They also did their "Pictionary" lol...(remember that game!)

They choose only FOUR words from the vocab list...

That's what I use to hold my words that we're working on

red section is the sight words

blue section is the spelling words (they're gone right now - in the center)

yellow section is science/social studies/reading words (the go hand in hand a lot of times)

green section is the math vocab (right now we're doing my fraction pack)

So they chose 4 words to do the definition on - here's rumbled...

So, I'm sure you noticed a pattern?

Yep - there's A LOT of writing going on.

Let me tell you why.

In the beginning of the year, I had 

16% of my kids score a level 3 (out of 6) or higher on the writing test.

Really???  I was beating my head against the table...almost EVERY day.

Could you hear it from where you are?? 

I wanted to cry. Literally. lol. 

I mean, I've ALWAYS loved teaching writing. It's always been one of my favorite things about teaching. But not with this class....lol.

But I turned to one of my writing gurus, Lori 

(Teaching with Love and Laughter) 

and asked for her help, used lots of her ideas... and LOOK what they can do now!!!

This, my friends, is a score of a 5!!!  

Our whole county did a writing test (since 4th grade FCAT Writes was today).

And look at the planning page they ALL did (all by themselves!) - I got the idea from Lori, but changed it a bit... but this 4-square planning works GREAT!

Topic sentence in the middle... details 1, 2, and 3 and in box 4 is the closing... so easy for them!

So - are you curious as to what my on grade level writers is now?

65%!!!!

And almost all the ones who didn't score 3 or higher, were at least at a 2, so they are ALMOST there! You have no idea how SUPER excited I am about this!!!

Speaking of writing... LOOK how cute these are!

We read Molly Lou Melon on Friday...

I just ABSOLUTELY love this book!!

And we are still hounding in those adjectives, so I thought this would be the perfect activity.

I'm sure you've seen the cute picture of me with adjectives around it floating around blog-land....

I took that a step further and added a writing component to it (yep - more writing!)

Click HERE to get the writing paper freebie!

AND

Click HERE to get a freebie for another version of this activity, from my writing guru, Lori.

And in math, for our Numbers Every Day folder we do, we're working in 3-digit numbers now, 

so I've upped the mystery number clues... these were the clues for this week...

four tens

three more hundreds than tens

two less ones than hundreds

They're getting better at them  - I'm impressed! And today, in the addition/subtraction section of the folder, I added in subtraction with regrouping - they got it like "THAT!" (envision finger snapping). I'm so excited! So, I can check that chapter off the list in the book - CHECK! And that's what I love about that folder. I don't have to teach them as chapters in the books.

While I'm teaching 3-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping, my kids are doing my fraction centers from my Hands-On Fractions pack.

Here are just a few activities in the pack...

This is the "Grab Bag" center

And the matching center.

And I have to show you a funny.... Monday, my teammate/friend and I showed up in the EXACT same outfit! lol. So funny! Totally not planned - and what's even funnier? We both usually wear different shirts with our red pants, but we both decided to change it to a black shirt on the same day. lol. It's the little things in life, right!?