Farm fun, Bookflix, nonfiction, and text features

It seems like Fridays are the only days that I have to blog lately..lol. I guess that's because my Fridays are usually taken. I leave work RIGHT at 3:00 and meet with one or two or a few of my girlfriends for "sprites" after work, then I pick up the girls (or the hubs drops them off on the way to his auction) and we go to the beach.  I must say, it's the combination of seeing my friends for an hour or so and then hitting the beach with my girls is seriously a GREAT end to my week!

Sorry, back to school related.  This week, we used Bookflix. I L.O.V.E Bookflix! I've talked about it before in THIS post. I actually posted a video of myself giving you a "tour" of it - check it out! (it is a paid for site, but I love it! Our media specialist "buys" it for us every year with her  media funds, and I'm very grateful!

So, this week we "read" Click, Clack, Moo and A Visit to a Dairy Farm.

The next day, we discussed how one was fiction and one was non-fiction, and they had to find evidence (common core buzz word!) to prove that it was either one.

Yesterday, our morning meeting reviewed what we've been doing in our morning meeting, and we did some post it note learning (man, I just LOVE post it notes!)

Then, we took their ideas, and turned it into a venn-diagram, and turned that venn-diagram into paragraphs! Say what?!!? PARAGRAPHS? Be still my heart. But I KNOW they can't do it on their own, but the fact that they understood that each paragraph was about something different was just awesome.

We've also been discussing the different parts to non-fiction, like the text features. You can check out THIS post to see how we've been using our reader's notebooks to help us out in our small groups with text features. So then we used that practice and did an informal assessment! I gave them strips of post it notes and they had to label specific things in the magazine.

I was so impressed on how they did!

(see? I love post it notes!)

Today, we added one more bit into our reader's notebooks in the text-features section. Diagrams.  And since we are doing farm themed activities, then I did a cow.  

Let. Me. Tell. You. I am SO impressed with my drawing!! I can NOT draw. And my anchor charts are NOT cute...lol. But I am pretty darn impressed with this. Aren't you!?

I did the cow in front of them, so they could see how I drew it (almost like a directed drawing activity), so theirs came out pretty darn good!

Well, I didn't get through A LOT of my plans from last week, so I'm just moving a lot of it to this week. Please tell me that i'm not the only one that doesn't get through her plans on a weekly basis!

Please.

Make me feel better.