Five for Friday September 11th

I am linking up with the super fab Doodle Bugs Teaching for this week's

This week has been a very eventful one!! Check me out :)

So I am ONLY a literacy teacher this year. I teach one group of kiddos in the AM, then I switch with my STEM counterpart and I teach her kiddos literacy in the afternoon, while she teaches STEM to them. So one of the first standards we have attempted to tackle has been RETELLING. Last week, I unsuccessfully attempted to teach my kiddos. Nothing seemed to work--not the retelling rope, retelling hand, retelling bracelet, NOTTA! Then I saw my friend, Carrie over at Adventures in Kinder and beyond, had these amazing Nursery Rhyme pack and she blogged, or it may have been instagramed, about how she used it for retelling. A lightbulb went off!! This would work perfect, so all this week, we have been reciting nursery rhymes, and then they using Carrie's nursery pack to extend our learning. I even have a retelling center now with these nursery rhymes and the retelling cards---the kiddos went cray cray for them!!!

It's so important to have a happy medium between work and family. I absolutely love my children, and I also love my job. I feel that teaching makes me a better mother, and vice versa--being a mother has made me a better teacher. Wednesday night, my eldest had football practice (my husband took him), and my two middle children had AWANA at the church, so me and my Lexa bug got to have an ice cream date. I love spending one-on-one time with each of them when I can---which isn't that often!!

With teaching literacy, I also attempt to do my version of daily 5, but it's more like a daily 4 and I call it rotations. With Rotations, the students are either buddy reading, reading to self, meeting with me, or doing some sort of specific word work activity. Last year I started creating a powerpoint with the students' names and I would project it so they knew which rotation they were to go to. This year I have changed it a bit because I have the students in different groups based off of different data. I have groups for Foundational skills, vocabulary skills groups, literature and information groups, and language and writing groups. We took the MAP testing at the end of last week, and I took that data and created groups so I am able to hone in on those skills. So I was able to start rotations with my afternoon group, my morning group is not quite ready for independent activities, so we are still in the practicing phase, WISH ME LUCK!

Thursday September 10th was my 3rd child's birthday. Christopher turned 6 and he had a great day! I took the day off, I was able to make them breakfast, take them to school (with his cupcakes), make dinner and a cake, and then pick them up from school. He was so grateful for his gifts, after opening each one, saying 'thank you mommy so much!' He is such a sweet little boy and I was so glad I got to make his day special for him. On Saturday night, we are taking him out to his choice--Chuck E Cheese, so that should be fun, we haven't been there for a long time!

So this is Marking Period 1 of our school. We map out all the standards we are teaching throughout the year, to make sure they are all planned for, and then we go back in and plug in assessment and checkpoints, and then finally we do themes and the day to day activities. So we've spent about 2 weeks on retelling, and next we are moving onto describing characters, setting, and main events. In writing, I've been trying to get the kids excited about writing, but next week we are moving onto 'how to' or informative writing. Social studies, which is integrated into reading time, we are going to be talking US symbols. It should be an exciting week!

OHHHHH and I got a brand new blog design, just up and running today from the AMAZINGLY talented Laine from Peace of Africa she is absolutely wonderful to work with, and if you are in the department of shopping for a new blog or logo designer she is SUPER QUICK and fantastically reasonably priced!!

Anyway, have a great week!!