Five for Friday - Halloween Style

I'm EARLY!! Well, actually I did this yesterday and then scheduled it to post so I would be on time. Aren't you proud?

I've been meaning to share some of the fun things we do on Fridays in my room. It's my rule that students can have game day on Friday if they focus and do what they are supposed to for the rest of the week. They get excited, and I know that it's really just more reading review in a fun way. One of their FAVORITE games is Plinko. Most of the questions have short paragraphs. I laugh because they always want to land on "Diagrams, Charts, and Tables" because those are "easier" since they don't have to read. What they don't realize is that some of those are harder than any of the others.

I mentioned in an earlier post about how we were doing test-taking strategies. We read about bats, made "headlines" for each paragraph, and then went back to the text to highlight where we found answers. They definitely still need practice, but we're getting there.

Fifth grade continued working with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. On Wednesday, I told them that Ichabod Crane had suddenly reappeared 30 years later. They had to pretend to be newspaper reporters and write a short article about him. Bear with me. I promise these were the best, but we didn't do any real proofreading because of time constraints, etc. I know there are A LOT of things to work on before the Writing SOL in March, but I thought the ideas were pretty decent.

I was excited to be asked to help carve pumpkins in my third grade class yesterday! The teacher had a glyph for animals since they have been studying ecosystems in Science. Each group was given an animal, and they had to decide where it lived (forest, ocean, rainforest, etc), what adaptation it used (migration, hibernation, or something else), and if it was a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore. Then they drew the eyes, nose, and mouth based on how they answered the questions. I carved from there (and thanked God it wasn't whichever would have had a star nose), and then each group used the glyph to try and guess the other groups' animals. Fun!

And I think I did a pretty good job carving (ours was a bear, btw)!

And of course, last night was Halloween! This year was SO much more fun with Keagan because he's more aware of what's going on (although it took him a while to get the hang of things) and enjoyed it! His favorite part was ringing the doorbells, though.