Five for Fraturday again

Whew! I am officially back to teaching now, and it was tiring! I feel like I came home every night and just crashed. Eventually, I'll get back into the swing of things.

First, I FINALLY got a new phone!! My old one was terrible and had this HUGE crack in it. I seriously was a walking T-Mobile commercial.

As much as I would LOVE to join the iPhone club, we didn't want to upgrade our contract because we currently get unlimited everything for $99, which you can't beat. So I checked Ntelos's stock of refurbished phones. I'm VERY happy with my HTC One V, and after browsing Etsy, I also found a store that does personalized cases for it. So that's already on my Christmas list :-). Now I'm just impatiently stalking A Beautiful Mess for their Android app that's supposed to come out next month sometime!

My fourth graders were working on Author's Purpose this week, so I created a little evidence sheet (Don't you love the Melonheadz clipart in the corner? My score from Educents last week!) to record information from the text. I think we've focused too much on just Persuade, Inform, and Entertain in the past, but that's RARELY how it's tested. Next week, I'm going to focus on the purpose of individual sections/paragraphs.

With third and fifth grade, we have been working on character traits. We read a few different books with big characters (Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon, Alice the Fairy, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and Ferdinand), and I had students use my Duck Dynasty sheets I shared about last week to choose some traits and prove it with evidence from the text. 

TN or TPT

They had a lot of fun, but I noticed how limited their vocabulary is. I gave my fifth graders a list of traits and had them put stars by any they hadn't heard before. It was enlightening. Humble is going to be one of my focus words. Not a single student knew it, and they were all very interested to learn it!

On Thursday, my new linky started! I'm going to host Teacher Fitness Thursday on the third Thursday of each month, and we'll have a different topic every time. For the first month, we are sharing about healthy eating - tips, recipes, struggles, what's in your lunchbox...you choose! I would love to see a lot of you join in.

This weekend is Mommy and Keagan time, and we're really enjoying it! The weather has been great here (although it's starting to rain), so we have spent a lot of time outside. This morning, we went to a local produce stand with some friends to play in their hay maze!

Next week, we might even go apple picking! It would be nice to go when it's not so crowded. Of course, the state fair starts next Thursday, so we have to work that in at some point, too!

Okay, my goal for next week is to blog more frequently. I know it most likely won't be every day, especially because we only have one laptop for the house and Steven is teaching an online college class this semester. However, I need to take the computer anyway so I can work on finishing my Halloween Literacy Pack. We finally installed the new Microsoft Office, so I have a lot of work to do!