Photo Friday!

I decided I wanted to share some stuff I've been doing in my room. I finally tried out the ipad our school has and took some pics, Here's a peek of what we've been up to :)

It's not the best shot, but this is our fictional narrative unit, I decided to turn half my wall of fame into a writing focus board, on the board is the covers of two mentor texts we used, a small anchor chart that each student keeps in their notebook, a huge "Somebody Wanted But So Then" chart where I read a mentor text and students filled out all parts, we then came together to discuss what we thought we should put down for each category. I am breaking down my unit as much as possible to really focus on character creation and give more value to the planning stage. I feel I have been skimming it over and not giving it the time it deserves.

This is a photo of my class using my smart board with a Les Plan article that we are labelling all the text features. Of course the interactive feature would not work for some funny reason so we kept right on going and labelled all the text features we could find and started a discussion about how they help our comprehension, a big focus at a professional development series I am attending every few weeks. My next step is to have the kids come up and re label it with our stickies. I should mention they also have their own copy and this is Day 3 of our shared reading.

This is a photo of my bathroom system, I know it looks complicated, I used to do the put the pass on your desk, no need to ask, put the pass back on door knob when done, always can tell who is out by where passes are, BUT this year I had some students who literally were rotating who was out of the room. So with the help of an Educational Assistant friend, Misty Hutchison, came up with this. All students start the day on green, there is a "boy" magnet and a "girl" magnet. When you need to use the washroom, you don't ask, you just place the appropriate magnet over your pocket. You also flip your card to red. When your card is flipped to red you have no more bathroom trips. I reset it each block of the day. It is working out very well but looks complicated I know!

This is the web we created to go with the shared reading that is in the above picture, on this day, the second day of the shared reading we looked at not just one reading strategy but I put up a few different strategies and had students share if they did ANY of them, as not everyone interprets or comprehends a book the same. Again this is taken from "Journeys In To Literacy" Professional Development I am attending. I really enjoyed the discussion that took place because more people seemed engaged, suddenly if someone didn't have a visual it was okay because maybe they had a connection, or a question they came up with. I am leaning towards focusing more on inferencing as very few people had something to contribute for this one.

Hope these ideas are helpful for someone!

Kat :)

PS How LONG was this week!!!! Happy weekend :)