Tuesday - Focus on Reading

I'm blogging about how my weekly plan of integrating our new Wonders series is working.  I last posted about my Monday plan of Intros, Intros, Intros.  Next up is Tuesday.  But first, I finally posted pics on the "My Classroom" page, so feel free to check it out!

As I mentioned before, we start off with 10 minutes of writing each day.  I have a prompt for the students, and we focus on one of the 6 traits for each prompt.  Here is an example:

My students actually love any prompt that focuses on Voice, which I think is a hard trait for 4th graders.  Prompts like this are something that I model first, and then I recycle with a different topics from time to time.  Here is a student sample:  PLEASE READ THE BOTTOM, good for a laugh for sure!  And....Not sure why I'm on the list.  I'm not scary at all - I don't think:(

I've enjoyed finding tasks that lead into our daily lesson, whenever possible.  The day I planned to teach character traits, I had them list 10 people in their lives that they knew well, and then give one word to describe each person.

Now for Tuesday:

In a nutshell, I plan to do a mini-lesson that ties into a RL or RI standard.  We are again using interactive notebooks, but I've decided to rename mine "DIY Resource Book".  I use composition notebooks, and we divide the book in half, the back half is for language.  These books are easy to find the half way part because of the gap where the seam is.  Each half starts with a Table of Contents that we add to as we go.  I'm not using anyone's notebook pages, I've been making mine as I go.  That way they are just the way I like them!  Here is our Tuesday page from last week on Text Features (student sample in the picture in case you are wondering if I spelled "features" wrong).

The PLAN was to also use the close read in the workshop book to help integrate the reading skill.  Right now we are STILL in beginning-of-the-year slow motion mode.  Hopefully soon, the routines (and cutting and gluing) will go quicker and we can add that to our Tuesday.

We started using interactive notebooks mid-year last year, and I really like them.  This week I started making a big deal about students being able to check off the "I Can" statements on each page when they have demonstrated mastery of a topic.  This has helped encourage students who have had to try again on a particular skill.  I hope the excitement lasts!

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!