Overdue Updates

Well, hello again! It's been forever since I've found the time to sit down and write.

For that reason I decided to create an "Update" blog today. Here are a few of the things we have been doing, updates on a few things I mentioned before and some celebrations.

First, here is the finished welcome board in the hall. It looks so much better with the machines on it!

These are our name art from the first week of school. They are on the wall by our door in the hallway. Please excuse the crookedness...I had some grade eight helpers... I haven't fixed it because it drives my OCD neighbouring teacher crazy! lol

Here is a peek at our Daily 5 board, now that we are doing all of our dailies! Monday begins the choice board! Yeah for organized Chaos! I have actually updated this board with teacher-made I-Charts (from ours) and some pictures. I will show you that and my choice boards on Monday.

Here is our book box shelf. This year I also decided to have them keep their Writing binders (black) and their Word Work Binders (white) next to their book boxes. It is working so far. I labelled each child's spot on the shelf. There are a few mishaps with binders being shoved behind, but they are getting the hang of it.

Oh, and did I mention...Our class won the "SILVER SNEAKER" award this week! Yeah! I actually had one of my grade twos come to me and say "Mrs. M. This is the best day EVER!" lol I love it because it keeps the hall so nice and neat! This is a size 17 sneaker donated from an alumni of our school. It's HUGE!

Next is our Writing board. We have been discussing different kinds of writing and options for publishing. As we talk about each one, I will add a finished product to the board. So far we only have a finished journal entry.

You can also see our "Ideas" list beside the board. And the bottom section is our "Challenge" section. Each week, our spelling patterns go there as well as a writing challenge. Right now they are trying to work on ABC books.

This is our Reading Goal board, just about finished for the month. Each book is a sticker. The black line show the goal and highlighted boxes are 100% on the quiz. I have 18 out of 19 kids reach their reading goal this month! Wahoo! I have October's goals all up and ready to go!

And lastly, this is a cute art/socials project we just finished. We have been talking about maps and symbols and neighbourhoods, etc. So we created play mats. No words were allowed, only symbols. They also had to include certain things (a school, two roads, etc.) This is my example (since I complete forgot to take pictures of their finished maps). But they turned out really cute!

Well, I hope to be back a little more this week. I have defeated the cold bug that had me down all last week. Yeah for sleep!

See you soon!

Daily 5 Poster Freebies

Going through my plans and setting up my room, I came across last year's D5 posters and decided I should share what I made. I created I-Charts for each one as well as a few other posters. I created the I-charts on the whiteboard with my class and then posted my I-charts as anchors. I referred to them often and saw the students referring to them as we added a new one to see the similarities.

  I am not fortunate enough to have access to a colour printer, so I made all of my posters in black and white and coloured the letters a specific colour for that element of D5. I also glued them onto construction paper as a border and laminated them so I have them to use again this year.

Feel free to use them yourself or simply as a springboard to design your own. Here are the colours I used:

   Read to Self    (I Pick and 3 Ways to Read a Book)

   Work on Writing 

Listen to Reading

Word Work

Read to Someone (Ways to Read to Someone and EEKK)

Check out the Daily 5 Linky Party over at Thoughts of a Third Grade Teacher. There are some fabulous ideas!

See You Soon!