Turkey Claus and a Freebie {Book Talk Thursday}

Happy Thursday! I wanted to stop in and share a favorite book of mine to reading during the holidays, Turkey Claus!!

It is a super cute book about a turkey who learns he will be the main dish at Christmas dinner. He wants to write to Santa to ask that he not become Christmas dinner, but it's too late to write so he makes a trip to the North Pole. It's Christmas Eve and no one can get in to see Santa, so Turkey has to get creative with his attempts to get to Santa! 

The candy cane costume is definitely my favorite! 

My students last year loved this book! This year I thought I would use it with predicting, so I created a little freebie to share with you guys! 

Just click on the picture above to get your copy! 

I'm linking up with Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars! 

People We Should Know Series and Peek at My Week {Must Read Mentor Text}

Good Sunday Morning! I hope you enjoyed your extra hour of sleep. It was much needed in our house! 

I'm linking up with Collaboration Cuties for their Must Read Mentor Text linky. 

We're going to be working on identifying and using nonfiction text features this week. I headed to the library yesterday in search of books and came across one I'd used a few years ago, but had forgotten about it. 

Barack Obama just happens to be one of many books in a series called People We Should Know. You can click here to see a list of some other titles in the series. 

This book is packed with text features for students to explore. 

We'll be using the Nonfiction Test Features Discovery Chart from The Unique Classroom to record our findings. 

This is a nonfiction text that has a lot of great, interesting information but isn't as long as some others. Students can usually read this with a partner in a couple of sittings, giving them plenty of time for other activities. 

Speaking of other activities, I wanted to share what else we've got going on this week with text features, so I'm linking up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings for A Peek at my Week linky.

Interactive Notebooks

We'll be adding note sheets from The Shabby Chic teacher to our interactive notebooks. (Look under Units of Study.) I just reduced the sheets a little when I ran them through the copier so they would fit right in our notebooks. 

I also printed out the full size pages in color, laminated them and put magnets on the back to use on the chalkboard this week during our mini-lessons. 

Practice

I bought this great memory matching game from Kelly Clark to use for practicing text features. 

We are also going to be using a spiders worksheet from an ancient Mailbox Bookbag magazine. The sheet has some great diagrams and facts that are really helpful for my kiddos. 

Grammar 

We are sorting nouns and verbs using this Football Noun and Verb Sort from my TPT Store. 

The best part of the week - No School on Tuesday!!! Our district is always out on Election Day and I have a day of relaxing and crafting planned!! 

What are you up to this week?

Night in the Country and Sensory Words Freebie {Must Read Mentor Text}

Y'all know what Sunday means, Mentor Text linky time with Collaboration Cuties!! I'm still going through all the great books from last week's October/Halloween topic! 

Today I wanted to link up to share a book and a couple of lessons we used last week when discussing an author's use of sensory words. 

Our read aloud for this lesson was Night in the Country by Cynthia Rylant. I just love her books and when I ran across this one I knew it would be the perfect one for teaching sensory words. While working on this post I even ran across this video of the book. 

As far as a summary goes, the title is pretty self explanatory. The author takes readers through the sights and sounds of a night in the country. 

Here are some of my favorite lines from the book: 

There is no night so dark, so black as night in the country. And while the people dream of daytime things, the nighttime world awakens. Owls swoop, a rabbit patters, and in the yard an apple falls --pump! -- from the tree. 

Before reading this book my students and I brainstormed a list of sensory words for Summer. We talked about all the 5 senses and about our favorite summertime activities. 

Next, we add this great FREE foldable, from The Teacher in Me, into our interactive notebooks. 

Then we headed outside for some inspiration on Fall sensory words. The first group I took out had that ideal crisp, Fall morning weather! Students worked on filling in their foldable with all their favorite things about fall. 

When we arrived back in the classroom we shared ideas with each other and worked on finalizing our lists with those great words that really appeal to a reader's senses. 

The 2nd day we started out our lesson by reading A Night in the Country and looking at how authors use sensory words to make their writing more interesting and to help us connect with the text. 

Then students tried their hand at writing using sensory words. I chose to have them write acrostic poems using the word Fall. Some students also branched out into other, longer words related to Fall. 

This was a very fun way to get the kids excited about their writing and reading! 

I did promise a freebie, so here it is. During the course of this lesson I had an idea - don't you just love when that happens?! Why couldn't that happen before I actually teach the lesson?! LOL 

I decided to create a web and focus on just one word from our lists. This way students had an opportunity to really flesh out their ideas around one topic. 

I did a web on the board about pumpkins and then they picked one word and drew their own webs in their notebooks. If you'd like to pick up a copy of this web for FREE you can click here or on the picture above. I even included a mini version with dotted lines to cut out and glue in an interactive notebook! 

What are your favorite activities and books to use in teaching sensory words? 

Bats at the Library {Must Read *October* Mentor Text}

October is my all time favorite month. I was so excited to see that the Cuties over at Collaboration Cuties are having a link up to share our favorite books to read in October! 

Just last week I had scribbled a note on my desk about some ideas for the upcoming weeks and this great book was part of it! 

Bats at the Library by Brian Lies is a super fun book about the one night a year the library window gets left open and the bats can visit. The illustrations are adorable, as are the bats antics! They get into all sorts of different books and become the characters!  It's a fabulous book to use to promote reading and talk about how books take us to different places and make characters come to life. 

This year my plans are to use this book and a nonfiction book about bats to compare and contrast fiction and nonfiction. My students always have a difficult time with keeping the two straight, so I take every opportunity I can to review and discuss it! 

What are your favorite books to share in October? Head on over to the Collaboration Cuties to link up. 

New Book Finds, Site for Lesson Plans, and a Find {Five for Friday}

I've made a lot of new discoveries this week, so I thought this post would be the perfect way to share them all! I'm linking up with Doodle Bug's Teaching for the FAB Five for Friday!

1. I've made two great books finds this week while checking out the books my students had chosen from our school library. I wanted to make sure I would remember them, so what better way than to put them up on the blog to share with all my wonderful readers! 

The cover art on Hide and Seek Fog caught my eye. Once I started reading it knew it would be perfect for a writing lesson on descriptive language. I think you could really dive into this book with students and look at adding descriptions to writing. The pictures are also beautiful and that never hurts! 

The Life Cycle of a Spider is a great nonfiction book!! The bright cover drew me in and then I couldn't stop flipping through pages. It has a really nice combination of real photographs, drawings, and diagrams. This one will be perfect to pull out for nonfiction text features. 

2. I'm a gummy bear. I may be the last person on Earth to know about this song!! My kiddos mentioned it last week and I had to do some investigating. It makes a super fun brain break. 

3. Have you ever visited Ag in the Classroom? This little gem of a website has a lot of fabulous lesson plan ideas that integrate agriculture. 

After you click on the map above, select your state then choose Lesson Plans from the Teacher drop down menu at the top. There are some featured lesson plans and if you scroll down to the bottom you can do a more detailed search by grade level and subject area. I've used a few lessons in my class, especially for science, and the kiddos loved it! 

4. E-Z Grader + Amazon = love I just discovered that Amazon carries colored E-Z Graders. I'd only see the dull green ones in stores, so I am very excited about this.

5. I'll leave you with this little love note from one of my sweeties! Remember back a few weeks ago when I said we needed to work on writing...remember that when you read this.  : ) 

What have you been up to this week? 

Sally's Snow Adventure {Must Read Mentor Text}

I'm linking up with Collaboration Cuties for this week's edition of Must Read Mentor Texts. It's all about Language Arts, so I'm all there!! 

While I was unpacking my room about a month ago I ran across a book that I knew would be the next one I shared for this linky. 

Sally is a black lab and the star of numerous books. She is always going on adventures with her owner and in this book they go on a snowy adventure to a ski lodge. Sally gets lost and must be rescued by two rescue dogs. 

The pictures in these books are beautiful and if you've been reading this blog for any amount of time you know I'm an animal lover!! My dad has a black lab that I adore and this author does such a great job of capturing the lab personality! 

I think this book would be perfect for introducing summarizing. The text is short enough to read in one sitting while still having some time left over for the mini lesson. There is also a very definitive problem in this story with a really clear solution - both great things to have when introducing the summarizing strategy. 

Tuesday {Must Read Mentor Text}

Happy Sunday! I'm happy to be linking up with the fabulous ladies at Collaboration Cuties for another great round of Must Read Mentor Texts. 

I made a leisurely visit to the library with some of my cousins and we ran across this great book by David Wiesner. Right then I knew it would be my next MRMT because this is a book I always get so excited about sharing with my students.

This is an almost wordless book that leaves my 4th graders excited, interested, and full of questions. 

The book documents the very unexpected events of what appears to be an otherwise normal Tuesday. Frogs leave their pond riding lilly pads and fly through a neighborhood leaving a trail of trouble behind them. 

The illustrations in this book are wonderful! We always go back through the book again just to take a closer look at the book and see what we missed the first time. 

There are so many different skills you could pull from this book. I always seem to gravitate toward it when I'm teaching predicting. I have my students make predictions along the way as we read the book. The last page in the book shows a picture of next Tuesday at the same time and pigs are flying. As a response to the reading I have my kiddos write what they think will happen next Tuesday. 

Do you use Tuesday in your classroom? What skill do you use it for? 

The Library Dragon {Back to School Mentor Texts}

I'm very excited to be taking part in a special edition of Collaboration Cuties' Mentor Text Linky. Today is all about Back to School books. Yay!! I'm loving all the ideas I've already gotten today and Amazon is going to love me this week...

Since I am a little late on joining the party a few of my favorite Back to School books have already been "taken" and I don't want to be repetitive, so I'm going to share one of the first books I read for Reader's Workshop - The Library Dragon. 

This adorable little book tells the story of an elementary school that gets a new librarian, Ms. Lotta Scales. She is a little overprotective with the books and the children are missing their story time. It is full of rich language, beautiful pictures, and close encounters with the dragon kind! 

School for us typically starts back on a Thursday and the first two days we aren't into a regular routine, but by the beginning of the first full week I am ready to launch the workshop and I usually read this book on Tuesday or Wednesday. By that time everyone is really excited to check out books and it is a great lead into library procedures and caring for our books. 

I like that it is a playful way for me to show just how serious I am about taking care of the books in our classroom library. Throughout the year if we discuss taking care of our books and the library I'll make a reference to being a library dragon. I've even had kids do the same thing...lol! 

What are your favorite Back to School reads? Head on over to Collaboration Cuties and link up. 

Don't forget to enter the Show Us Some Bloglovin' giveaway! The contest ends at midnight and I'll be announcing the winner of the $10 TPT gift certificate in the morning! 

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End of the Year Feedback using First Year Letters {Tried it Tuesday}

Today was my last Tuesday of the school year! Yippie!! I still have to make it through Awards Day, Epic Field Trip, and another 1/2 day but I think I've got this! This week for Tried it Tuesday I wanted to share what we did in class today. 

I started out the year by reading First Day Jitters by Julie Danenburg. It is one of my favorites for back to school! 

Since we'd already had an introduction to Mrs. Hartwell I chose to read First Year Letters as a way to wrap up the end of the year. 

My kiddos liked getting a peek inside Mrs. Hartwell's classroom after she'd had such a rough start with the year. The illustrations in this book are great because there are all sorts of little "hidden" things to discover. 

The last page in the book is a letter from Mrs. Hartwell to her students telling them how much she'd enjoyed the year. We had a talk about how much I'd enjoyed having them as students this year, all the fun we'd had, and how they will do great in 5th grade! 

Then I asked them to write me a letter using the 2 stars and a wish method. Their letter needed to include two things we'd done that they liked and one thing they wish we'd done. 

The letters were all very sweet and were a great source of feedback for me. Through the letters I discovered that my students love the time we spend reading together at the carpet and also their independent reading time in class. 

Some wished they didn't have to read at home and several wanted to learn more details about topics we'd studied in Social Studies! Playing more games was mentioned in several letters. Having more fun at school was one of the goals in my "Next Year I Will Definitely..." post, so I guess I need to include games in the fun!