A Sticky Tip and Other Happenings {Five for Friday}

Fri-DAY!! Time to link up with Doodle Bug's Teaching for Five for Friday! 

1. I feel like celebrating!! All three of my reading groups are up to 20 minutes for Read to Self!! Wooo Hooo!!!! My lowest group of readers are using book bags filled with 3 books. We also started a book shopping schedule this week and that has worked wonders for us!! Finally, I feel like we are making progress! 

2. Since we are making so much progress I've decided next week will be the first week of full on guided reading groups. We've been meeting here and there as time allowed, but I've got a schedule this week and we are gonna make it happen!! 

This is Guided Reading command central! Notice the colored paper clips; my groups are named by color, so I'm using that to help myself stay extra organized!

3. Need to temporarily stick something to the chalk board? Try using a little scrapbook adhesive rolls like this one. 

Just a few little lines on whatever you're working with and you're good to go. I've used this for a few displays that the kids wouldn't be interacting with. I know it wouldn't withstand the kids..what does?! hehe When it's time to take the display down most of the adhesive stays on the paper, but what is left just rubs right off. 

Everything in this picture is stuck up with the adhesive. 

4. We finally got our Homework Stars board up and running. Well, all but the title because I've been a slacker! The stars at the bottom are kiddos who didn't turn in homework throughout the week. We used it as a way to track who got to participate in Fun Friday. 

Thanks to Holly at Fourth Grade Flipper for the fantastic idea!! Check out her link for a much nicer bulletin board than mine! 

Have I mentioned that it is nearly impossible to take a good picture in our hallway? 

5. I'm loving the Fall weather and the decorations. In my mind Fall is also festival season. I'm heading out the Apple Festival tomorrow morning and I'm so excited. What is your favorite Fall Festival?? 

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. 

Comfy Reading {Spark Student Motivation}

Good Saturday morning! It is a beautiful fall day here in Virginia and I'm so looking forward to getting out and enjoying it. Before I head out I wanted to stop in with a quick post on what has really been motivation my students this week! I'm linking up with Joanne from Head Over Heels for Teaching. 

This week I finally took the plunge and allowed my students to lay all over the classroom on pillows and rugs during our read to self time. 

I have been hoarding pillows for this very reason for several years, but I've never been brave enough to let my students actually do it. It sounds silly to me even typing it, but I just wasn't sure they would actually continue to read if they were spread all around the room. 

On Tuesday I had a group that finally worked up to 20 minutes of read to self, so I threw caution to the wind and got out the pillows. I was thrilled to see they were still reading and seemed to be even more into it than before. 

We've been rotating with the comfy reading spaces - one half of the class one day and the other half the next. I also have a cool green chair and two rugs that are being used as comfy reading spots as well. 

This was really the motivation my students needed to really spark their interest in read to self. I hadn't really heard much from my students about reading time until I pulled the pillows out. The day after I got them out I had several students ask me if we were going to silent read today. When I said it was time to read I heard a lot of really positive feedback. 

I'm sold on the idea of letting them get comfy and lay around the room while they read. If you're on the fence definitely give it a try! 

Do you have reading nooks and comfy places your students use during read to self? Any tips for making it even better? 

Ag Field Day {Five for Friday}

Wow!! What a whirlwind of a week. It was Homecoming week and, yes, we participate in every dress up day! Wednesday was aptly named wild and crazy day! 

Thursday we went on our first field trip to an agricultural center for an Ag Field Day with 4H. We had a blast and I even remembered my camera so I've got some pics to share with you all for my Five for Friday with Doodle Bug's Teaching. 

1. The horticulture table had some great displays and offered some amazing facts! I really want to go visit these ladies' gardens!! They were a wealth of knowledge and I bet their own gardens are gorgeous. 

2. We played Bug Jeopardy. I learned so much at this station! Did you know the bug in picture #1 is actually a ladybug larvae? 

3. About an hour into the field trip I had a little guy come to me and say, "Aren't we going to go on a hay ride or pet some animals or something?" We just hadn't been to an area where they could get a peek at all the animals. 

There was also a cow and calf, sheep, and goats. Unfortunately, my pictures of those didn't turn out so great. 

4. There was a great display on soil, rocks, and soil erosion. 

5. These babies were the highlight of the trip for me. These are Springer Spaniel therapy dogs. Oh my...it was love at first sight. 

Can you imagine how excited I was when the owner asked me to hold them while he talked to my students? It was a major distraction for me!! haha

6. You get a bonus today!! I got the best surprise ever when I ran right into my BFF who teaches 4th grade in the next county over. I was so thrilled!! Since we no longer teach at the same school I don't get to see her as often as I'd like to. 

Needless to say the trip exhausted us. After lunch they were all tired and ready to go back to school!! They must not have rested much at home last night because we had a pretty tough day today. About 10 minutes into recess today I had someone come ask me how much longer it would be until we could go back inside - a true sign of a need for the weekend! 

How was your week?  

Digging Deeper into Author's Purpose

I've been promising a post on our Author's Purpose study last week and I've finally rounded up all the pictures and things, like time, that I needed to get it out here for you!

For author's purpose, our 4th grade standards require students to explain the author's purpose and describe how the choice of language, setting, characters, details, and other information contribute to the author's purpose.   

In other words, identifying the purpose is just scratching the surface for us! More times than not students are required to look at why an author included a particular section in a text. That seems to be really tough for my fourth graders. 

I decided we need to set aside some time to really look at what goes into making a good information, persuasive, or entertaining passage. If we have an idea of what goes into each purpose it'll help us better understand an author's language choices. 

For our mentor texts we used passages from readworks.org. The passages are right at a page long, so the perfect length for this type of mini lesson. 

I pulled the passages up on the Smartboard and we went through them together, highlighting and discussing what the essential ingredients in each passage were.

In our small groups we worked in our interactive notebooks. I created 2 passages per purpose and we glued those in and highlighted and labeled the different components of each purpose. 

I think it was very helpful for my students to label sentences and words as opinions, facts, generalizations, etc. When we got finished with the labeling I would ask them to tell me what "made up" an information passage and all they had to do was look up at their labels. 

After we had gone through each of the three purposes in our notebooks, I put students with a partner and gave them three passages from Readworks. The pairs read through each passage, decided on its purpose, and highlighted evidence to support their decision. 

For our grand finale, we created posters to persuade our audience. The posters had to relate back to something from Raymond and Graham and the kids had a great time! 

This one was by far my favorite and the most creative of the bunch! In the book, the boys come up with this scheme to get a kiss from a girl, so this group decided to advertise for a kissing booth! Down in the lower left corner that sentence says: "He even brushed his teeth!" LOL I loved it! No wonder there was so much giggling coming from that group. 

On Friday we took a little quiz and they did great. One side was just your basic identifying the purpose with a little writing component thrown in there. The other side had a persuasive and informational paragraph they had to label and then answer a few questions on. 

You can check out the set of author's purpose resources in my TPT if you are interested in doing these activities with your own class. 

What is your best tip for teaching author's purpose? 

Context Clues {Peek at my Week}

Good Sunday evening! It has been a whirlwind weekend, but very enjoyable. I'm ready to jump in to the week, so I thought I'd link up with Jennifer at Mrs. Laffin's Laughings and share a few of the big things we've got going on this week. 

First, and most importantly (for the kiddos) it is homecoming week and we have our first field trip on Thursday! Needless to say, there will be a lot of extra excitement around these parts this week! 

We are working on context clues, so I'll be reading Baloney (Henry P.) as our mentor text this week. 

Last year was the first time I'd used this book and my students LOVED it, so I'm really looking forward to sharing it tomorrow. 

We will also be doing a few lessons from this great Scholastic book I picked up during one of their $1 sales. 

I've saved the best for last - I'm using interactive notebooks for the first time this year and I am really diggin' 'em! I ran across this great context clues interactive notebook resource on TPT and knew it would be just perfect for our study this week. You can click on the picture below to check it out. 

What do you have planned this week? 

Books, Exciting Mail, and Pictures {Five for Friday}

It's finally Friday!! This has been such a busy week at school! We've been hard at work on author's purpose and I have a post on that in the works. In the meantime I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for a little peek at some happenings from the week. 

1. The box of books for my lower readers came this week and I was thrilled!! They are almost all labeled and ready to get some use. I can't wait to see which become favorites with my students! 

2. I also stopped by the library yesterday afternoon to pick up this book. It's going to be the read aloud next week as we begin our talk on context clues. I can't believe how many great resources I've found for this book on Pinterest and TPT! 

3. Friday means fun day in my class!! If you missed last week's post on how I use (and love) the Whole Brain Teaching Scoreboard you can click here. For today's fun I think I'll pull out the beach balls. It's Friday, why not? 

4. We also got a very exciting package at home this week....the first Barkbox for my Charlie Bug arrived. He approved. Notice the slobber on the corner of the box. He could not wait to get into that thing!

5. On Sunday we went for a little drive. This week we wandered over to Big Stone Gap. Any fans of the Adriana Trigiani book series? Yup, it's the same place! We live about 30 minutes away.

Have a great weekend!!