Five for Friday

Happy Friday!!! This has been the loooongest week and I'm so thankful it's finally Friday. I will not have any time to rest this weekend, it's my dad's and my nephew's birthday tomorrow and I have a ton of lesson planning to do, but I still love that it's officially the weekend!

This week I'm going to do my first Five for Friday Linky. Keep reading to see what we've been up to in my classroom this week.

My 4th grade class has been hard at work learning main ideas and key details. This week we read the first chapter of their first non-fiction novel study unit. After reading the first chapter, three times, they complete a main idea and key details thinking map. My three boys were so proud of their work that I just had to put it up on the hallway board! 

Can you tell that we are going crazy over main ideas in my room? This anchor chart was made with my 3rd graders. They are really struggling with main idea. They can give me a million key details, but they think those are the main idea. To try to help them determine main idea from key details we watched a little brainpop video. After the video we gathered our thoughts and made this anchor chart that they can use as a reference during our group time. 

 I was finally able to get some work up on my word wall. I was told that we were not going to be able to have a word wall this year but I just couldn't do that. So, I'm using it for my first graders to post their letter anchor charts. We have been working on letters, sounds, and recognition this week; yes, my littlest babies are that far behind =( After spending 2 days studying the letter A we created this anchor chart to show what they know. It took a lot of prompting but they were able to get it together! I love "Asia" and "Alaska" I didn't even help them come up with these two words =D

So, I ran out of color ink about 2 months ago and just keep forgetting to buy more when I head out to the store but I really wanted to get my Focus Board up and running so please excuse the super messy hand written pages. My board probably isn't like most of yours, but I'm working with 5 different grade levels and it's hard to fit everything in that you would need. I decided to go with a simple board that my students could understand. In my 3rd-5th grade groups we are all working on determining main ideas and recounting key details so I made this our focus for the board. I used clear page protectors to slide the pages into so that I can easily change out my vocabulary words before each group arrives. The sight words are the same for all 3 grade levels; my little babies just need all the help they can get when it comes to reading. These 15 words were the top mispronounced words across my groups. We will rotate words out once they master that word 5 times in a row on 5 separate days. 

We held our very first curriculum night on Thursday, and boy was I tired! I was at school for over 14 hours! I was really excited to participate in this event and couldn't wait to meet with my student's families and get to know them all better. Well, this is what my room looked like the entire night =( On my hallway, only 2 parents showed up and neither of them were mine. Our school sent out so many reminders to families but for some reason they just didn't bite. I'm trying to think of ways to get them involved for next years night (if we hold it again). I know that they parents would have really appreciated the activities and suggestions we all had for helping their students but I just don't think they knew exactly what a Curriculum Night was supposed to be therefore they didn't attend. 

Well, that's it for the night! What have you been up to this week? Link up at Doodle Bug Teaching and let me know.

Shanon