Top 5 Tuesday

Happy Holidays! Can you believe that Christmas Eve is already here? I know many of use are doing last minute shopping, traveling, cooking, and so much more. I'm baking my families favorite homemade sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies, pumpkin pies, and getting ready to celebrate our annual family Christmas Eve event with my dad's side of the family tonight. But as an educator we all know that we never stop thinking about school, our students, lesson planning, and ideas to use when we head back. So, today I'm joining Comprehension Connections for the Top 5 Tuesday linky. I will be showcasing my Top 5 favorite pins from this week. 

I just love this anchor chart! I've been working with my students on asking and answering questions while reading and this will be the prefect addition to our lessons. This anchor chart gives you some very basic questions that you should ask yourself while reading to see if you understand the text. 

I just love fun, motivational, and easy to implement classroom management ideas! This pin is from The Creative Classroom. To read about how Mrs. Ellsworth is implementing this with her whole class click the link above! 

I can't wait to get back to school and start doing this with all 6 of my different small group classes!

During the month of January, each group will earn "marshmallow points" for demonstrating good choices, behavior, following the rules, and going above and beyond what it expected of them. At the end of the month whichever group(s) get 20 marshmallows will be rewarded with a hot cocoa with Mrs. Bourne! 

What a wonderful idea! A Non-fiction Reading Marathon. I wish I had seen this before Winter Break because it would have been perfect to use to get the kids excited about reading but also allow them to have a lot of fun. Fabulous in Fourth does a 110 minute reading marathon where the students alternate between reading a non-fiction text and creating a very cute and authentic poster with text components, questions, and facts about the book they reading. 

I love how fun and unique this biography idea is! This pin wasn't linked to a blog or any type of post, it's just a picture of how one teacher used pizza boxes to have her students create a biography about famous people in history. You could take this idea and run in so many different directions. I may try something like this for students to create examples of non-fiction text features. Oh, or maybe use it to show main idea and key details; 1 slice of the pizza could be the main idea and the other 5 slices could be key details. You could have them use the order pads to write the definition of a main idea and key detail, the title and author of the book, and give a summary of the text being read! How much fun would that be?! 

I'm absolutely in love with this last pin! When I was student teaching we did inference bags with my 1st grade class. You have the students select an item and secretly place it in their bag.Next, the student will write clues about their item and clue it onto the bag. You can have the students read their clues to the class and let their classmates guess infer what's inside or you can set it up as a center, like The Amazing Classroom did here . What I love most about this pin is the second way she used her inference bags as an interactive bulletin board for the entire school! Put the bags on a hallway board, have a box with inferring slips (for students or whole classes to use) and a box to place the slips in. Periodically open the answer box and pick slips to see if the guesses are correct. Reward students/classes who are inferred correctly!  

Well, that's my top 5 for this week! You can join in on the fun by linking up at Comprehension Connections Top 5 Tuesday post and adding your own top 5 pins for the week. I hope you all enjoy your Winter Break and have a very wonderful Christmas!