Five for Friday: January 16

It’s that time again!

I’m linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share 5 things from my week!

January is the month of assessment (it’s not just me right?)

I made two shape sorts so that I can check if the students can sort shapes by a given rule.

The file folder shape sorts made this part of the geometry assessment so fast and easy!

If you could use the labels and shape cards I made, you can get them by clicking here.

Last week I blogged that I was planning to make these 2015 goal writing and craft.

It took all week but we finally got them done!!

We hung them up above our cubbies hooks.

Here is the finished product!

If you would like to have the “template” (I put it in quotation marks because it is a really simple template) for the craft and the writing paper you can hop over to my post from last week by clicking here and you can download it!

I got on the Close Reading train in early December and quickly fell off (I’m blaming all of the holiday festivities, crafts, general madness..) so I started again in January! I even designated a bulletin board to keep the important close reading info together.

This week we read “The Mitten” by Jan Brett!

The kids also completed the writing activity below where they could pick anything they want to go in their mitten 🙂

If you would like the writing page you can click here.

One focus for our school and division is to incorporate timely and visible descriptive feedback for student work. This used to be my birthday board but I took it down and made it a “Work that says WOW!” board. I tell students a few centres that they can hand in to my table when they are done and I look over the work after school and write the feedback. Then before literacy or numeracy centres I read the descriptive feedback to them and challenge the students to improve their work.

For example this little guy did “Write the Room” the day before during literacy centres. I read to him that I loved how he found all the words and read all the words correctly but one wish I have is for him to use all lowercase letters. He immediately asked if he could do it again during centre time. Of course I said YES! (This is the goal after all!) He choose this activity to do again first and completed it with all lowercase letters! I just started doing descriptive feedback this way but I’m hoping that this will encourage some other kids to use the feedback and improve their work!

Another focus at our school and in our division is incorporating an interactive math wall.

I took down my math wall completely to start this new wall that I hope will be much more interactive and student friendly. We are focusing on using child-friendly language and using lots of pictures of the kids to show examples of the success criteria.

We reviewed patterning first and now we are working on reviewing sorting and adding to the sorting column of our math wall!