Family & Friends Night

Towards the end of every year, the students in our school put on what we call Family & Friends Night. {It's basically an open house, but the students also perform in a short program.}  Ours was April 30th this year.  And yes, I know that was quite a while ago, but I am so proud of my students that I wanted to share it with you anyway.

After a delicious pizza supper, we started our program.  This year our songs and reading parts were all patriotic themed.  

I loved hearing the students read about the founding of our country, the making of our flag, and the fight for our freedom.

After the program, everyone headed to our elementary classrooms.  Our rooms and hallways were filled with student projects for the parents to see.

 

One class made dioramas from different habitats.

The older elementary classes brought in science projects.  This student researched eggs and chickens.  He even brought in a live chick!

The second grade class made a combined bug collection. {Although I am pretty sure that the boys from several grades were bringing in bugs during recess for a while.}

  We also displayed several of the projects and papers from our Roald Dahl author study.

 

Our Memorial Day agamographs were a big hit as parents walked down the hallway toward our classroom.

 

 

Another parental favorite is our student writing binders.  In each binder, I include a copy of everything the student has written throughout the year from journal entries to research reports.  Not only are these fun to look at, but parents love having all their student's writing for the year in one easy to keep collection.

 

 

We end the evening with our yearbook dedication.  Then every student gets a yearbook.  Most of them start the signing process right then.  It's so cute to watch the younger kids signing their names in huge letters in each others' books.  Of course, it's also a little bittersweet to be asked to sign the yearbooks of your students who are growing up right before your eyes.  

 

All in all, Family & Friends Night is a huge amount of work for both students and teachers.  But it is always worth it to see the pride the students take in showing off their hard work to their friends and family members!

Our Author Study: Roald Dahl

Wow! I realized today that it has been almost two weeks since I have blogged.  Part of that was due to some personal issues, but a large part of the problem was my computer's refusal to connect to the internet at my house. {Oddly enough, it would connect at school, but not at home.  This obviously made blogging difficult.}  I was probably a day away from buying a new computer out of frustration when the problem somehow, amazingly, resolved itself.

I wanted to share what my 3rd grade reading class has been up to lately.  We are just finishing up an awesome author study of Roald Dahl.  I absolutely love his books.  They are fun and quirky with interesting plots and characters.  I was so excited to share them with my class.  

We started with James and the Giant Peach. {I chose this book to begin with because we had just finished a unit on characters.  I thought the bugs would be interesting characters to discuss.} At the end of the book, we made a character mobile to display.  We colored and cut out a peach, James, and the bugs.  On the back of each character we wrote character traits that could describe the character.  It was a perfect extension of what we had already talked about in reading.  

 

 

 We also made a lapbook where we filled in the books, setting, character list, summary, and theme paragraph.  {Again this was designed to review many of the reading concepts we had learned this year.}

 Next up to read was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  We read through this book rather quickly because I wanted the students to simply enjoy the story itself.  We used our writing time during this week and a half to write an essay comparing and contrasting our main characters from the two books, James and Charlie.  {I was shocked by how much easier the essays seemed than in past years.  Possibly due to the fact that we had spent so much time talking about both characters in class.}

Once we completed the novel, we spent two class periods watching the movie. {We watched the older version starring Gene Wilder because it's the version I prefer!} The kids couldn't believe that I was letting them watch a WHOLE movie in class!!  Although they were a little less excited when I assigned them another compare/contrast essay for homework.  This time, their task was to compare the book to the movie.  We filled out a Venn Diagram while they watched the movie.  Then they took the chart home to complete their essay.  {I wanted to see if they could write an essay independently, and I must say I was pleased by the results.}

By this point, I think we were all ready to move on.  I was even asked when we were going to do more work in our reading notebooks!  So we switched to a new unit on figurative language, but I am sneaking in one more Roald Dahl book.  

We are reading the BFG as our class read aloud right now.  It worked out great because Dahl uses an unbelievable amount of figurative language in the BFG so the kids are hearing it as well as learning about it. I also found a recipe for frobscottle that I am going to attempt to make for my students when we read that chapter! Doesn't it look delicious?

I must admit, I truly enjoyed this author study.  I think I may have like the books even more than my students did.  Plus I loved seeing my students experience books that may have been out of the comfort zone of the normal books they choose.  Hopefully they were inspired to read more Roald Dahl books on their own!

Five for Friday: 2/20/2015

Woohoo!  Friday is finally here!  Why does it always seem like short school weeks feel longer than normal weeks?  Thankfully, Friday has arrived which means it is time for Five for Friday with Doodlebugs Teaching!

 We had a snowstorm on Sunday, more snow on Tuesday, another dusting late Wednesday night, and even more expected this Saturday.  I don't know about anyone else, but I am sick of snow!

We sent home our March calendars to our students today.  Thinking about March has me dreaming about springtime.  I can only hope that it is right around the corner!

I teach several different English classes, and our curriculum has us alternate between writing units and grammar units. {However, I try to add in lots of writing during the grammar units too.}  Anyway, my 6th grade English class is in the middle of writing research reports on historical places. 

We used library books to do research on note cards, wrote an outline, and are currently working on writing our rough drafts.  {This has to be my least favorite unit that I have to teach. Hopefully we will be done soon.}

On the other hand, my 3rd grade class just finished writing Compare/Contrast essays.  This is a unit that I always enjoy.  We have been reading Roald Dahl books recently so we wrote about characters from his stories.  Not only did they turn out great, but I feel like using information from books we have read made the writing process even easier.  {I am going to write more about our Compare and Contrast essays tomorrow so check back then to find out more!}

I don't know if all of you have heard, but Educents has decided to let teachers open storefronts similar to TeacherspayTeachers.  It is a completely new program they are rolling out soon. I have been busy setting up my store and uploading products for sale. If you haven't signed up for Educents yet, they are also offering a free $10 credit right now. {That's like $10 worth of free teaching products!!}  You can get your $10 coupon by clicking here: Educents coupon. 

Also feel free to stop by and check out my new storefront!

My friend Kristin over at My Carolina Classroom is having a huge giveaway for her blogiversary!!

 She is giving away over $180 worth of teaching products {including some TPT gift certificates}!  The giveaway is only open until Saturday, so don't forget to stop by and enter.  In fact, you may want to go there right now!

Throwback Thursday: Silly Stories

I am linking up with The Teacher's Desk 6 for Throwback Thursday. 

 In this post, I talk about one of my favorite writing lessons that I have done with my kiddos.  I thought I would take this opportunity to share it with you again today.

 

I used my new Silly Story Cards with my students today for the first time! 

 Each student got to choose one card from four different card types.  Each card has a different story element on it - main character, time, place, and problem.  The students then recorded their four story elements on the top of a recording page.  After that, the writing fun began.  Each story came out different because they all had different combinations of story elements to begin with.  

After we finished our stories {and yes, I wrote one too},  the students that wanted to were allowed to read them out loud to the class.  We had lots of fun giggling at the silly stories about things like farmers in outer space, cowboys on the beach, and talking dogs.

The kids had so much fun, but even more importantly, they spent about 20 - 30 minutes actually writing.  True, I didn't get everything taught that I had scheduled for today.  But it is worth it to put a few things off until tomorrow so that kids can have fun practicing such an important skill!

The great news is that you can win a copy of my Silly Story Cards to use in your own classroom.  Kristin over at My Carolina Classroom is having a huge giveaway right now.  My Silly Story pack is just one of the amazing products that you can win!  Head on over her blog to enter.