GIVEAWAY!!!

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BAD!

These last few weeks have been to say the least CRAZY! I have reached under 30 days for my wedding and was waiting to hear about my job for next year.  I am going to stay in the same position, intermediate reading interventionist, and I have MIXED feelings.  Being that this will be the end of my 5th year of teaching, I felt that I had left the classroom too early.  I had been talking to my principal about the possibility of going back to the classroom. Well with all the economic trouble schools are facing that possibility was not there for me.  After thinking about it over Memorial weekend, I have come to decide that another year doing my job is going to be PERFECT.  I have a notebook full of ideas, interventions and ways I will organize everything for next year.  This week I spent closing up all my interventions and completing my final progress monitoring to get paperwork into folders.  Well, that is done so I have been busy creating my new lesson plan template, reading conference form and anecdotal notes.  I took a few resources I have had for years and morphed them to hopefully be the forms that will work for me.  I will try to figure out how to attach my Google documents but I am not very confident.  If you know I could really use the help! 4 days of school left!!

Countdown...

Well today is 17 days until the end of the school year....this bring a mixed bag of emotions.  I look at my 30 students and their progress in reading and rejoice! Then my mind moves to what more could I have done!!! This time of year is both my favorite and my least favorite.  I am busy working on some new things with my kids and am hoping to get some of them posted this week!! I hope everyone is enjoying their last weeks of school! CRAZY

If you have any fun things that you do at the end of the school year...what are they???

a few days...

We have our last late start day tomorrow in our district and I am wondering what on earth we could be working on.....PBIS for next year......RtI......there are so many possibilities I cannot wrap my head around it!  Today I worked on creating some new lessons for my students.  I am creating a lesson based on a fictional book on meerkats for a couple of my groups.  I am excited to put it all together and share it! I am also creating a mlti-disciplinary unit on the civil war for my 5th graders and a comparison study of Cinderella around the world! Lots to do!! WHEW! After a raining start to the day I am ready to hit the hay! :)

EXCITEMENT

With 26 days of school left I am encouraging myself to stay as excited as possible! I have been busy letting my mind plan and re-plan next year as if I know my teaching assignment yet! I have been keeping a notebook of my future ideas both for a classroom teacher and a reading interventionist.  I have officially determined that I want to be a workshop teacher.  As much as I heart guided reading and all that if offers, the thought that I would meet individually with my students more often was intriguing.  My fiancée who also happens to be a teacher, first grade to be exact, implemented the CAFE model this year in his room.  I am blown away at the progress his children have made in the first grade and ponder why are more teacher NOT implementing the workshop model?!?!?  I have created a list of must read books or books I want to re-read for over the summer...you know in between our wedding, second reception, honeymoon, Responsive Classroom training, PBIS coach training and anything else I get signed up for!

Let me know what you have thought of these books or if you have any other suggestions!!!

CAFE- The Sisters 


     Daily Five- The Sisters


Around the Reading Workshop in 180 days by: Frank Serafini- One of my Master's professors!

LOVED HIM


Guiding Readers and Writers- Fountas and Pinnell


Writing Workshop by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi



A Writer's Notebook by Ralph Fletcher 

My thoughts about today.......

For the last week I have been working on two different ideas with my students.  We have been continuing our practice on their fluency.  As many of them have increased their rate we are now more focused on their accuracy and prosody (expression).  I love to hear their first "cold" read of something and then to hear it after a couple reads. I have been pulling poems for multiple voices from my Tim Rasinski book Partner Poems for building Fluency grades 4-6. If you have never checked out this book it is a must HAVE!  The progress the students make as they read and re-read the poem is tremendous! It gives me goose bumps!!  The second idea is that of them writing their own poetry to read.  With my 6th graders one of the poems we read was a tongue twister about Better Botter.  After we did a few different Better Botter Poems, my students wrote their own tongue twisters! I will get those uploaded sometime this weekend!

What have you been doing in your classroom to help you students fluency????

My first post

After doing a lot of searching through hundreds of other teacher blogs, I could not help but create my own! I think that teachers who share their resources are THE BEST! I cannot wait to get my blog more up and running and will be working on that throughout the rest of the school year! :) Please share any advice or tips you may have!