A Packed Week of Learning

The Lake Myra Benchmarking Team checking out Pinterest!

As I struggled with 'blogger's block' this week, I decided to just create a post that included highlights of everything I taught and saw in action at Lake Myra.  First of all, I must say this week came fast after coming of off benchmarking the entire school last week in two days. It's a move we made last year in an effort to take *something* off the plate of teachers since we do ask teachers to maintain quarterly running record growth lines for each of the students in their class, they get to listen to them read once every nine weeks at a minimum, if not, daily in guided reading. So, I know you're all wondering what's going on in the picture above. Well, let me tell you....with the help of @Jane Ferguson, we have Pinfluenced at least five teacher friends to check out Pinterest and I must say, as you can see, they were very Pintrigued!

Ms. Staib's 1st Grade Class in my 21st Century Special

 Part of being a 21st century learner is being able to work and learn with EVERYONE. So, in addition to the content lesson of learning how to create partner Wordles, students are also practicing their 21st century "super skills" of communicating and collaborating, and being critical thinkers when laptop problems arise.

3rd Grade Reading Group

This week my 3rd grade reading group (9:30-11:00) worked on creating SMART reading goals based on one of the 1st quarter reading objectives in addition to getting good at identifying fiction story elements. 

The SMART clipart downloaded from Pinterest

 Monday began with an Elements of Fiction (formative) pre-assessment.  I read a fiction story to them all whole group, and then gave them each a blank white piece of paper and asked them to create a story map.  I got 19 different story maps with most students needing work on Setting and Plot.  Thus, we began a Setting study.

By the end of the week, students were able to make interesting, specific predictions based on book jackets.

Download Book Jacket Prediction sheet here.

Our Word Learning Anchor Charts (in progress)

I also push-in to a 2nd grade class in the afternoon...this week, we focused on Predicting. Here is some of the anchor charts we created this week.

In the middle of the week, I spotted this 'Synonym Garden' made with paint chips when I was attending my daughters' middle school Open House.

Synonym Garden @ North Garner Middle School 7th Grade Hallway

As the IRT at Lake Myra, I'm in and out of classrooms all day long...lucky me!  Most days, I carry my iPhone on me because I always suspect I'm going to see or witness greatness while I'm in and out of Lake Myra classrooms.  Here's a sampling of some of the greatness I found this week on the first grade hall.