Five for Friday

 What a busy week! Happy Friday everyone. I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday.

I'm lovin' the cute little number buttons you can download on their website.

 

We had parent teacher conferences Monday and Tuesday evening. Something I like to share with parents is their child's self-evaluation. I enjoy learning about the children's perspective on how they're doing and what they think of school. Here is my revised self-evaluation from the one that I posted last year. 

 

 Many of my children said through their self-evaluation that Reading Workshop was something they enjoyed about school! That was music to my ears.

                                                                        

 

We finished up rounding and moved to estimating sums this week. I concluded rounding with an activity called Scoot that I found from another blogger. The children scooted around the room from one task card to another. Each card contained a rounding task. They met with a partner when finished to compare answers. If their answers didn't match, they both went to that task card to determine the answer together. They did well collaborating with their partners. 

 

 I ended the week at a conference featuring of my favorite book authors on differentiated learning......Carol  Tomlinson! The title of today's conference was Differentiation and the Brain: how neuroscience supports the learner- friendly classroom. This is also title of her newest book. I will share some tips from this conference on my blog. She's amazing!

Finally, I want to give a shout out for the Breast Cancer Research Fundraiser at TPT during the month of October.   151 resources were donated for this project and divided into 7 booklets.They will be available October 1st. Proceeds will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. 

 Have a great weekend! 

Lovin' Learning Teams

 Hooray for Friday and Freebies! I'm going to end the week by sharing what I've been doing new in Math this year. I talked a little about this in my Tip Tuesday post. I've created learning teams in math to reinforce the weekly concepts. Each Friday, my students get into their learning teams and work together to completed an activity or game related to the week's math skill.


The children love it! I've set clear expectations for behavior and participation. Everyone stays on task and participates. The activity that the children did today in their teams was to roll and order numbers in the thousands. I found that particular fabulous freebie on TPT.

You may download a copy of my learning team sign below. I've also included my partners sign with it.

Enjoy your weekend! Stop back for Tip Tuesday. :)

Close Reading and Common Core

Hello everybody. This is a big week for me. My Common Core Reading Bundle was picked to be featured for Teacher Tuesday at the Late Night Coffee Blog and I'm a guest writer for Rachel Lynette tomorrow at Minds in Bloom.  Come back and click below to read my close reading article at Minds in Bloom.

                                                               

Now for Tuesday's Tip. I created learning teams for math this year to work on tasks connected to the new common core math standards. My students absolutely love working with their teams. While exploring bigger numbers, I gave each team a set of place value blocks. After telling them what number I wanted represented, the teams had to make the number two different ways and draw it out. They really were able to grasps the concepts such as 12 hundreds = 1,200, 10 tens=100,  and so on.  I repeated the process with different numbers. You can download the recording sheet below.

Stop back tomorrow and follow the link mentioned above to read my article about close reading.

 

Tip Tuesday and Sept. Currently

Welcome to Tip Tuesday at the BC! This year I decided to do more with interactive notebooks and I'm lovin' it so far. My kids have math, reading, writing, and words notebooks. I really like using mini-anchor charts for the reading notebooks.

Since we have so many scraps each day, I found a tip on Pinterest from Peace, Love, and First Grade  that I want to share. Blue and green are my classroom colors, so I found blue and green plastic serving bowls at the Dollar Store to use as scrap bowls. I put them out at each table to collect scraps. It's so much easier than passing around the trash can or everyone getting up and down.

Now for my September Currently with Oh' Boy 4th Grade......