The Diary Of...

For our Tier 2 groups I have came up with the binders for our fluency kids. This round of RtI I decided to focus our lessons around the stories by Doreen Cronin, Diary of Fly, Diary of a Spider,  and Diary of a Worm. We only get four weeks of RtI in this quarter because of the way CBM testing and other things fall, so there are only 8 days worth of material provided.

For Diary of a Worm:

• after reading the story students will complete their own "worm comic" where they will used information learned from Cronin's story. I used this comic strip. Click on the link and scroll all the way to the bottom to find it! 
• My third graders are crazy about doing readers theaters, they absolutely love them. So I found a reader's theater based off the story of diary of a worm for the second activity to work on. The readers theater is here. 

For Diary of a Fly: 

• I created this worksheet because I couldn't find one that had what I was looking for. After reading Diary of a Fly, students are tasked with drawing Fly as a superhero and providing all of her superpower details and name. I couldn't upload it as a file, so here is a picture of what I created: 

• The next activity for Diary of a Fly is having students discussing the pros and cons of being a fly. I typed up a worksheet where students have to list 5 pros and 5 cons so the discussions could be done in small groups. 

For Diary of a Spider:

• After reading Diary of a Spider students will refer back to the book and pick out facts that they learned about spiders from the book. I found a spider web graphic organizer that fits perfect for this activity. I wasn't able to find it when I went back looking for it, but you can google "spider web graphic organizer" and find plenty. Here's a picture of what it looked like: 

• The last activity for Spider will be a "Facts-Faction-Fiction" sheet where students have to take information from the book and decide whether its fact, fiction, or something that they're not sure about (faction). I found this online at read*write*think.  Click Here to Get It

The last two days of RtI will be spent with kids writing their OWN Diary of…  story. On teacherspayteachers I found a wonderful FREE download that can help get you started for this project! Get it Now. 

Halloween

Fluency Phrases

I was browsing around on teacherspayteachers and found this AMAZING set of fluency phrases. My kids are really into Star Wars right now so I was even more excited to find something that they would enjoy. She has all these different sets of phrases based on different characters of the movies and they're leveled from easy to hard. She even includes a set of free posters about fluency and assessment sheets.
Here is the link:
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Stay-on-Target-with-Fluency-Phrases-728523

Setting Goals

I wanted my RtI kids to focus on making goals for themselves. So as a simple way to display their goals I came up with this bulletin board.
I had seen a Pin where students took brown paper bags and cut slits into it and them twisted them to form branches (see link below). So I thought that I could create that in a larger version by using the bulletin board paper that we have in the teachers workroom and doing something similar.
I punched out some leaves and had students write out their goals on them and this is how it turned out.
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/486107353500259066/

Duck Dynasty!

Just like everyone else in American our students were on the Ducky Dynasty band wagon. But more than that, their favorite character seemed to always be Si (why not, right?).
So in spirit of Ducky Dynasty and wanting to make a bulletin board that the kids were interested in I came up with this Predicting bulletin board. I used some leaves from the dollar tree and found some prairie grass out in a field in the country.
Love how it turned out!

Love for Reading

 

My love for reading comes honestly and works out perfect that I am a reading teacher! I wanted a way to show students that I too engage in reading books, and many different types of books at that. So I set out on yet another project. I found a U.S. map in the school supply section at Target and trimmed it up to fit onto a 3D thick poster board.

I used push pins to mark places on the map where the locations of books I have read are. I later changed this to printing pictures of the cover of the books and pinning them onto the board because I was quickly forgetting where each and every book's setting was. 

Listening Center

 When we were digging through things our room already had I was finding a lot of books on tape.. literally.. cassette tapes! Which is good and all except the problem was that only 3/8 of the Harry Potter tapes were there and so on and so forth. So I obsessed (literally) in finding all new books on CD and creating a listening center. I spent my entire classroom budget (first year teacher mistake?) on books on tape. However, what I was finding that sets of books with their CD's were extremely expensive so I found an alternative route. Online on Barnes and Nobel and Amazon I was able to find books that were available for download for $1-2. I was able to download them and then burn them onto a CD. Some of the books I downloaded I already had, but for those I did not I went to www.thriftbooks.com and found book to match up and have sent to me.
After all my ordering and downloading I ended up with more than a dozen books and books on CD for my kids to use. When it all came in we matched up the books and CDs and put them in Ziplocks and hung them up on the wall and there became our listening center!

Back to School

Our school is a HUGE football school. So in spirit of the school year kicking off with football we came up with this bulletin board. The background we stumbled across at the teacher supply store (isn't it perfect?). The crowd at the bottom I drew myself and cut out. Then on the football helmets we wrote book titles for the kids to check out

Decorating

After a few long hours over the summer days before the beginning of school we got SO many things completed! We got all our own things in the room and stored away. In addition to, the room was already stocked with hundred of children's books. So we took a day and organized all the books by grade level and then alphabetized those books!  Took some time, but definitely well worth it!

 

I am all about children's books and the characters in them so over time I have gathered a collection of my plush characters so to display them all I found a book that each character as in and displayed those books on top of one of our bookshelves.

 

Below is how my desk started out this year (much cleaner than it is now). I bought the shiny dandelion flowers from Wal-Mart for only $1!

 

A Teaching Job!

Wow! Now I know why it's so difficult for teachers to keep Blogs. I was all about blogging when I was student teaching and have found it extremely difficult now that I have a teaching job. So time for a quick catch up! I was hired a week after graduating from college to my hometown school as an RtI teacher. I absolutely LOVE my job and have had a ton of different experiences so far this year. So I figured I would take some time and catch up on this year.

 

When I was hired another teacher was hired as well for the same position and we got to share a room. So here is how our room started out this summer before any decorations or arranging happened.