Pictures! Anchor Charts! Freebies! Oh my!

SNOW DAY!!! Well, not really. The weather people predicted a ridiculous amount of snow for pretty much all of Ontario. We go....none of it really. At least, here in the GTA but the scare was enough that the school board cancelled all the busses and when you work at a school that is 98% bussed...well, not much happens. In case I haven't mentioned it before my school was built for 675 students...we currently have close to 1300 students!! WHAT? HOW?? I know, that's what everyone says. Well, we have 25 portables outside the main building. Yup, an entire school outside. There are 85 permanent staff working at my school everyday, K-8.

So, to get back on track with the busses being cancelled there were very few students at school today. My teaching partner and I combined our classes and we did a little art, a little geometry jeopardy and some movie watching. It was a relaxing day. It fit in well with the rest of my week where I have not brought my teacher bag home a single day and I have caught up on my hobbies. I think after a whirlwind few weeks of reports, assessments and strep throat I just needed some down time...BUT that doesn't mean we haven't been busy in my classroom.

Here's what we have been doing!

Learning about the benchmark angles. I used these great posters from Mary over at Guided Math.

We also brainstormed everything we knew about quadrilaterals- angles, sides, vertices, parallel ...you name it we thought of it. I was super impressed with my class on this day! Everything I wrote on these anchor charts was straight from them!

We've been working on these tessellation art projects since we were working on patterning during math. I like how they turned out but next year I will make sure to insist that my students stretch a little farther and attempt to create an object out of the tessellation shape they use. I found an amazing lesson plan online here...Go check it out! The kids can be sooooo successful with this. 

In writing we have started working on Narrative Writing and I have mainly been using the unit plan I purchased from Jen Runde's TPT store- Runde's Room. This is a FANTASTIC unit! The kids and I are loving it. 

My teaching partner had never seen the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then strategy and is loving it. I have used it many times in the past and was once again happy with how effective it is for helping students understand the plot of a story.

This is our anchor chart about memorable characters. I'm not sure I agree with everything they said BUT at least Harry Potter, Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder made the list!

And last but not least...

I found an amazing activity on this blog and decided to try it in my class. It turned out great!!!!

Last week when I introduced our Medieval Times unit I started with a time line of important world events to help my students gain a frame of reference for when the middle ages occurred. One of the events was the death of Martin Luther King which really caught their attention. So today we took a break from the middle ages and made these amazing MLK portraits and dream writings!! So proud!

Here is the small sheet I prepared for my students (FREEBIE) so they could write their own "I have a dream..." statements after we read a few picture books and watched some videos on MLK. Enjoy! The font I used is Scribbled for Sugarfrog Fonts. 

I hope you weathered the "storm" if it hit where you live, and if not I just hope you had a great Friday!