First week done! Pictures and more pictures.

We returned to school year in Ontario on Tuesday and had a nice 4 day week to ease us back into the routines to school. This year is a little very odd for me because I am only returning for the first 2 weeks of the year!

I decided to focus on curriculum rather than routines because I have no idea how the teacher coming in will want the class to be set up...at least curriculum is constant and by completing some expectations they will be able to focus on the typical beginning of the year community building. 

Here is the makeshift calendar that I created (only using chalk...blah). The first math expectations I have been covering with the class are place value to 1000 and skip counting...nothing too complicated.

I have been reading picture books that focus on the theme of inclusivity. First we read Odd Velvet by Mary Whitcomb and worked through the structure I followed last year after reading The Power of Retelling.  I love following this structure because it keeps all of the comprehension strategies fresh in the student's minds. 

The first writing unit in Grade 3 is procedural writing so we did 2 different shared writing procedures to provide some examples for the students. These are the only real "classroom routines" I have tried to implement for the new teacher coming in. I hope they are okay with it. 

I was pleasantly surprised when I asked the class to make a mind map of everything they could think about math...and they came up with so many good ideas!

Here is a chart I made to illustrate the math goals we have been covering during our calendar time and during different class discussions. 

On Friday, we made this class bar graph about our birthdays. The other curriculum expectations that are covered in the beginning of the year is graphing and sorting so I thought that by making a bulletin board bar graph the students would have a HUGE anchor chart for how a bar graph should look...and it created a small sense of community when we could see when all our birthdays fell during the year. 

My biggest goal of these two weeks was to create a portfolio of diagnostic work to help the new teacher have a sense of where the students are academically and not feel as though they are coming in super late...it's what I would want someone to do for me. So in addition to the diagnostic tasks we have been working on creating a portfolio cover. I blogged about this art assignment a few years ago when I taught my own art (oh how I miss that!)

Lastly, we brainstormed all the things a good classmate is/ does/ says and is not...a great idea I found on Pinterest(!!) but is originally from Using My Teacher Voice. Hopefully, the new teacher coming can use this to create the classroom rules they want to have posted in their room. 

Well, there's my first week in a nutshell...and tomorrow I start my last week! What a weird feeling. 

Starting to Work on Retells

My class is starting to move towards retells of the texts we are reading. That means we are using some of the great strategies I have learned about from reading The Power of Retelling. Here is a look at our most recent Books of the Week.

Every Monday we do predictions and vocabulary. Two weeks ago I had my students predict independently and post it on chart paper. I have found that the more we talk about predictions and justify the reasons we used to make the predictions the better my students are getting at this skill. 

Last week, we very quickly made predictions because I felt that the title "Larf" didn't really lend itself to making predictions and other than predicting that the book was about bigfoot/a sasquatch based on the cover there wasn't much else to go on!

Which was fine because I was really excited to get to our story mapping chart. 

We then moved on to finishing some sentence stems for our interpretations of of the book...and I discovered that my students really need some work in this area!! 

Here are some of the good ones...

Yesterday we completed a sequence GO! chart for our retell. My class seems to be on the ball so far with retells, but of course we were all together on the carpet. Time will tell.