Time to Catch Up

Where has the time gone?!? About a week and a half ago we said we had another major announcment... sorry to leave you hanging!

I'm having a baby!!! Lots of big news on my end this year.  My students are beyond excited! Every day I find sticky notes on my desk with potential baby names.

In the mist of wedding and baby planning I am managing to get some teaching in! hehe... Thanks to my two lovely sisters, of course.

We have our bat unit under way. We have to say we are very excited about this unit because it was our launch into TPT. It's our first Sister Secrets "baby" if you will! Check it out if you're interested in studying bats this year. Here's a writing craftivity from the unit.

We are also starting our Halloween inspired activities and lessons. Today our cuties began rough drafts of scary stories... look for pictures of the finished projects soon! We also have been enjoying Halloween Bump! in our Math Menu rotations. You can grab a year of bump here, for free!

This week we've been doing all sorts of visualizing. It's one of my favorite strategies! Yesterday, I read See the Ocean.. it's such a sweet story. I stopped about half way through and had the kiddies go back to their desk and draw what they saw when they heard the words on the page, in their Daily 5 Notebooks.  Then we did a gallery walk. Here are a few of their visualizations!

And finally the highlight of last week was a visit from Big Boy! Our students had written resturant letters a few weeks ago and Big Boy wrote back saying they wanted to bring an ice cream sundae treat to ALL of us! 90 ice cream sundaes!! Such sticky fun. :)

I'm off to meet a contractor... we're wanting to renovate the bathroom. Wish me luck!
-Sister 3-

It's Hump Day!

Today we started Math Menu! I know it's only been one day but I'm LOVING it. And more importantly... the kids LOVE it! Today we explained the structure and went over the expectations. We had our first successful day of rotations!

You can grab our free BUMP games from this post! To learn more about how we run Math Menu visit this past post!

Today we also practiced our sentence writing! First we read Dogs Don't Wear Sneakers. It's such a cute story. Around the room we placed animal cards.  We set the timer for 15 minutes and the students had to walk around the room (silently!). When they came to a card they had to stop and write a silly animal sentence. Once the timer went off everyone returned to their seat, reread their sentences, and picked their favorite. Their favorite was then turned into a "final copy." Since they got such a kick out of these sentences we decided to make them into a class book!

 

See you back here Friday for some Five for Friday! 

Math Menu

Yesterday, the sisters and I spend the day at Math Menu training at our local ISD.  It's basically Daily 5 Math.  We are obsessed with Daily 5 so we knew we'd love this too!  We are going to start Math Menu in the fall.  Our math block will look like this.. mini lesson the the math topic for the day, students will be divided into 3 groups, they will rotate to the 3 choices, and we will meet back to talk about what we learned.

The three rounds are:
1. Math practice- this is the worksheet or activity they will complete based on the mini lesson.
2. Math review- this is practice problems from concepts they've already learned.
3. Math games- this can be computer games or any math games you have or find. They don't have to be the specific topic you taught that day.

The three groups should not be based on ability level, everyone should be mixed up so you have time to pull those who need extra support. We all decided that we will be assigning groups and posting the rotation schedule, there will be no choice for Math Menu because everyone has to do everything everyday.  Each of the three rounds will last for 15 minutes.

The presenters showed us this great K-5 website. There are wonderful resources. Just a warning... you might get lost in this site! So much good stuff.

This is our plan for fall... we will update you on how it's working for us!  Does anyone use Math Menu or something similar? We'd love to hear how it's working for you!

- Sister 3 -