Spin a Story and Sequencing

I don't know about you, but these short weeks are killing me! I mean we had a workday on Monday and only four days with kids but I'm exhausted! I need a snowday something fierce, something like THIS maybe:

Wow, can you imagine? We'd be out until May around here! I'm a bit bitter, we haven't had ANYTHING to speak of and it's already the end of January! So instead of playing in the snow, I'm hanging out with my students trying to teach them a thing or two about Energy. I'm whipping through this unit and trying to tie some language arts into it all.

I like using these reuseable anchor charts with these gigantic post it notes that we can fill out but then remove so we can do it again and again with other stories. Here is our sequence chart for The Story of Fern the Fossil and How Coal is Formed. We sequence using a Thinking Map of course. This one is the sequence chain. Perfect for retellings:

My students used the "Spin A Story" wheel to retell the events in the order in which they happened. There is just enough room in each section to tell the main point and draw a picture. I like that because we are leading up to Summarizing where you only give the "gist" of the story.

More examples of their great work...will they remember it for the Benchmark Test this week??

We're talking a lot about increasing the quality of our work since we are getting closer to fourth grade. Maybe I'm rushing it a bit but with high fifty degree weather, it feels like spring this week. Anyway, this one did a great job.

Here is the wheel in case anyone would like it. I ran it on tag so it would hold up better.

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Have a great end of the week!