This is what I found in my inbox this morning!
Oh joy, I am super excited and grateful to have this day.
This is today's plan:
What a great feeling, right?
I thought I'd also take this opportunity to catch up with a post.
School has been somewhat overwhelming this year.
Thankfully, I have one of the sweetest and most loving classes ever.
They have helped me keep my head in the game.
I've been working them really hard; yet, they come to school with sweet notes and lots of hugs and love.
I'm a lucky teacher.
Those of you who have been following my story know that we had been flex grouping for reading for the last year and a half. We are back to the traditional model and I am scrambling to manage four reading groups in my class.
Difficult to say the least.
It is a struggle to meet the needs of such a diverse group and time is always an issue. I always feel as though I am shortchanging someone.
As we introduce reading strategies, we have been posting them on this CAFE board. It allows me to constantly refer to all of what we have been working on throughout the year. All my groups refer to this all the time.
We also create anchor charts to record our learning. We are using Benchmark Reading as our core reading program. I like that Identifying Main Ideas and Details was introduced early in the year.
We use this skill in so many areas, from science to math to social studies learning.
I'm constantly integrating content studies into my reading time. Our schedule allows for 25 minutes for social studies /science a day. There is no way we can cover all that we need to in that amount of time so I weave content learning throughout my reading rounds, small group and whole group reading times.
We recently worked through a unit on Ancient Greece. We read from lots of nonfiction materials to get information about this civilization.
It turned into a great practice and review of reading with main ideas and details in mind.
We created an Ancient Greece flip flap book to use as a study guide.
The topics of physical characteristics, human characteristics, adaptations and contributions were recorded on each of the four flaps.
Inside each flap, we glued down and wrote the main ideas and details associated with that topic.
This flip flap book includes a pocket for each main idea. This became the perfect place to put our folded Greece maps.
Students used index cards to write and illustrate important words or ideas that they needed to remember.
These index cards fit perfectly into the book's pockets. Students can sort and classify these detail words under each main idea.
Interested in making these with your third graders?
I have posted these materials and others related to Ancient Greece in my TPT store.
You can check them out here:
How are you managing to fit it ALL in?
Would love to hear from you....
youngdor8@gmail.com
