Five for Friday 1/16

Hi!  I am linky up for a Five for Friday with Doodlebugs Teaching!  This week we are building and building our writing skills by using our sight words to help us make sentences.  3rd Quarter always seems to be when our writing begins to flourish.  Anyway, here's my 5 for Friday...

We read "The Mitten" by Jan Brett and did an art project with it.  A simple project that worked on writing and constructing a sentence as well as story recall.  

I tied this activity in with my Religion class, but you could definitely use it as a literacy activity as well.  We talked about how God gave us each special talents.  This was a perfect book to read as an introduction to that.  It's called "Jack's Talent".  Then we made a class book on our own talents.  Again, they worked on using sight words to form a sentence:  I am ________ (top)

I am good at __________(bottom).

Here's an example of a finished product:

We had a little Write the Room, Polar Animal style,  The students had to go around the room with clipboards & find all of the polar animals on their sheet, and write the names.  They LOVE Write the Room activities.  It gets them up and moving.

I just finished adding this product to my TPT store this morning.  It is a bundle of monthly/word and picture cards that I am going to keep in my writing center as well as at each student table so that these words will be readily available for their writing.  

Lastly, our literacy centers were heavy this week with depicting sounds and spelling CVC words.  We did this on Stretchy the Snake, on divided trays with letter cards, and with magnetic letters and picture cards as you see above.  

Well, I hope you had a great week.  Thanks for stopping by and seeing what we are up to.  

Do You Wanna Build a Snowman?!?

We are now in the 3rd quarter of school, and all I can say is "Baby It's Cold Outside!!!"  It's our first week back since Christmas break and it was a week of getting back into the swing of things, finalizing evaluations, inside recesses,  and having some Winter themed learning as well!  

First, I wanted to post a student in my class who got decorated as a snowman in our "Reindeer Games" that we had before Christmas break.  3 other members of the class got to help wrap him and decorate him, all while they were racing different classes.  I thought they did a TERRIFIC job!!

and here are the people that made this snowman happen...

Great job, I say!!!

Speaking of snowmen, we made some cute ones in our art center this week.  

With Winter in the works, I created this packet in my TPT store for us to work on some math and literacy concepts.  I have been using these packets (I made a Dec as well) as morning work for the class and to reinforce certain skills I feel they need more practice on.  I do use the writing in our Writing curriculum though.  It has some fact writing, letter writing, a bunch of diff things.  Here's a peek...

We have been working hard at blending our sounds together too. I love this tray for working on this:

We worked in our guided reading groups with Stretchy the Snake from Deanna Jump-

Well, that's all I got for this week.  Stay warm everybody!!