We had such a busy week this week, but I feel like we got so much accomplished in such a short time!  I wanted to share our week here, if only because I felt like it was so successful.  I forgot to take a picture of a few things so I’ll share those as I take pics,  but here is a little peek at all the fun we had.

All Summer In a Day

All of our novels for our first novel study have yet to come in, so I pulled out an old short story that I love.  My fifth graders read All Summer In a Day, a really neat short story about a group of school children living on Venus, where, in fiction, it rains all the time except for 2 hours every 7 years. We filled out this anchor chart dissecting some of its key elements.  Each student chose a section to write about and put their answers underneath.  Some of them are still working on their sticky notes, but I thought I would share anyway.  It was great for me to see what they remembered from last year (I’m lucky to be looping)!  Next week, we will pull off their sticky notes and do some “writing long off post-its.”

We also did a few foldables out of Lovin’ Lit’s Interactive Notebook pack.  If you don’t own one or two of these, they are simply AMAZING!  We have already done 3 of her lessons, and I just love them.  I have 5 or 6 of her products, and they are top notch.

Did You Know? Board

This was definitely some Pinspiration, but now I can’t find where it came from!  If you know, please leave me a message, so I can credit that person for their original, similar idea!  I put up a board in the hall that students can display facts that THEY researched and validate.  My talented and gifted kids absolutely love to show off their fabulous facts, so this will be the perfect way for them to do so.  They get to research anything they want to (within reason, of course), and as long as they have a verifiable source, they get to write the fact on the board for all to see.  They are SO pumped up about this that I know there is going to be a waiting list to get their facts up!

Miss Math Dork’s “A Good Mathematician….” Posters

I LOVE these posters, and so did my kids!  Miss Math Dork has the cutest posters with traits of good mathematicians, and we went over them this week.  After we talked about each one, the students got to choose one to draw a comic or scenario for to represent it.  They cracked me up with some of their interpretations!  (I made a mistake in a problem we were solving together this week, and one of my kids said, “See Mrs. M., I’m an excellent mathematician, always checking for errors in the work of OTHERS!”

Character Traits Task Cards

Finally, I have an hour with a third grade language arts enrichment group every week.  They are working on character traits in their classroom, so I pulled out my character traits match up task cards (available for purchase HERE in my TpT store) to use for the last 15 minutes of it.  We had so much fun!

The kids each got four character cards, 4 character clue cards, and a recording sheet.  The character cards describe a person, and the clue cards give a third party perspective of the person (a teacher, a friend, a brother, a sister) with specific character traits.  The students have to infer the character traits on the character card to match it up with the clue card.   I wasn’t sure how they would do since this was our first time meeting, so I split the deck up into sets of 4 cards each for them to match, but they did so well with it, they could have definitely taken on more at a time!  Next time, I think I am going to just give them the character card instead and have them infer the traits and write them on their own rather than give them the clue cards which essentially give them the character traits.  The kids actually asked to bring this one home with them to finish!

We only have a three day week next week, but I’m sure we will be just as busy!