A Peek at the Week Linky Party

Well everyone it is finally the first day of FALL! If you have read some of posts you will find that I love fall! Pumpkin Spice sure is in the air at my house. How about yours?

Here's to another Peek at the Week with Mrs. Laffin!

1) I have a celebration from last week that I would like to share before I start with this week's activities. If you read last week's post you know that I tried the first signpost from the book "Notice and Note". Well I have to say that it was a total success in my class. Students were find the contrasts and contradictions in the excerpts I gave them like pros. Then when they asked themselves the anchor question "Why is the character acting this way?" they made wonderful inferences about the character! Go Mrs. Shepherd's Class! :)

2) We will be begin to learn about character traits and how to analyze the character this week. I have chosen to use the book "Black Cowboy, Wild Horses" by Julius Lester. This book is about a man named Bob Lemmons and he is  "famous for his ability to track wild horses. He rides his horse, Warrior, picks up the trail of mustangs, then runs with them day and night until they accept his presence"(Scholastic). It has a great story line, examples of splendid figurative language, excellent sentence structure, and beautiful pictures. We are going to use the text to analyze the character. Students will create a T-Chart in their reader's notebook. On one side they will put the text and on the other they will write the character trait they inferred from the text. In addition to using this for reading, I am also going to use this book during writer's workshop. I plan on taking one of the sentences from the book and using it as a mentor sentence. I am going to model my lesson after the ladies over at Dandelions and Dragonflies. When I read about mentor sentences I knew it was something that I wanted to try.

3)The last plan for the week is to recover from this awful cold I've had all last week and to get all my graduate school readings done!!!!

Thanks for stopping by! I do love comments and new followers! :)

~Susan

A Peek at the Week Linky Party

# 1: I'm finally going to try the first signpost from the book "Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading". The first signpost is called "Contrasts and Contradictions". Students will read and as they read if they notice the character is doing something that is different from how they normally act or different from how they expect them to act, then they will stop and ask themselves the signpost question(every signpost has a question to help the students think) which is "Why is the character doing that?".

I am going to use the sample lesson from the book which uses the book "Thank You Ma'am". As a follow up we will read an excerpt from "The Watson's are Going to Birmingham." I'll blog on how it goes. I think it will be something totally different than what my students are used to but I think it's going to get them critically thinking! Wish me good luck.

I made these anchor charts to go along with the signposts! They are super cute! I can't wait to use them. Click the photo to take you to the product!

# 2: I received a grant last year for Social Studies Weekly. I got them in over the summer and have been dying to use them. Since the 4th grade social studies standards focus on North Carolina we really only have the text book to teach with but I'm not a fan of the text book. So we started the first newspaper last Thursday and the kids really seemed to like them. I think this will make learning about North Carolina more exciting. They have one main story in the middle and lots of little side articles. We are gonna try to get through the rest of week 1 and week 2 this week!

# 3: I plan on continuing my first "Word Nerd" vocabulary cycle this week. We are going to practice our words using a vocabulary rap, a counting dude/bragging dude activity, and we are going to look deep into our crystal ball to predict the meaning of our crystal ball words. Also we will be using our vocabulary lanyards all day, every day to practice our words!!! :) I love being a Word Nerd!! I will add pictures to show you all these activities! 

Hope everyone else has a fantastic week! 

I love comments and new bloggy friends! :)

~Susan

New School Year.......New Kiddos :)

Well fellow bloggers I just finished my first week of my fourth year of teaching and my first year of grad school. Woooooo! it was quite exhausting but I am absolutely loving my classes and the fabulous teachers I have meet. My class is also pretty great! :)

Well I'm trying some new stuff in my room this year and I'm pretty pumped about them!

One of the amazing things I am trying out this year is called "Whole Brain Teaching". If you haven't heard of this before you need head on over to their website and start reading up. https://www.wholebrainteaching.com

Here are five reasons I LOVE using WBT in my room.
1. The kids are super engaged.
2. No more trying lots of different attention getters. Class?Yes! is the best!
3. The students love teaching each other.
4. I love using all the gestures and expression when teaching!
5. The scoreboard is my new best friend!

This is a video I found on Youtube that gives a perfect example of why WBT is so AH-mazing!

The second thing I am trying this year is incorporating the Notice and Note Signposts into my Daily 5 lessons. Another teacher on my grade level and I spent the summer reading the book and adding the signposts to our curriculum map. We tried to think which reading strategies we already taught would be good to introduce with each of the signposts. We plan on introducing the "Contrasts and Contradictions" signpost with character traits and story elements. We can't wait to try this out and have our students thinking deeply about what they are reading! I'll let you know how it goes when we try it. If you haven't read this book and are looking for a professional book, I would recommend this one!

Well that's all for now. I'm going to make it a personal goal to blog at least once a week this year! So tune it for more from Adventures in 4th grade.