Monday Made It- New TpT & Garden Stones

Happy Monday!  I am barely making it to link up with Tara from 4th Grade Frolics today for her Monday Made It linky!  I spent all day in a Google training (more to share later when I figure out how to process all of my new info) and I am beat!  I'm excited to look though and see what everyone else made this week!

I've got two things to link up today for my Monday Made It.  One is a new product to my TpT store.  I'm pretty new at this whole teachers pay teachers thing, so we'll see what happens. This is something that I use in my own classroom.  I revamped it only to look a little cuter for the classroom, but the idea is still the same exact thing as I've been using.  I talked about this a little bit here if you want to check it out.  Keep in mind that this link will take you to the older version.

Literature Circles:   I use literature circles in my guided reading groups all of the time.  I don't use them over and over, but tend to rotate through a variety of different learning tools with students to do in guided groups.  Something that is always in my rotation is literature circles.  I have created a literature circle pack for a group of students to use right away in a small group.  This pack is designed with 4 members, but no fear, you can easily have more than one member 1, 2, 3 or 4 depending on your group.  The work is independent until sharing time, so very seldom do you have duplicates of what students are sharing.  '

This is member 1.  Each member's cover will look like this, just have a different rotation of jobs for each day. 

Each member has a twelve day schedule included with the pack.  There can easily be more added, or some taken away if you don't need that many.  Each member has a rotation of 4 jobs do go through each of the twelve days.  The pack is put together so all you have to do is print, and you will have each booklet pre-made in order.  It's over 60 pages!!!  You just need to make copies.

After the front cover for each member book is a self assessment page for students to assess how they did with their listening and talking skills for that days literature circle discussion.  I typically have them do that at the end when we're all done.  Then the booklet is laid out with the job pages.  Like I said there are 4 jobs. One is to come up with 3 long answer questions for the reading that was done for that day to pose to the group for discussion.  One is visualization where students draw a part from the reading.  It can be a part they liked, didn't like, an interesting part or a part that made them question something in the reading.  They share their picture, why they drew it and then others can comment/discuss.  The third job is to make connections to the reading, and the last is to give a summary with the main characters, setting and plot of the pages read.

This is an example of a job page.  There are 4 total jobs in the packet for students to rotate through. 

Here is another example of a job page for the student book. 

Helpful Hints: I color code the front covers of each book if there are more than 4 students so I know who is on what rotation.  I also have color coded the job pages in the past.  All of the connection pages were yellow, and the visualization pages were pink so I also knew quickly at a glance what each student was working on.  That was more helpful for younger students when I did this in 2nd grade.  As they get older they tend not to need it as much.


Like I said, I'm new to this whole thing. I'd love for you to check out my product and if you think you could use it I'd love for you to download it. I'm going to offer it at 50% off to get started at my store until Wednesday night.  If you do download it I would love for you to leave feedback!  If you do, I will then put your name in a drawing to win a free copy of the higher elementary version that I'm working on right now.   It can easily be used for all grade levels, however it will have a rubric at the bottom of each page and the job descriptions are a little different to accommodate higher level thinking. Hopefully I'll get that done for next week's Monday Made It!

Garden Stones:

Materials: I bought Plaster of Paris from the art store, had some stones in my craft room from random projects that I've done in the past which are totally optional for this project, and larger paper plates with the wax coating as a mold.

Steps:

1. We made the plaster to the directions on the container and then poured them into the plates to settle.  While we were waiting for them to settle, that's when we added any of the beads or stones that we wanted to dry into the mold. 

2. When the plaster began to harden that's when we made our imprints in them.  It was hard to do with a 3 month old, which is why I don't have pictures of the actual process, but we managed to get them somewhat done!

3. After about an hour we removed the plaster from the plate and set on a piece of wax paper to dry overnight.  Then we added paint.  Lastly we coated with a spray plaster sealer so they could go outside and not be ruined by the weather! 

Have a great rest of the day!!!