A Peek At My Week {9-7-14}

Wait, What??!!  

It's already Sunday???  

Oh. No!

These weekends just go by so fast. 

Last week was my first week of school,

and we spent so much time getting to know each other, 

practicing routines and procedures and revisiting rules and expectations. 

Boy, am I exhausted!

This week we will really hit the ground running

and get down to business. 

I am ready. I am excited!

I'm linking up with Jennifer 

from Mrs. Laffin's Laughings

to share my plans for the week. 

Be sure to stop by her blog to see what everyone has planned

and for some great ideas!

Reading- This week we will continue to work with the book that we read the first week called First Day Jitters. I shared last week that we are using Jivey's Better than Basal pack to get things started. We didn't have enough time to finish the pack for this story, so that will be the plan this next week. So far it's been great to all be working on the same story and talking together about different story elements. It has really given me an idea where students are coming in at, even before I do all of my assessments. Eventually I will just be using this in my reading groups for students who need more of what we are learning about. It's set up nicely with mentor texts that I usually use in my classroom to teach our reading skills and concepts to my on-level or below level students. I think it will be great for students in my room who need some extra help.  We also are learning about making inferences, and students are using the word "inference" like it's been in their vocabulary for years. I'm so proud!  We will also be doing our Daily 5/ Cafe training this week. We'll be making T charts for each part and also practicing so we know what is expected.  

We did get a great start this last week: 

Writing- Well, I planned way too much last week, so we never got to the mentor sentences that I was telling you about. But that's totally fine, because we're still working on our book First Day Jitters, so it was an easy element to push off for this week.  Not only are we going to be starting each writing block with mentor sentence work, this week we are starting to establish our writing workshop.  I work with Jennifer, and as she has shared this week, she found a really great CCSS aligned writing resource.  As a 3-5 vertical team we are going to implement it this year with our students. I'm really excited about it. Be sure to check it out if you're looking for something to use! This week to launch the workshop we will be discussing the following:

*Why do Writer's Write?

*How do we come up with topics?

*How can we use books to help us come up with topics?

*How do we narrow down our topics when we write?

Some of the mentor texts that I'll be using to talk about these are

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the whole week goes! 

I hope everyone has a great one!