Five For Friday - A Pilgrim Came to School!

Hallelujah!  It's Friday!

Here's a peek at my week.

 We had an actual Pilgrim visit our third graders this week!

You should have seen the looks on my students' faces - they were priceless.

They were so confused that "Elizabeth Hopkins" could still be alive.

As one boy explained it, a Pilgrim could have a baby, and that Pilgrim has a baby, and so on....

That's how we could actually have a Pilgrim visitor.  :)

She was so gooooood!  

She was actually from a nearby historical society.

She was worth every cent of the $175 we paid for her.

To review all that we've learned about Pilgrims we have done these Pilgrim I Have~Who Has cards.

They connect so well with our reading of the book If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620.

These cards are available in my TpT store with my Pilgrim Bingo cards.

Check them out here.

 This study of Pilgrims coincides with our non-fiction literature unit.

We started the unit by searching for text features in Big Books.

 Later the students had to search for, and take photos of, text features in Pilgrim non-fiction books.

Pictured below is the checklist of text features they searched for.

We used the Seesaw Learning Journal app to store the photos that students had taken of the text features.

This app provides a digital storage file for each student. 

It's fantastic!

We use it to store math work, recorded readings, and more!

Hope you had a great week!

Head over to Kacey's site to join in on Five for Friday.

Swap Meet - A Product Swap Blog Hop and Giveaway

Hi!

I am happy to be a part of really fun product swap and giveaway!

As a part of this product swap I was lucky to try out the Digital Book Report created by Nicole at Primary Teaching Resources.

Click on the product cover below to go right to Nicole's TpT store to see this product!

 I love to incorporate the use of technology in my teaching, and this was the perfect project to do that, as well as support writing and reading instruction.

And added bonus was that my third graders got a wide variety of book suggestions from their classmates.

First, my students colored the included templates to look like themselves.

Two girl and two boy templates are available.

My students chose the one they most resembled.

Next, we wrote the title and author of a book they had read onto the display sheet.

Also, we gave a brief explanation of a favorite event from the story that might attract a 

new reader to the story.

I don't have a picture of the next step, but after coloring the display sheets, students used Google Drive to write a more detailed book review.  

Then we copied the book review, and pasted it into a box on the site called qrstuff.com to generate a 

qr code of that text.  Since the writing had been in Drive, the students were able to share it with me so I could create the code if they had a problem doing it.

Nicole provided very clear instructions on how to do everything!

This past week I posted the completed projects all around my classroom.

During small group station time, the students used iPads to scan and read each of the book reviews.

I have 7 iPads in my room, and 5-6 students were in the small group that did this activity each day.

A really cool result of this project was that one of the assistant superintendents in my district and my principal happened to visit my room while the students were doing this activity.

They both remarked about how unique the projects were, and how engaged the students were while scanning and reading!

You can win this fantastic project, as well as the others listed in the graphic below by entering our giveaway!

Just follow the entry guidelines in the rafflecopter below.....

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Currently November

Well, an extra hour today means that I have time to join Farley in the month's Currently!

I am a football fan.  And, to be more specific, I am a huge Green Bay Packer football fan!

Here's proof.  This was the scene in the hallway outside my room when the school year started.

Those are three of our amazing Packer players - Jordy Nelson, Clay Matthews, and Eddie Lecy.

We have a big game tonight against the Broncos.  Both teams are undefeated.

Go Pack Go!

We have a few new teachers in our building this year, and they have been such a great addition to our staff.

One of them is someone I work closely with, and I am so happy to have her with us - she has invigorated me as a teacher.  We are working together to bring Project Lead The Way to our school.

Any tips on that?

It's the time to put away the patio furniture - sniff, sniff,

They may be covered with snow if they are left out any longer.

I love this extra hour - enough said.

Our school district is changing insurance carriers.  I have to get those forms filled out yet today!

Mmmm........I love mashed potatoes.  With butter or gray.

Or chunky red garlic mashed potatoes.

Real or box-made. 

Mmmmmmm.

Oh and the winner of my recent giveaway was Suzy Q!  I will be e-mailing you soon!

Thanks to all who entered!