Five for Friday - Close Reading Fun!

Thanks to Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for hosting this fun week-in-review linky!

I introduced Close Reading this week in small groups while we read an article in a Time For Kids magazine.

We did a cold read first, then I brought out the glasses, an annotation guide, and permanent markers.

I got the glasses at my eye doctor's office.  I just asked if they had any child-sized frames that they were willing to give up, and they gave me about 10 pairs for free.

After the initial excitement of wearing the glasses, the students reread the article adding marks from our school district's suggested annotation guide. 

We did a third read looking for pronouns, as that connected with our 

spelling and grammar topic of the week.

Thanks to Angela from Hippo Hooray for Second Grade on her blog post about establishing pairs for group work.  I have always used things like Compass Buddies, etc; but liked the idea of assigning each student a "buddy identity".  So all week these buddies sat next to each other when we worked on the carpet.

Maybe the Berry Blue buddy would have to share ideas first, 

and the next day the Silver buddy would have to share first.

Of course you may have realized that Berry Blue and Silver are our school colors!

We are learning about Simple Machines in Science.

I've been searching online for fun, doable explorations for this unit.

I was thrilled to find a suggestion to use the black section for binder clips 

for the fulcrum piece on these levers!

Here is one the activities the Berry Blue and Silver buddies worked on together.

We were working on pronouns this week, and students had to sort them into 

first person, second person, or third person point of view.

To review, they used a spinner with three sections. Depending on the number that was spun, the partner gave  a pronoun from the matching list of point of view words to spell.

This is Teresa Halbach.

Teresa is a lovely young woman who was horrifically murdered about 45 miles away

 from the city in which I live.

I did not know her, but I have close friends who knew her, and her family, well.

Its been said that she was photographer who could get babies to smile when no one else could.

She was a line therapist for autistic children.

She was the coach of her middle school-aged sisters' volleyball team at a nearby Catholic School.

She could have been your sister, your daughter, your niece, your friend.

Her family declined to be a part of the movie that was recently released on Netflix, because they didn't want 

their tragedy to become a source of entertainment.

So, did her nightmare, the nightmare that could have happened to 

your sister, your daughter, your niece, your friend.....

become a part of your holiday break entertainment binge???

The greatest amount of sympathy in all this should go to Teresa and her family.

And if you are one of those people that thinks her brother had anything to do with her loss, 

then you might want to head to the nearest psych ward, because that notion is pure lunacy.

You can learn more about Teresa here.