Five For Friday - Digital Resources for Fables and Myths

I'm back for a look at my week through Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday!

We've been working on reading traditional literature.

A few years ago I came across this great app that features many popular fables, and they are told through animation.  My students love them.

The app is called Animated Aesops Fables and is $1.99.  You can find it at this link.

I created a reflection booklet for our unit on Fables, and it covers many of the Common Core skills.

You can check it out in my TpT store here.  It is a great deal at $2.50!

These are some the books we use for our Fables unit. 

You can find the suggested titles in my TpT product.

We also read myths as a part of our unit on traditional literature.

I used the easy myths from Starfall, but was surprised to find that the website is no longer free.

Luckily, they do offer a free app, so my students were able to access the myths through that.

Our current social studies unit is on Russia.

Our city has a sister city in Russia, Kurgan, so we research what life is like in this large country.

I created a class Google Slide presentation, and groups of three each worked on a specific topic.

So, each group was responsible for preparing one slide of the class presentation.

It was a jigsaw-like activity where students then presented their research to others in the class.

We had President's Day off which is a rare occurrence in my district.

My college friends and I took advantage, and drove to St. Louis to see BON JOVI!

The concert was awesome, and we got a great deal on a hotel room on Hotwire.

Our hotel was right next to the Arch.

Unfortunately we missed the photo shoot of the band that apparently took place the day after the concert.

How was your week??

Five for Friday - Fables for Third Grade and More

Hi Friends!

What do fables, Lakeshore Learning, subtraction, hand-washing, and Donors Choose all have in common?

Well, they're all a part of my Five for Friday week!

Hurray!  My Donors Choose project was fully funded on Tuesday morning, by the parents of students in my class!  And, this was before the big announcement from Donors Choose about the #bestschoolday.

So I posted another project on Wednesday night to obtain iPads for our room.

I was lucky enough to have that project posted on the Caring Classrooms site.

It has actually been the #bestschoolweek ever !

We completed our traditional literature unit this week.

Fortunately we have quite a few books in this genre for our students to read.

I created a reflection book for the unit that can be found in my TpT store for only $2.50.

Here are some sample pages from the reflection booklet:

There are more "I Can..." posters and reflection sheets that directly relate to the Common Core standards in reading.  You can find this product here.

Our school nurse did a lesson on hand-washing this week.

She used a black light to show them how dirty their hands really were.

Yuck - I think she made her point about using soap!

We used these clips from Lakeshore Learning while reading some Tall Tale books.

The kids loved using these while they read in small groups.

After they finished the book at our Book Club table, we went back and discussed where they had put the clips and why.

Since we were using these for the first time, I only took out the "New Word" and "Question" clips.

Do you use the box method for subtraction?

My students are really loving it.

To subtract from 100 or 1000, box all the digits to the left of the ones place, and think of how many 10s there are.  For example 100 is 10 tens, and 1000 is 100 tens.

Then cross that out to ungroup the tens, and you can subtract much more easily.

See the sample problems in the picture.

Hope you had a great week!

Check out all the Five for Friday posts on Doodle Bugs Teaching!

Five for Friday - CTP Responsiblity Board

It is sunny here today and the temp is above the freezing mark, so I'm celebrating by hooking up with the Five for Friday linky, which I haven't done for ages!
1.
I updated my "Be Responsible" board.
Each student has a small shape with their name on it.
The black sheet lists weekly responsiblities.
If the students forget one of the responsibilities, his or her shape is taken down.
The students whose shapes are remaing at the end of the week earn a Behavior Buck (our version of PBIS bucks) and some other reward (this week it was a 15 minute technology pass).

I love the look of the new letters I got from Creative Teaching Press!  I had the chevron border from CTP, and have a black, gray, and lime green color scheme in my classroom.

I updated this last week to reflect some responsiblities students had been forgetting lately.

2.
We started a unit on Fables this week, and l love using this book!
There are such great word choices and dialogue.

Make sure you change your voice for each of the characters when reading!

3.
Our district used FOSS Science, and I really love the lessons.  We are currently doing the Earth Materials unit. Although it was a pain to make the mock rocks for this unit, the students loved chipping away at them to find the minerals.

The safety were glasses were a huge hit!

4.
Our PTO organized a fundraiser to obtain more laptops for our school.
It turned out to be fantastic!
Each class had a theme basket, and the families donated items to put in their child's classroom basket.
My class's theme was chocolate - oh my!
(I may or may not have snuck out a dark chocolate candy bar after school one day!)

Someone even donated chocolate lotion!

5.
My nephew plays college basketball and they made it to a championship game last weekend.
It was a very exciting game - they were ranked 7th but made to play the team ranked first.
Unfortunately they lost, but we are all proud of him and the team.
Can't wait until next year!

Check out Doodle Bugs' site for the Five For Friday linky.