Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts

Monday, September 2, 2013

Week 2, What we have been up too...

Hi there friends! Its been a while since I last posted and I do apologise for that. The start up of the year is always a crazy time at The Academy, and I've pretty much lost a lot of sleep and grew a few grey hairs. Now that we have delved into the second week of school, it's good to see the school year starting to meld together.

This is my first year back in fourth grade after being in third for four years. I'm pretty excited as it means I have more teaching time in English and Science.

Our first back mainly consisted of back to school stuff, but I was really eager to get that past so I can get into the nitty gritty of teaching.

I'm definitely loving my new class this year. They are extraordinarily calm and insightful and its great going up a grade with them.

This week, we started off our Reading Street unit, Patterns of Nature. We only picked selected stories from each unit.

The kiddos read the selection in two lessons. Since our comprehension skill is fact and opinion, we did a lot of work on differentiating the two. Afterwards, we made a fact map about what we learnt on Grey Whales and listed the facts and opinions from the story.



If you would like a copy of the worksheet, you can download it here. 

In Science, we have started looking at cells and classification. We are also using the Scotts Foresman Science books which I find a bit dry. I managed to get the Senior School to allow us to use the video microscope to look at plant and animal cells.

The kiddos really enjoyed this as it was the first time they got to use a microscope.  I projected a sample of the onion cell and an animal cell on the board and the kids made some observations.


Before they started, we talked about using our five senses to make observations in Science. I posted an anchor chart on making observations to help them with their write-up.


I hope you are all have a good week at your schools! Happy Days! 

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Teacher College Reading Writing Project and the New York Experience

Ok, so I've been super slacking off on this whole blogging thing and with good reason. I just got back from attending the TCRWP at Columbia University. The Reading Institute is a week long, 30 hour professional development run by Lucy Calkins and her amazing staff developers. TCRWP promotes using the Units of Study curriculum in both reading and writing. Our school does not use this curriculum, rather we use Reading Street (I'm not a big fan of using basel readers), but I did learn many strategies that I hope to implement into my classroom for this upcoming academic year. 30 hours of learning later, I found the importance of using post-it notes so the kiddos can record their wonderings and reading conversations, a huge toolkit for conferences, a plethora of awesome anchor charts, how to use conferring data to help you determine where your students are, the importance of reading logs and so much more. I can't believe I'm actually excited to teach reading this year!


Above, Christopher P. Curtis, author of Bud, Not Buddy - a truly inspirational man, with an insane sense of humour! Will be adding Bud, Not Buddy to my read aloud list this year! David Adler of the Cam Jamsen series also spoke too! 

Spending a fortnight in New York was such good fun. I'm a city girl, having lived in London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong for most of my life, so navigating NYC was relatively easy. I ate ALOT! I spent a lot of time running from restaurant to restaurant catching up with various friends. Sales were a massive hit! I also made my way into the only Scholastic Store in the world and OMG, I wanted to buy so much for my classroom. I ended up spending quite a fortune in there, but luckily there is a teacher's discount of 25%. My kiddos are going to be excited with the new additions to our classroom library! The staff at the store are super friendly and knowledgeable in current books ( I needed more "boy" books for my library), so if you are in the neighbourhood, I recommend you to pop in for a visit! 

I got to catch up with my friend Amanda aka the real life Lara Croft. We spent many days exploring the UWS for their drinking haunts.  This lovely lady has an impressive resume: ex Navy diver, Master Chef, Archaeologist, Fitness Model and now Masters student at Columbia's Journalism school.  Check out her blog www.apronsandsneakers.com. iPad users, download Glam Today, she is featured on their cover! 

NYC before sunset - Empire State Building 
 
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