Five for Friday!

This will be the LAST Halloween related post, I promise (until next year hehe)!

I’m linking up with Doodle Bugs this week to share what I’ve been up to this week during the craziness that is Halloween.

We started working on predicting last week as well as adding responses into our Reader’s Notebooks. I read the story “Oliver Button is a Sissy”…fantastic book by the way! This was one of my second graders responses in his notebook. I used his response to show the other students what kind of things they could write about. This kid just LOVED that his work was getting written on chart paper and displayed in the class! This chart not only has our learning goal on it but with his response as an exemplar the students can clearly see what type of response they should be aiming for. Do you post student exemplars in your room? Do you have an interesting way of displaying them? I would love to hear from you!

This is clearly a problem:

This listening center is from the dawn of time! It barely works, gets all tangled up, the headsets are ginormous (yes I did use that word), students can never figure out which button to turn to get their volume to work….basically this system just sucks.

I went to my admin to see if we could purchase something from this century and to my delightful surprise she said “Go ahead and get something”!

So, this is what I found at Best Buy:

It takes 5 regular sized headphones or earbuds and the sound squality is great! Right now I have it hooked up to my classroom computer and we use it for Listening To Reading during Daily 5. BUT the nice thing about this is that it can also be used in an ipad so we could have multiple listening stations set up.

Problem solved!

In my search for a cheap Halloween costume at the dollar store, I found these bad boys!

These are sponge capsules that you put into warm water and the kids watch them dissolve and grow into something!

I put them in the cups while the students were working and I didn’t tell them what they were. They watched them with such intensity! I loved listening to their conversations about what they thought was going to happen or what they thought they were.

Our school does a pumpkin carving contest each year. The students bring in spare change and vote on their favorite pumpkin. The money raised goes to a charity that our sixth grade students pick. These were my favorite!