Monday Made It: {August 4th} and a Freebie!

So this was an extremely busy weekend. My little sister from my sorority got married! I wish I had actually gotten some pictures this weekend, but somehow I didn't seem to have my phone with me. Thankfully I was in the bridal party, so I'll have some great pictures soon. Now that I feel a bit more like myself (there was a lot of sleep and recovery that needed to happen) it's time to link up for Monday Made It!

On Sunday, I had to recover from the long days before and I conveniently received The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller in the mail. I was exhausted and planned to read a chapter or two and then take a nap, but I couldn't put it down! I read the entire thing on the spot, what a great read. It definitely inspired me to look at how I was teaching reading. I immediately got on Amazon and ordered Reading in the Wild. Thanks to Amazon Prime, anything that I had planned to accomplish tomorrow will no longer happen since I will be spending the whole evening reading. This year, I plan to do the 40 book challenge with my students. I had read about it on a few other people's blogs, but now after reading about it I know that it is my plan this summer. This challenge inspired my Monday Made It for the week!

I had talked to a colleague in another building about doing the 40 book challenge with her class and our classes keeping in touch. If you don't know about the challenge, students are required to read 40 books during the school year that come from different genres. Students will track their books as they read throughout the year and will complete the different genres. I want to do as much celebrating as possible with this, so I plan to have a display in my hallway with each of my students names, a place for them to share what they are currently reading, and a place for their badges. Each time they complete the number of books for a genre, I will give them their badge to hang outside. You could also use them on their notebooks. Click on over to my TPT store to grab the freebie here! 

Our school does not have a color printer, so although I plan to print them in color, I did not want to have badges that were too heavy on the color since I will be the one printing them all. 

My colleague and I also talked about how we want our students from our separate schools to share book recommendations with each other. We will be using Padlet with our classes. Have you heard of it? If not, stop on by the blog tomorrow to check out my Tech Tuesday on using it! It's so easy and you are going to LOVE it! 

Tomorrow also starts a three day math professional development for me on the Expressions series. Does anyone use it? Thoughts? 

Five for Friday!

WOW. This week has been really long. Welcome to SOL testing. Haven't been on here all week. But I didn't want to miss out on Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching, so here goes nothing!

We are an Success for All school. There are certainly some great things about the program, but at this time of year, myself and the kids are starting to get a bit frustrated with the same thing every day. On Wednesday, all of my fourth graders were at Jamestown and this meant that the best plan for SFA would be to do an alternative project with my fifth graders! 

Since we are reading a Wrinkle in Time right now, we are creating our own planet and then writing about it. Figuring out how to show the reader our planet in our writing instead of telling about it is certainly going to be exciting! I can't wait to see how they turn out! Here is some of our planning:

Students have to answer a bunch of questions about their planet and then have a few other things to do to complete their projects. I think the writing is really going to push them. If you want to check out the project, head on over to the TPT store and see my Wrinkle in Time Planet Creation Project!

It has really been a LONG week of SOL testing. So far this week I have tested third, fifth, and sixth grade math. Being a specialist at this time of the year is hard! I miss seeing my math kids! :( Although we can't read during testing, we can read after! During the past two days week I have managed to read two great ones! 

Today's book of choice was Wonder by R.J. Palacio

What a read! I couldn't put it down and was crying at my desk. Our county uses this as one of the fifth grade reading titles and I see why! We don't use the reading curriculum since we are an SFA school but I will definitely be assigning this as reading with my students next year. It teaches you so much!

Yesterday's choice was Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. 

This was another excellent book! A colleague had a class set in her classroom that she had never read. Our library just got it in and I couldn't put it down! What an excellent book. I read for four hours last night and stayed up way later than I should have because I had to see what Isabel's fate was. I highly recommend it and I will be getting the second book in the series, Forge from my library this weekend, AMAZING!

I am also proud of myself for getting so much done this week! At the beginning of the year I made SOL checklists to help me make sure that I covered everything with my kids. I teach 4th and 6th grade math at the same time and sometimes needing an at a glance way to make sure I was getting everything done. I wanted to go ahead and make this for the other subjects as well, but this year got away from me. I finally motivated myself this week and realized that one of my buyers on TPT is one of my sorority sisters from Radford, what a small world!

Finally, I am so very excited for this weekend! I get to enjoy some relaxation but also will be going to my Little's Bridal Shower on Sunday. I am so excited to see her and give her a gift that I believe will be quite entertaining. More about that next week! 

Now it's time for me to get back to that relaxing thing. Hope everyone has a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! 

Happy teaching y'all!