A Peek Into My Week - Mar 17 - Mar 21

Next week is going to be short but crazy!  We ended our third quarter on Friday, so we will be having Parent Teacher conferences on Wednesday and Thursday - that means half day craziness.  Friday I will have a sub because my hubby is having a procedure to reduce his migraines.  He has tried everything from physical therapy to meds to botox - with no relief!  We are really hoping this works!  With 6 boys to keep after - migraines are just not a part of the plan!

I am linking up with Mrs Laffin's Laughings to share a few things we have planned for next week:

Reading/Science

Animal Presentations

The students have been hard at work putting together their animal research reports and boards.  We will present them this week.

We used this Animal Research Project from forkin4th.

Conferences

When I hold conferences, I try to have the student run the conference if possible.  I have them complete the sheets below which I found from Lesson Plan SOS.  This really helps them guide what they tell their parents and I have found the students to be VERY honest.  Their reflections usually match their grades closely, and light bulbs seem to go off in many of their heads about their work habits.

They are often tougher on themselves then I would be, but that is often a great teaching point in itself!



 I also ask them to write a short note to their parents telling them one thing that they are proud of this quarter and one thing that they are still working on.  It works great for the conference and is also as a mini-assessment.

I also found these forms from Ms. York's class that I think I might use this year.

Do you have your students write self-reflections for conferences?  Do you have any other tips for having successful conferences?

Math

Due to the short week, we will be reviewing fractions - St. Patrick's Day style!

Wacky St. Patrick's Day Fraction Fun

and

This one is a FREEBIE!

A Peek at My Week-November 10, 2013

I am linking up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings for A Peek at My Week.
 
Because of Veterans Day, this next week will be short of course, but it will be even shorter for me since I am taking the GRE on Wednesday! And although I should be working on sub plans as we speak, I am blogging instead! LOL!

 Daily 5 (Reading and Writing Mini-Lessons)

 We are finishing up our poetry unit and will continue to work on reading Love that Dog and using mentor texts to write our own poems.  I will be posting more about this later on this week and next week, but I am loving how their work is turning out!  My reluctant writers are turning into poets!  

 Math 

 This week begins our division unit.  Most of my kiddos are still struggling with the concept of division and their basic division facts, so this week will be an extensive review before we dive into the processes of long division.   I just started small math group instruction two weeks ago and I am LOVING it.  I really loved when one of my struggling kiddos said, "The best part of math rotations is working with the teacher!" (My other rotations are seat work and games). I feel like I can really give each student what they need and ALL of my students are making progress instead of just a few.  

 One of the games I will be adding to the rotations this week is this division bump freebie game from Games 4 Learning. 

Social Studies

We will continue learning about the Pony Express.  We had a re-enactment done a few weeks ago sharing letters from our school to another local elementary school which the kids loved!  We have been reading a few pages of this book everyday.

We will then start learning about Native Americans in our state.

Science

This week starts our unit on systems of the human body.  

Seems like an awful lot to cover in a short week, but somehow we will make it all work!