Five For Friday: Last Friday in January!

What?! The month of January is already over? Its hard to believe!

Here is what we have been up to this week!

one: Book Talk is in full swing in our classroom! We all want to talk about what we are reading, but it is a learning process for first graders! You can find more details about how Book Talk is going here!

two: I posted a new product this week! We started using them in workshop right away! They are a great way to practice the different plural noun spellings and its only $1! You can find them here!

three: We are working on asking and answering questions this week. I decided to use this time to introduce writing thoughts on post it notes while we read. So we read Hondo and Fabian together and the kids and I wrote down our questions while we were reading. The next day we picked three questions (ones that I thought we could answer and were ones that lots of kids had in common). We reread the story with those three questions in mind. The discussion that followed was so deep as we had to use those inferring skills to figure things out! My favorite quote of the discussion (when we were trying to figure out if there were adults in the story) was "we can hear the mom talking but we can't see her." We never saw a picture of her, but she inferred that one of the quotes may have been by a mom. I was so impressed with my kiddos! 

four: We LOVE  Mo Willems! We are beginning a new IB unit, How We Express Ourselves, and I plan to use a lot of Mo Willems to help us think about expression. During our Read to Someone time I put out several Elephant and Piggie books and the kids each take a part. They have LOVED it! I have never seen some of them so engaged in their Read to Someone time! I think I am going to make some elephant and piggie masks to add next week to keep them excited. ;)

five: No five for friday is ever complete without a picture of my boys! ;) Alex's pose seriously cracks me up. He is a bundle of silliness mixed with some sweetness and a little (or maybe a lot of) stubbornness.

Linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching!

Happy Almost February!