Planning for 3rd grade!

This past week has been a busy one! Thanks to the teacher meetings and spending more time with my coworkers, I am starting to feel more ready for everything. Having people answer your 100 million questions is always great! ;)

I've kept busy with planning too! I'm finally making some headway in what I will do with Literature and Writing. :)

Literature

I finally figured out the units of study I want to accomplish with each novel we read. Each unit is a question and I broke down some of the elements I want to cover in each unit. 

 

It is not all inclusive because I only have 2 mornings a week with them, nor I am finished with my list, but I feel much better knowing where I am going. I'm also going to split up some of those units over two books... AND, I've started working on my Interactive Notebook pages! We use interactive notebooks to help scaffold their learning as they apply it at home as well.

I'm excited for how the first pages have come out!

 We will use our novel for the examples in our interactive notebooks (or iBooks as we call them! :) ) but use these pages for our notes. I left the pages pretty basic, because we are going to build off our class discussions and ideas a lot. 

Our first unit is What Makes a Story a Story? We will cover the story elements in this first unit... I'm still in the process of finishing that up! 

I'm also loving Reading in the Wild! It has been helpful in thinking through reading in the upper grades!

Writing

I have more of a framework to follow for writing, but was struggling to figure out how to bring all my ideas together (6-traits, genre writing, setting up workshop etc). I was looking through some resource ideas that a friend shared with me, and discovered this helpful book:  

I love how it walks you through all the ideas of what you want/need to teach and then to think about how to bring it all together.

I had fun on pinterest and at the library choosing some books I wanted to use as mentor texts to teach about ideas!

Another book i want to read again is Mentor Texts. I read some of it several years ago, but I think this will be a helpful resource too!

I will share all of our back to school plans after I finish them on Wednesday! I am repeating some ideas from last year so if you check out the collaboration label at the side you will get a preview. ;) 

Oh, and don't forget that TPT is having an SPECIAL back to school sale on Wednesday! Just in time to pick up all the things you need to have a great start to the school year! :)

Hope you all have a great first day of school!