Blessed to Teach and Read

We enjoyed a rather summery October this year with highs in the mid-80s.  Whew!  Hot! However, I went ahead and pulled all the fall books and eventually sipped on a pumpkin spiced latte.  :)   Our "Fall" display of books, made its way into the window, since we'd been running out of space on top of our book shelves.  I had to turn down 5th grade for displaying their Civil War projects, because PTA's Reflections (student art) were already going to be using the space. I made some new shelf labels to replace old ones and to help students locate books on their own.  These also assist me when I shelve books during my classes.  After 3 years, I've almost memorized where everything is located, but these visual clues are quite helpful. (On my "to-do" list are visual clues for the "E" and Non-fiction sections.) I did do a fiction lesson with first grade on different series found within the "E" fo...

Found out last night around 10 p.m. that school was cancelled for today.  One of those, "better safe, than sorry" situations, where we probably could have attended school, but stayed home and used our ItsLearning platform to learn instead.  I got time to work on a new book order list for this spring, and time to update my much-neglected blog.  (And time to catch up on some household chores!)  So, without much further ado, here's what I've been up to instructionally since my last post in September 2015... In October, I found this cute jack-o-lantern in the storage closet, and used it for our "Carve Out Time to Read" Halloween/Fall book display.   I also tried to incorporate spiders in kindergarten's lesson on "Verbs" and in first grade's lessons on taking notes from nonfiction books and identifying nonfiction book text features.  We also worked on our nonfiction writing in conjunction with our school's adoption of Lucy Cal...