Use Kind Words

Yesterday was such a great day at school that I was a little sad to see it come to an end and have a nice long weekend with nothing to do to look forward to!  I have now banned the words "like" and "love" from my students daily sentence writing and the results have been incredible.  I pick five random people to sit in the "Author's Chair" to read their sentence each day.  When one girl read "Use kind words."  I cheered and clapped.  We started a chart called...."Words of Wisdom" inspired by this sentence.  I'm looking forward to next week when I'm sure someone else will come up with some gem to live by!

I love my easel!

Most of my students have gotten pretty good at partner reading.  I have a couple who have a difficult time keeping their eyes on the words and staying in one place.  Working with a twosome yesterday I turned it into a game with some fantastic results.  One of the pair was working really hard as they were taking turns page by page.  One partner never knew where they were supposed to be when it was their turn, so I just had "the reader" keep reading.  She got to a word she didn't know and in her hesitation the partner chimed in with the word and I said to just keep going.  The partner got to an unfamiliar word and the other reader jumped in with the right word and kept going.  It was wonderful to see both partners engaged in the text waiting for their turn to jump in.  I'll be keeping these two together and watching with delight as their fluency and word recognition soars.

I'm going to try to catch up with some house work really fast so I can play with my Cricut and make some math centers with folders to help with math facts.  What will you do on this wonderful long weekend?

A very easy Cricut creation!