Details and nice work

Yes, I know I have been MIA since the beginning of the school year. I want to apologize for that. I had some personal things going on toward the end of summer and beginning of the school year and felt that my family should come first. Now that I am somewhat back on track…even with this CRAZY winter…I am hoping to get a blog post up once a week!

Have you been having a crazy winter as well??? We have already used up our 5 emergency days because of the cold weather. It seems like it snows, gets super cold, snows again, gets super cold, and snows again and super cold. It is the cycle that will not end!!! How many snow emergency days have you used??

Well, since we have come back from Christmas break, I don't think we have even had a full school week yet! Thus, possibly the reason my students’ coloring has reverted back to what it was at the beginning of the school year…TERRIBLE! I have done several mini lessons on coloring throughout the first semester but this time; I finally made an anchor chart to hang up in the classroom. (DUH…why wouldn’t I have done this a long time ago???? I had done examples in all my mini-lessons but never made a chart!!)

My kiddos helped me make the anchor charts telling me what was acceptable and what was not. Now that they have this visual, there is no excuse for scribbling!

We have also been talking about using details in our pictures; another skill that kind of has been forgotten about. So, again, we worked together to make another anchor chart. We had the discussion about how illustrators of picture books, work really hard to make the pictures match the words in the book. Sometimes, if authors don’t make detailed pictures in their books, it makes those hard vocabulary words difficult to sound out. Then, we compare this to their journal writing or mini-book writing…if students don’t draw detailed pictures, it may be hard to go back and re-read later. 

Here is our anchor chart for remembering details in a picture:

We have had such a busy week and it is only Wednesday! We have been trying to play catch up since we have had so many days off, today was a 2-hour delay and Friday is the 100^th day of school! If you haven’t seen some of the activities we do for the 100^th day of school check out my 100^th day blog post here or check out years past by clicking the picture below.

I can’t wait to share some pictures from our 100^th day this year! Check back next week for those!

Have a fabulous day!