Week 2- Journal review

Since we don't have a lot of wall space, we have been turning our anchor charts into mini books and gluing them into our journals.

Here are some topics we covered this week!

Parts of Speech- nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs

Action Man! (verbs)
First I had each team come up with as many action verbs as they could. The winning team received tallies in their team points. Now that we had verbs to work with, I decided it was time to introduce Action Man! I used the die-cut of a man and each student got to decorate their own person. The man was glued into our journals and we used the verbs they came up with to write all around the man.

We tried to put the verbs next to the body part that would perform the action. Some verbs could go different places. (like swim- we use arms and legs to swim!)
I did include verbs like kill and mock, although we did have a talk about how those were not particularly nice verbs. 

Story review brochure

I introduced this way of reviewing books so that my students would be familiar with the concept. I hope to use this type of review during small group reading and center time.

We reviewed this book:

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I think my students enjoyed this way of reviewing and retelling books!

Cowboy linking verbs
I have done this lesson with every grade level I have taught. (you know, all 3 levels I have taught now) Last year's group (first graders) did exceptionally well. You can check out their post {HERE}. I used the same book to introduce the lesson, and my kids seemed receptive.

 Check out the video {HERE}

We will have to try this lesson again next week though. A few stinkers ruined the good mojo and we had to cut it short. We went ahead and glued the Cowboy Linking Verbs sheet into our journals for future reference.

The other 3rd grade teachers were so impressed with our work that they decided to create these mini books as well! We are so cutting-edge!

End of Week 1

I don't see myself being a daily blogger this year.
My oldest is starting school and my class this year requires me to do more research and planning than blogging. In other words, I'm really busy! So, I will be blogging at least 2 times a week. I hope to cover the beginning and the end of each week. (so.... maybe Mondays and Fridays?) If there's something totally awesome to share, I will do an extra post.

Here are the highlights of this week:

The Nehemiah Project delivered backpacks full of supplies to our students on Thursday! We are so blessed here at the Hills to have a community that cares!

Also, we found a police officer to be interviewed for our Big Plans Weekend segment! We are going to work with Ms. Harper in the office to get an interview set up with Officer Craw! (he was a volunteer with the Nehemiah Project)

We worked on Types of Sentences and made a handy-dandy flip chart!

 Interrogative: asks questions. We made a list of questions words!

 Declarative: tells you something. (statement) Declarative sentences end with a 'soft' period.

 Exclamatory: Shows strong feeling, ends with an exclamation point.

 Imperative: tells someone to do something, it's very important. (command) Imperative sentences end with a 'hard' period.

Wondering where we got these rules? We have a groovy little Sentence Jingle, compliments of the Shurley Method!

Here's a video of my wonderful class! They're a little shy, but they'll get over that pretty quick!

After creating our flip chart, we glued it into our notebooks. We don't have a lot of room for posters, so we will keep mini-books of our posters in our notebooks for future reference.

Next we looked at nouns.

We created lists of nouns in our notebooks as well.

Each student will get a mini copy of the noun jingle to glue onto their nouns page.


It was a l...o...n...g yet successful week. This was the first time since I've been with Hamilton County that we have started school on a Monday. Typically we have started on a Wednesday to ease everyone back into the system. I hope we never start on a Monday again.

I'll see everyone bright and early on Monday morning!