We've been busy this month!

Happy Earth Day!!

We made these cute little owls out of scrapbook paper today...
"Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute!" 
They look so cute hanging in the window of our classroom.  Tomorrow we're going to do some writing about how we can help take care of our Planet Earth.  The kids will be tearing blue and green paper and creating their own little earths.



We've spent the last few weeks reviewing the many strategies that good readers use to help them with their comprehension.  These posters include thinking stems to help the kids remember what kinds of things good thinkers may be thinking as they're reading.  Each student has a baggie of color-coded bookmarks (cut from construction paper) to go along with these posters.  The bookmark can be written on, much like a sticky note, without having to spend all the money on sticky notes. 
For example, if a student is at independent reading and has a question about their book, they take out a green bookmark and write their question on that bookmark, then place it in the page where they had the question.  This is done for any of the other thinking stems as well:  orange/visualizing, yellow/connections, purple/characters, blue/feelings, red/predicting.



These "Adjectives About Me" were so cute, I had to hang them in the room and take a picture of them all together.  Since we've been talking about adjectives, they helped each other think of good describing words for each other and then wrote them down and glued them around their little cutie pie self-portraits.









These are the adorable giraffes the kids made after we went to the zoo.  I got the cute pattern from Mrs. Jump's Class.

Early this month, we returned to "Features of Nonfiction".  I've done various anchor charts for this over the past few years, but I really liked this idea I got from this fabulous website:  www.julieballew.com.









This is another awesome idea I got thanks to pinterest and the various blogs I follow!  I just love how this retelling ribbon turned out!  After hearing a story, we bring the retelling ribbon down and go over how to retell the parts of the story. 

Castle:  Where the story takes place
Sun:  When the story takes place
Owl:  "Whoo" is the story about  :)
Boot:  What kicked off the story
3 Star Buttons:  3 main events
Bow:  What tied up the story

See these blogs for more info:
Castles and Crayons
Spotlight on Kindergarten