Five for Friday (plus a freebie)

It's Friday!  Linking up with Doodlebugs to share what I've been up to this week.  

This week has been spent gluing tabs into my composition books.  I've tackled 4 out of the 5, so I'm not quite done yet.  My notebooks are color coded by different subjects, and now these tabs will help kids to stay organized inside the books.  

My Reading Log has Classwork and Homework Tabs.  In past years I've used 2 notebooks (spiral and composition) for this, but I'm trying to put it all together now.  They respond in the classwork part after silent reading (I give them 5 minutes to complete a write up on their book), and homework is one night a week writing about their home books.  

Math is my red notebook this year.  I split it into 2 categories - Skills and Problem Solving.  The front half will be our interactive notebook lessons, the second part will be a place to hold those word problems, journal prompts, and critical thinking.

The green notebook is my Reading Notebook.  I did a triple tab in here, the back half is all Open Court stuff - vocabulary and reading comprehension.  The front half is divided into Strategies and Themes.

The blue book will have our Science and Social Studies notes.  This is the first year the kids won't have workbooks to write in, so we will be spending a lot of time writing notes.  

How I put these together wasn't hard.  It was just a matter of typing up labels for everything I wanted to use.  The page tabs I typed up half size on the address labels, then cut and stuck them onto index cards.  I cut the index cards to make tabs, and then glued it in the right spot on the edge of the book.  Right now it's pretty secure, though I'm prepared to reinforce with tape.  

My pile is getting larger for school.  I still have more projects to finish before Monday rolls around.  

Lots of laminating this week... Just when I thought I was done too!  I had been so good about printing off resources that I had bought from other sellers that I forgot to print out what I made.  :)  Silly me!  I also decided to put my store on sale through this weekend.  

This week there were a lot of bulletin boards being mapped out on the floor.  I really want to have a Data Wall this next year, but I wanted to stay with my green, blue, chevron, apple, bird theme I have going on in my classroom.  The tree will have laminated leaves that are added with different fun things that we learn this year.  The cards and graphs will track the different Math and ELA scores - I've chosen to post the class averages so as a team we are working to improve.  The kids will have their own data in their binders.  

Here's a goal sheet that my kids are going to do that first week of school.  I'm going to post them for Back to School Night.  You can see them in the above picture too, they look great when printed 2 per page as well.  Get it on Google Docs.

Have a great weekend!