Apostrophes, Quotations, and Commas - Oh MY!

We've been having fun in my classroom.  :)  A lot of wet glue has been used - so messy, so worth it!  

This week in our mentor sentences we have been focusing on apostrophes, quotations, and commas.  I use Jivey's Mentor Sentence unit... this week our story has been Stellaluna.  Such a good story!  

Anyhow, after we read it, picked it apart - I wanted them to have more practice working with the different punctuation before we created our own sentences.  So I used Where the Wild Things Learn's task card pack.

I ended up just printing the entire thing off and with the 24 of each type of card, I formed 6 groups.  

Imagine this - 6 groups, 12 cards total (no groups had matching cards).  The kids cut the cards a part, glued it onto large construction paper (they fit on two 12x18 sheets stapled). 

They first glued down the task cards to the paper, to make sure they all fit, then they moved onto the macaroni part - adding commas, quotation marks, and apostrophes.  

That was yesterday...  so today we took it to a new level.  Instead of groups, they had to find a sentence in our read aloud - Charlotte's Web that showed all 3 types of punctuation and had to write it in their mentor sentence notebook as a good example.  Then they showed me for approval, chose a colored sentence strip, and wrote it in marker - adding macaroni over the punctuation as they went. 

These are now hanging up on the wall as a display of great sentences - of course I forgot to take a picture of that.  

I hope you had a great day! Linking up with Holly's Tuesday Tried It!  

Peek at my Week

Linking up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings again to share a peek of my week.  

We are moving into our business unit.  For an introduction to the unit, I have students brainstorm a business that they are familiar with, and then they have to come up with a product list.  Our story this week is a short one, so it allows us time to really talk about what makes up a business.

We are still tackling doing everything in multiplication (switching from addition and subtraction), so this week is working on patterns and function tables..  I've been adding task cards into my morning math meeting to make it an easy switch out at the end of the day and to give some variety.  

I made up this freebie to help my kids review - there are 14 function tables with

 different operations to get my kids thinking of finding the rules.

The past couple of weeks we have been so focused on science that social studies took a back seat. This week is all about learning about the CA Explorers - Cabrillo, Drake, and Vizcaino.  

I'm using my pack to have the kids compare/contrast the men, writing informational paragraphs, and drawing portraits.  

We have one more chapter about Ecosystems - so this week my students are bringing in an empty Kleenex box to paint their own ecosystem - that's the plan for Friday.  I'll talk more about that in a different post - basically it's this idea - picture is from last year.  

Our Mentor Sentences this week focus on commas, apostrophes, and quotation marks.  I'll be using Where the Wild Things Learn's Task Cards to help kids focus.  

Then I picked up a box of elbow macaroni, and the students will be creating their own examples on sentence strips - gluing on the macaroni.  I'm so excited about this project!  

Have a great week!  

Five for Friday - Owl Pellets, Spiderwebs, and the Pumpkin Patch

5 random things about my week...  Let's see...

Today we tackled Owl Pellets in class - well, really outside...  

The weather was marvelous.  Same type of set up as last year - each group had a plate (I chose foam since adults were spraying water on them), a bone bowl, gloves, tweezers (Big Lots has a 2 pack for $1), toothpick, and this year I brought wooden skewers from home.  I put down butcher paper, and the kids wanted to sit boys vs. girls.  When they were completely done, they got a snack size plastic bag and separated out the bone bowl with their partner.  Then they headed inside to fill in Jivey's Owl Pellet Dissection worksheet.  It was so cool and gross at the same time!   

 This week we had our parent art docent come in and present a lesson about art in nature.  She had a powerpoint that she shared with the class with different pictures of spiderwebs.  Some had snow on them, some had rain, they all had different designs.  Then she walked them through creating their own webs.  It totally ties into reading Charlotte's Web and Halloween...  

The kids each got a square of card stock, and she had them take a ruler to draw perpendicular lines with a sharpie.  Then she had them go through the intersecting point and draw 2 additional lines.  The next step had them drawing "valleys" starting at the outside of the square making connectors between the main straight lines of the web.  From there, once the web was complete, she had them take 2 colors and create an AB pattern going around.  The last step was optional, but if they wanted to they could draw a small spider on the web and add googley eyes.  The kids loved the project!    

Number 3 is easy... my preschooler had his first official field trip to the pumpkin patch today.  Since I was up to my eyeballs in owl pellets my husband got to chaperone.  

Lucky him!  His shirt is so cute - he actually made it in class with his teacher.  They tie dyed the candy corn shirts specifically for this field trip.  S is so proud of it!  

What else?  Today was a minimum day to work on report cards and I actually FINISHED!  We always have the afternoon to get it done, but I never actually get it done on time during the day... it usually takes me into the next week.  Somehow miraculously I did this year.  Yay!  It being the end of the trimester - I will completely enjoy this random weekend with no grading!!  :)  In other classroom news - I totally fell today.  Tripped over a backpack during prep and went down.  OUCH!  Got a beautiful bruise that has formed...  

Last up I wanted to give a shout out to Fifth in the Middle.  That girl is now celebrating 1,000 followers over on TPT.  Make sure to go enter!   

Well, I'm linking all of this up to Doodlebugs.  I hope you had a great week too!