Word Wall, Beach Wall

After having three days off because of the cold last week, it seemed like Monday was our first day back from break.  It was nice having a 5-day weekend last week but it was very hard to get motivated for school this week.

This weekend, I spent many hours working on a beach themed word wall for all 220 Dolch words.  I am hoping to have this posted on TeacherspayTeachers before the end of the week, fingers crossed that it happens tonight.  Maybe it was the temps below zero last week, or maybe the fact that I could still be living and teaching in North Carolina, but the beach was on my mind.  The beach word wall packet will contain 26 word wall letters, with a cute flip flop theme.  I even colored coded vowels and consonants.  Each word wall word is on a blue surfboard.  These turned out really cute, I wish that I had a classroom right now to use these.  I have been having some difficulties with getting this packet to save as a PDF file.  Thankfully, I figured out a way to save what I was working on a different way and everything is fine!

Surfs Up!

I have also been busy writing a Groundhogs Day and a Dental Health Literacy Packets.  So far, I have the main ideas for my two stories written, and have a few comprehension questions to answer for each one.  I have also been trying to think of some other literacy center ideas and writing prompts.  With another long weekend coming up, I am going to motivate myself to get one of these done.  

Today, I was working with my students on character traits.  The fifth graders, are reading War With Grandpa.  We haven't gotten too far into the book yet, but they seem to be enjoying it.  When they came up with a character trait, they had to find proof in the book.  With the group that I have, we do a lot of our reading assignments together.  One thing that I have learned is that students need to have comprehension questions to answer at any age.  My group of students struggle with comprehension, this is something that is crazy for me to imagine because I always had my kindergarten and first graders working on comprehension pieces for their stories.  There have been times where I have reread things many times hoping that they will pick up on what I was asking.  

Stay warm, soon it will be spring!

Amber