If you know me then you know that I am an avid trade books lover. If you don't know me then...Hi! My name is Sarah, and I am addicted to trade books. My love for trade books means that I spend a lot of time and energy reading children's literature, grouping books into "sets", and determining what Common Core skills and strategies can be applied to specific texts so that I can use them to supplement a lot of the instruction across my various content curriculums. Using text sets in the classroom provide teachers with the opportunity to reach out to students' interests, expose them to nonfiction texts, and advance their knowledge about the important individuals who have impacted our world. I just love, love, love all of the opportunities that texts can provide my students. So you can imagine my excitement when the creators of the new site asked me to post a text set! I chose to post a mini text set about biographies. Recently, I have come across ...
Archives for September 2013
Visualizing and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Shew! Times be CRAZY! I keep thinking that my kiddos and I will fall into a consistant classroom rhythm, but it hasn't happened yet. Every time I feel like we are close to one.... something happens, and we take a step back. We will get there though! I just know it! Anyways...our skill for the last two weeks was visualization. My kiddos rocked it. I am so proud! My class loved doing the poems Oh No!, Green Giant, and My Neighbor's Dog is Purple. We also branched out and spent a lot of time reading poems and trade books to help us strengthen our visualizing skills. Here is one of my favorites activities from this skill! I was surprised that most of my students had never read the book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and only a handful had seen the movie. So, I hopped on the opportunity and paired this trade book up with a visualizing activity. I read the story to the kiddos but would NOT share the pictures with them. It about killed the kids AND ME to not share the ...