Five for Friday

TGIF y'all!  I am sooo glad that it's the weekend!  Life has been super busy here between regular school and family responsibilities, plus I've been shuttling my oldest to soccer practices and church activities.  I don't think I've made it to bed before 11 this week and that is late for this gal!  In fact, my bed is calling my name so I'm gonna do a quick Five for Friday link up with Kacey.

A lot of my week consisted of administering Reading 3D assessments.  I've completed all of my DORFs, WRCs, and have started my TRCs but man, the TRCs are moving sloooooowly!  This is the first year I'm required to complete Reading 3D on all of my students (the end of last year was a practice run and we only had to complete it on a few).  So I would LOVE to hear any suggestions or ideas that you have to better manage administering the TRCs!

In ELA, we've been hitting RI.3.2 hard...working on identifying main idea and supporting details of informational text.  Since we finished up reading some African folktales, we moved on to reading informational text about countries in Africa.  I gave each group of students a section of text to read, discuss, and determine the topic, main idea, and details.  Then I handed them some bulletin board paper and markers (love how excited they get about "posters" and markers, lol) and let them go to town creating graphic organizers to show the main idea.  They really did amazing with this skill so we'll be looking at some more complex selections next where the main idea isn't directly stated.

In math, we started to tackle 3.NBT.2 and looked at properties of addition.  One of my fab team members shared this idea to help the kiddos grasp the concept of the identity property of addition.  We related the identity property to the kids' personal identities and explained that the zero is kind of like a mirror.  The kids created "mirrors" out of card stock and foil and outlined the edge of the mirror with examples of addition equations that show the identity property.  They turned out super cute and the kids seem to really get this property.  We also created some adorable flip flops for the commutative property but I forgot to take pics of those. =(  (I still have some up in the room though so maybe I can snap some next week.)

In science we are focused on force and motion and what better way to explore this concept than to make marshmallow launchers!!!  I found the idea from The Techy Teacher and knew right away that my kiddos would love it.  So I made a few at home and let my boys play around with them (who am I kidding??...my hubby and I played too)!  My students had a great time using them (wish I could show you those excited faces) and really learned a lot about push, pull, force, speed, and direction.  I would highly recommend this activity if you have to teach force and motion!

This one's really not from this week but I haven't blogged recently so I wanted to share now.  I was looking for a fun craft to do for my parents and in-laws for Grandparent's Day. I just had my hubby cut these 2 x 4 and then I painted them white.  I modgepodged cute scrapbook paper to the front of the 2 x 4 and to some clothespins.  Then I added some cute letters and threw two pics of my cuties inside the clothespins.  I think they turned out great and the grands loved them!

Well I'm off to bed!  Enjoy your weekend friends!!!