Ms. Moreau's Literacy Blog

     Since this was our last lesson, we decided to spend extra time on our icebreaker to help our students feel relaxed and not stressed.       We started with a thankfulness worksheet where they had to write something they were thankful for from A–Z. After that, we went over our class norms and schedule like we normally do. I went through our anchor chart about paragraph shrinking and then my partner explained the vocabulary words.       One of our students went to the restroom, and since we didn’t want to start reading the paragraph without him, we began working on a crossword puzzle instead. By the time he got back, there were only about five minutes before they had to leave for their assembly, so we continued the crossword puzzle until they returned.      When they came back from assembly, we restarted our paragraph shrinking activity. We reviewed the anchor chart again and then used my computer to display the pa...

  We started the lesson with a butterfly-themed ice breaker, since our book mentioned butterflies, we had the students color a butterfly picture of themselves and write affirmations in the butterfly wings. i These were things she could say to help her “butter butterflies” go away when she feels nervous. We spent about ten minutes on this before moving into the main lesson. We reviewed the class agenda and classroom rules like we always do. I explained what sentence expansion was, and because we only had one student, the explanation went quickly. After reviewing our anchor chart, we had her read the vocabulary words about butterflies. She told us she had learned a lot about butterflies in second grade, so she already had strong background knowledge. Next, we read our story about a girl who wanted to build a butterfly garden and wrote to her town council to persuade them. After reading, we worked on a sentence expansion activity. Since her partner was not there, my partner and I al...

       During our lesson, we started with an icebreaker activity where the students made their own quilt. In the quilt, they drew pictures of themselves, their families, favorite things, favorite activities, and favorite foods. The students took longer than expected to finish their drawings, so we could not cut them out during the icebreaker. Instead, we cut them out later during our brain break and taped them together to create a quilt that represented our whole teaching group.      After the icebreaker, we went through our class agenda and explained the Frayer Model strategy. The students had used a similar template before, but they did not recognize the name.  My partner introduced the vocabulary words from the story and used the word wonder as an example in our Frayer Model. The students helped create a definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples for the word.        Next, my partner read the story aloud. The...

     During the lesson, we started with a “This or That” Halloween activity. Halloween is my favorite holiday, so it was fun to talk about what we like and do not like, and to share what our costumes were. One of our students was absent, so it was just Student G with us today.                                                           After that, we reviewed our class norms, went over the agenda, and then jumped right into our QAR (Question-Answer Relationship) strategy anchor chart. I explained what an informational text was and how the QAR strategy connected to the book we were reading.       When I was done, my partner shared the vocabulary words, which led to some good questions about Congress and politics. Our book was about Shirley Chisholm , the first Black woman in Congress, so some of the vocabula...

     During the lesson, we started with an acrostic poem as our icebreaker to get to know the students better. They used their first names and wrote adjectives or things they liked that started with the letters in their names. Each student, my partner, and I shared our acrostic poems as well. From this, we learned that one of our students really enjoys music, and the other student enjoys basketball and animals. After this, we went over our norms again and then started our lesson about making predictions.       I explained our anchor chart and talked about what predictions are, and also how we had sentence starters written on the chart for when they would write their predictions. My partner introduced the vocabulary words. Even though our book didn’t have any printed words, there was still a lot of vocabulary used to describe what was happening in the pictures. Most of our vocabulary words were about the ocean or cameras, and the students enjoyed taking...

          During the lesson, students participated in an icebreaker activity and then helped create our classroom norms. Each student gave at least one norm to add to our list, which helped them feel involved in setting expectations. After that, we went over our agenda and introduced the topic of story elements. The students were very engaged and offered to read what was on the anchor chart, taking turns reading every other puzzle piece. I explained that our lesson would focus on story elements using a story map. I had an example ready with The Three Little Pigs , which they had heard of before, and the students took turns reading the example map. After that, my partner explained that they would make a story map with the story Rapunzel .  Before we started, we shared vocabulary words from the story, and the students were excited to take turns reading the definitions.                        ...