Silence for Sandy Hook

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Devastated for all....

Back to School

It was the weekend before school starts and all is calm (sort of). This year I have some wonderful new things to look forward to including spending more time as the librarian, running a Kurzweil skills based group for some of the grade fives and sharing my classroom with our energetic new Vice-Principal. I think it will be a great change of pace for me and I am still teaching in my grade five class every morning till lunch. I did however give up Science as well as Social Studies, P.E. and HACE. I think I will miss Science the most but I really wanted to continue with the Language Arts, Math and Fine Arts. I am really excited about the library though and have big plans (that I am sure will take years to accomplish)! I plan to do some posting and pictures on some of these plans this year. I hope everyone else is off to a good start and will check in soon.

Excited about reading- YES!

So today while we were just finishing up our literature circles one of my wonderful students came up to me and said, Please can I keep reading, I am at such a critical part in my book and I cannot put it down! This is just one of the reasons I love, love, love our collaborative literature circles. We base our literature circles on Faye Brownlie's method in Grand Conversations and Thoughtful Responses book. We have three classes of students, a grade 3/4 class, a 4/5 and my 5's that take part. Each teacher runs four different books. The students listen to our book talks one day and on a post it note write down their top three choices. We teachers then try to accomodate them as best as we can based on their reading levels and choices. Once we have our groups of 6 or 7 we hand out the books and then begin. Each day the students either have a discussion group, blog, or double entry journal to complete. They can move through the novels as quickly or slowly as they need to as long as they complete the criteria for each novel. At the end of the six weeks they have a choice of a final project. I have students that are devastated that lit circle time is almost up:(

Bump in the road

So best laid plans...I had such grand plans to figure out my word work program and blog more about our collaborative literature circles on Friday, however we found out at 11:00 am that the Labour Relations Board here in British Columbia ruled on side with the Government and is forcing us to write report cards due to our AO's by this Friday. We have been doing job action all year and the government has written a new law called Bill 22 to force us back to full duties. (We had not been doing recess or bus duty, attending staff meetings or report cards...) We thought that because this law took effect after term two had finished we would not be required to perform struck work. HA HA HA! I should have known that would not have happened coming from a government that makes up new laws to supercede old ones that even the BC Supreme court said were unlawful. So now it is back to court for our union to fight ever increasing class sizes, class composition problems, lack of funding for resources, special education, librarians etc... Friday became all about how do I report on two weeks of school (which is all we have had since Spring Break). Let's just say thank goodness my student teacher from term two left her assessment results in perfect order as I relied on them. I will try to post more productively this week and I really want to figure out how to attach BLM's to my posts on literature circles so if anyone knows how to do this please let me know!

Word Work

As we are faced with another Professional Development day this week my collegue and I have been discussing revamping our word work program. We have been using Words their Way but want to switch it up a bit to hit some of the words that our students always seem to get wrong no matter how many times you spell it out for them. So what do we do? That is what we are investigating this week. I will be on the hunt for word work ideas from intermediate teachers. Stay tuned and I will report our findings and let you know how it goes. If anyone reads this and has some ideas for us PLEASE feel free to comment and shed some light on this topic for us! Have a great week.

Linky party for intermediates!

Alright so I am trying to join this amazing linky party of intermediate bloggers even though my blogging has been so inconsistent. I will try harder to keep up. So here is a link back to the wonderful blog that started this great linky party!

Lit Circle time

So I do not understand how people have the time to blog everyday!!! I have so much to do... It also does not help that I have taken on more responsibilities at school. It is my favorite time of year-Lit circle season. I am lucky to work with a team of grade four and five teachers on collaborative literature circles. I will be running three books but my 30 students will have the choice of ten different novels. We meet three times per week. One day one group will be reading and writing double entry journals while another group blogs and a third group is discussing with me. The students move in and out of books throughout the process. Each teacher starts a whole class lit circle this month so we have lots of modelling going on for awhile then we break into our groups after spring break in March. I will post some examples if I can figure out how to put them into google docs!