I'm not ready!

To go back to school that is.  Sunday crept up so fast, but I have to say, it was one of the best weeks we've had in a long time.  We got in lots of quality time with family and friends, and that's one of the things that I think gets pushed off the most during the school year.  I don't know about you, but I can get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of school that it can be weeks at a time where I don't stay in touch with people the way I would like.  I've been trying to get better at leaving school earlier and bringing a few things home with me to finish up, but I have discovered that the essential "teacher bag" (or 2!) that we all have tends to get really neglected when I bring it home.  So, for now, my focus is to have a short checklist for myself each day of the things I really need to get done before I leave school for the day.  Hopefully that will help me better manage my after school time more efficiently.  I am most definitely a project jumper.  Hopefully I am not the only one guilty of this, but I tend to bounce from one thing to another and then back again trying to get so many different things taken care of.
     Today's goal was really just lesson planning.  We have finished our state assessment for reading and language arts, but I still want to keep our reading momentum going.  This week we're going to have an interactive read-aloud with Humble Pie, by Jennifer Donnelly.  We'll be focusing on inferring character traits, and character change as we read about the main character, Theo.  Students will be recording the character traits they infer, as well as examples from the text that led them to those inferences.  We will be paying close attention to how inferring character traits helps us to better understand the story.  Also this week we are going to continue our genre study with poetry.  Our class has been enjoying selecting different poetry books, and reading poems for enjoyment, as well as introducing our classmates to poems they are enjoying.  We'll work more on writing our own original poems this week, including some list poems, acrostics, and cinquains.
     Our next math unit is geometry.  This year I decided I wanted to approach this unit differently.  I created a special lines foldable to introduce parts of lines and special lines to the students.  As we learn about each different figure we're going to add it to our foldable.  After they are all created, the students will be able to use their foldables with a partner to quiz each other.  The cards that are used to create the foldable could also be used to play a memory game independently or with a partner as well.  I'm excited to get to work on this with my students tomorrow.  From there we will go on to angles, triangles, plane shapes, 3D shapes, area, perimeter, and volume, so much more to come!

    If you think this might be something you are interested in using, you can check it out here.
To everyone returning back to school this week after spring vacation I hope you have a wonderful week! =)
~Heather~