Five for Friday

I'm joining up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her linky party Five for Friday.

1. My first one has nothing to do with school. Last Saturday, one of the older ladies at  church, invited a lot of people (ladies and girls only) for a tea party. She has a backyard that takes you to another world. I thought I would share some pictures.

Here are a few pictures of the spread she had out for the girls. The adults had twice as much food!

Here is a picture of the girls with Mae. She crocheted all of the hats that the girls are wearing. She told me it took two weeks in her spare time to make each hat.

2.We are working on writing descriptive sentences. I decided since our story this week is about pets, we would write about a lost pet. I wrote on a piece on a piece of paper. "I lost my pet. Please call 587-8600 if you find him." Then I asked the kids if there was anything wrong with it. I guess we had been working on punctuation so much that everyone kept saying, "You forgot your period." Haha, at least they were trying. After a while one of the kids asked what kind of pet it was, whew, finally. So I wrote it again, "I lost my dog. Please call 587-8600 if you find him." So I kept questioning them, what else is missing, they came up with color and it's name. I was trying to lead them to size so I told the kids that thing I was thinking of something you would notice across a field. One student raised her hand and said whether the dog was wearing a collar and another said what color his eyes were. Were they listening to me? I said you could see it across a field. With much coaxing, I got them to size. Yes! We finally got all of our important information and they worked on brainstorming for their own Lost Pet page.

2. Scholastic Book Fair is coming to our school next week. There has been a competition to see which class can bring in the most money to donate to buy books for the school. It's cute to watch the kids putting their money in the makeshift bank I made. We have on of the biggest classes in the building, but the older kids just seem to be better at begging and pleading to their parents. lol

3.Why would Treasures introduce possessive nouns this early in the year? I did everything I could think of to explain it to them. I told them that they actually already use possessive nouns, now we would learn how to write them. I made an anchor chart with them and had them all write a possessive noun on a post-it. Then we looked at all of the post-its and then went over it all again. I had them write another possessive noun on a post-it nouns book

4. I know it rather late, but we just got started with our journal writing. I'm very excited about the writing I am getting at this point in the year. Most of them aren't writing things like I see a cat. I see a dog. etc... I started the first day writing back to anyone who wanted me to read their journal. It is a little time consuming but I think it is worth it. 1) It shows them that I can read what they are writing. 2) I get the chance to show them correct spelling of a word they used when i use it in my sentence. 3) They are very motivated to read what I wrote to them.  Today, they wanted me to read the journals out loud, so I put them up on the Smartboard and read what they wrote and my response. They were very excited to get their journal and write again after that. Here are a few of my favorite entries.

5. Pumpkin Update: I was just about to give up on our pumpkin. The shell was getting soft, but there were no signs of growth. Yesterday afternoon, I saw just a hint of green starting to break through. Here is how it looked this evening.

I'm really glad it is Friday, these pictures don't tell the true story of my week, I'll share that later. Have a restful weekend!