Fire safety, nonfiction and subtraction

Happy Sunday! It's going to be a 4-day week for us! Well... at least for the kids. Teachers have professional development on Friday (I'm presenting on how to use Reading A-Z and RAZ Kids in the classroom), but without kids it's still kind of like a day off! I have a whole lot of things I want to fit in this week, so let's get started!

This week is fire safety week, so everything fire truck, firefighter and safety related goes in the plans! You can check out a past post of mine with ideas for activities, movement, writing and technology, by clicking the link below. I also have a word search freebie you can grab.

 

 

We're starting to dive into nonfiction text features this week and I'm looking forward to using an activity I discovered last year - text mapping.



This was a great way to get my students actively involved in locating and defining text features. I'm going to use the same set of books as I did last year, since we're just getting to the middle of fall here in CT. You can click on the image above to find out more about how I plan to do this.

 

I also have a class set of books that I picked up a couple years ago from our "Books Are Fun" salespeople.

I think there are actually 6 titles in the fall series. I have 4 or more of each one, so they're perfect for reinforcing text features in small groups. There is a table of contents, glossary, index, headings, bold print, fact boxes.... all the text features we focus on. I know the books are available on Amazon, and I'm pretty sure they were in a Scholastic book club last year, too.

 

We have moved on to subtraction fact strategies as our math focus. Oh, subtraction... what IS it that makes this concept so hard for some kiddos? I'm planning on using this week to practice, practice, practice subtraction facts! I pulled out my pumpkin math centers to use as one of our rotations this week.

We're going to need all the practice we can get! (You can see the whole Pumpkin Math resource by clicking HERE.)

 

That's it for now! I'm off for a little family breakfast and then home to settle in on the couch and do some TpT creating. I see spiders in my future...!