Five for Friday: January 22nd

Hey y'all! We survived a four day week...Woohoo! Why do they always feel like the longest weeks of them all? I hope everyone is having a great start to their 2016 year! We are rocking and rolling in Portable 37 as those big state tests are looming over us. I'm joining Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching for her weekly linky to give you a peek into the craziness...

We have discovered Google Docs since the beginning of the year and we are loving it! I'm fortunate to be a 1:1 classroom and we have all just recently gotten our Google accounts. Boy, do these accounts make life easier. I love being able to use them anytime, anywhere, and even more that I can give immediate feedback! This week as we have wrapped up our FIRST DBQ project, we went back to look at an exemplar essay and highlight certain sections. We went through to highlight the main reasons and evidence. It's so important for them to look at good writing to become good writers. It's also a bonus that they love to add color to their documents. What's even better? Our Media Specialist joining in the fun and giving them a Google slides project on Generals of the American Revolution!

We covered in depth before our holiday break Opinion writing, so now we are diving into Expository writing. Sometimes it is a struggle getting the kiddos to write those five paragraphs with 3-5 sentences. I'm still working on finding the magic to make this writing thing a breeze for them! Our first expository task will be to pick a topic to research, so hopefully with them getting to choose their topic they will be more interested!

We dove into the topic of Martin Luther King, Jr by creating these mini-lapbooks below. Students had to research using the Google kid search engine, kidrex.org to fill in the information about Mr. King. I love how they turned out! You can find this item in my TPT Store!

I HAVE to share one of my favorite new places in my room...

When students have finished reading a book, they add a book review to our "Some Books are Worth Melting For" Olaf bulletin board. It's been a big hit!

Leaving you guys on a little personal update...

This little bump of mine is growing each and every day. I'm at 25 weeks and counting. Time is flying by amazingly fast and I'm definitely coming home double teacher tired, but I wouldn't have it any other way! Wishing you all a wonderful, warm weekend!