Final "Five for Friday" in this Freezing February!

(Yay, for alliteration!  Haha!)

Thank goodness for the last minute or I wouldn't get anything done around here!  J/K  I am usually on top of things, but I have been a bogus blogger these days.  Anyway, I am happy to squeeze in a post for the month of February!

Here are some snippets of random things going on in our ESL classroom:

Every time I walked passed our "Wemberly Worried" craftivities in the hallway, I reminded myself that they had been up there TOO LONG (since early September!) and we needed a change of scene.  We finally made that happen on Valentine's Day.

 We read the oh-so-cute picture book, "Love, Splat" by Rob Scotton.

Then, these first graders got to work on tracing the templates...

...and cutting out the pieces.

Next, they assembled their very own "Splats" or "Kittens"...

...and glued all the pieces together.

Of course, there was a writing piece involved (and, surprisingly, I only heard one or two grumbles my students).  We talked and wrote about what love means to us.

"Love is when my mom gives me a hug."  <3

"Love is when my mom makes pizza."  Haha!  :)

This one was my favorite by far!  "Love is when my mom goes to the gas station.  I go pay for the gas."  It is the little things in life!

I have a group of extremely hard-working 4th and 5th graders that I am fortunate to see daily.  Seriously...great kids.  Anyway, I wanted to give them an opportunity to kind of take a break from all their hard work (and before we plunge into our next focus = research).  So, in order to wrap up our fairytale study, these kids collaboratively created a "What are the elements of a fairytale?" poster and...

 ...completed these craftivities:  "If I had a magic wand..."  They also had the option of finishing this prompt:  "If I had a fairy godmother.." but no one chose it.  They told me it was because magic wands have more options and fairy godmothers are limited.  Haha!  If you all say so!  :)

Oh, and I do not have a photo for this but - we had a great time writing our own fairytales today.  We used what I referred to as a "Build-a-Fairytale" strategy.  Each student had their own sheet of loose leaf paper.  I set the timer for one minute and they started their fairytales.  Then, they passed the papers to the person on their right and that new person wrote for another minute.  This process continued, BUT the person writing could only read what the person before them wrote.  (Does that make sense?)  We covered up the rest of the writing just by folding the paper.  The fairytales were quite funny and I think the kids really enjoyed this!

Can you take a guess at what our 4K kiddos were learning about??  Yep, you got it - living and nonliving!  This anchor chart really helped them grasp the differences between living and nonliving.

Here is a close-up shot, so you can read the questions we used to drive our discussion about each object.

Do you have students who demonstrate very little self-motivation?  Do you find yourself just "going with it" whenever they DO show some interest?  I do with my group of 5th grade boys!!  We are currently working on persuasive writing and I am trying to make it motivating and interesting, but it is a challenge because - in the end - my boys still have to do something they do not want to do = write.

So when one of my boys asked if they could write on the whiteboards, you better believe my answer was "YES!  And you can even pick the color of your marker."

Messy?  Yes, but they showed an understanding of persuasive writing by stating their opinion, giving three reasons, and then restating their opinion.  Mission accomplished. 

Ladies and gentleman...it is coming!  Dr. Seuss Day will be here before we know it!  Stay tuned in order to check out my awesome costume this year.  If you missed my Dr. Seuss Day blog post from last year, be sure to check it out HERE!

As always, thank you for stopping by!  :)  Oh, and be sure to stop by the linky party at Doodle Bugs Teaching to swee what other awesome teachers are up to!