Happy three-day weekend! Naturally I spent a large portion of the day today at Teacher's Pet in Methuen buying more goodies for the classroom. I'm a teacher nerd and I am incapable of spending less than an hour in that place. I hope all the kids are enjoying their day off!

I had Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom for intervention block, writing, and social studies this past week. Students are working on book group projects during intervention, while I re-test students using the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark reading assessment. I tested students at the beginning of the school year, so I'm re-testing them to track their growth and figure out which areas of phonics, fluency, and comprehension each child needs to focus on. In writing, we talked about how there is persuasion all around us. Students brought in examples from home and we had a circle discussion evaluating the effectiveness of each advertisement, commercial, billboard, etc. We began to talk about different persuasive writing strategies, and we'll continue to learn and practice those strategies as the unit progresses. In social studies, students did an awesome job deconstructing touchstone texts, like poems that related to their states.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Ava C. and Isadora. Ava is such a sweet girl. She is flexible and positive, and I like how she seeks out help when she doesn't understand something. Isadora never fails to make me laugh. She is creative and witty, and she thinks my jokes are funny too, which I'm grateful for of course. :) Can't wait to have lunch with each of them this week!