Sick doesn't mean not productive...

Unfortnunately, I'm home for the second day in a row, but I'm determined to get things done today.

Things like: writing all my lesson plans, finishing my handwriting intervention analysis, and making a new notebook file next weeks Treasures lessons.

Last week, I made one large Literacy file to go with each days lessons. It worked out great by keeping me on track and getting the students to use the smartboard too! My plan is to do this for each week of lessons till the end of the year. I'll keep you posted on how it's going.

We also studied contractions last week. I was inspired by Cara Carroll's contraction surgery and tweaked it for my kiddos. They had a blast and were so excited about taking a simple surgical mask home. I even had a para-educator give me kudos the next day because the kids were telling her all about it. We'll continue to work on contractions during Daily 5 with some word work games. I'm sure they'll love it now.



The kids writing has been taking off too! I finished a mini-unit on persuasive letter writing where the kids got a request from our principal for some book recommendations and we did a shared writing back. The kids did fabulous and are now independently writing book recommendation letters using the skills we learned. My favorite strategy I taught was "Policing My Writing with COPS". It's so hard for first graders to edit their own writing but this simple tool is beginning to change that and the best part about it is I can refer to it for every writing task. So if you're wondering what COPS is here you go:

Capitals
Overall neatness
Punctuation
Spelling