The year is off to a good start...

Hi everyone, I wanted to make a quick post and share some of the things we have been working on in the classroom.

Character Traits

Character traits have always been one of my favorite things to teach. Last year I noticed a lot my students did really well with identifying character traits within themselves and had trouble applying it to the characters in the stories we read. So when I introduced character traits this year, I took them out of the idea and strictly focused on discussing characters from a book.

I used this awesome FREEBIE from Workshop Classroom to start building the students vocabulary with character traits. We glued this page to our readers notebook and we're adding to the lists over time. 

Then we made this anchor chart to help the students thinking process on figuring out characters. I am currently reading The One and Only Ivan to the class and used Ivan in the center of this anchor chart. This showed the students that there are many ways to look at a character to help us better identify their character traits. 

(In case you can't read my chicken scratch)

*What am I thinking?

*What do I look like?

*What do I say?

*What do I feel?

*What do I do?

*What do others say about me?

*How do I change over time?

This anchor chart/lesson provided my students with many ways to look at a character to better understand them and identify their traits. 

Inferencing Investigation 

I loved the idea of kicking off inferencing with Babbling Abby's Snow Day Case Files. Though my only problem was that my Texan 3rd graders have no idea about what a snow day is. Haha. 

So I needed something that would better connect to their schema to make this intro lesson more successful.

So what I did was keep the same idea from Abby's unit but changed "snowy day" to a "no school".  In my version of the story, school is cancelled due to a thunderstorm that leaves the school with no electricity. 

The unit tells the story of mother who comes home and finds her son and grandmother missing from the home. They leave behind many clues and the students are asked to use their inferencing skills to help the mother discover where they could be. The contents inside this folder were:

- a note from Mom with a list of chores to do (only some where checked off)

- a chapter book with a book mark 

- brownie recipe

-a note from a friend to meet him at the park

My students were all over this activity and did an awesome job inferencing with the given clues. Check out the unit for more information on how to turn your students into inference investigators!  

Also, my very first giveaway announcement is coming soon. :) 

Until next time...