I'm working on some literacy centers. My students love using bottle caps to sort through. I'm writing homophones on the tops of bottle caps. I made some worksheets to go with the bottle caps. The first ones, students need to place the correct bottle cap in the blank so that the sentence makes sense. Then they use the bottle caps to write their own sentences. I will laminate these so I can use them over again, and to save on copies. I'll make up the bottle caps when I get back from spring break (I have a lot of bottle caps in my room). Another center I'm going to make up is matching words with their contractions. I'll use bottle caps again for this.

Literacy Center

I've been working on a literacy center that my students can go to when they're done with their in-class work. This is what I have so far. It includes my puppets (to practice their plays or to use when reading), paper for drawing, paper for writing, different writing activities including word work and prompts. They enjoy coming here and will often ask to come here. Before next year I hope to do something similar for a math center.

Puppets!

I am so excited this week! I put up a project on donorschoose.org to try and get some puppets to enhance my students' writing. It worked! I received all the donations I needed and this last week my class received lots of boxes of puppets. After spring break, we will be writing 5 minute original plays, practicing, then performing them for the school. I'm excited to see what my students will write. If you haven't done so, check out donorschoose.org and get a project going. I can't guarantee that your project will get funded, but it's a great resource to tap into.

Persuasive Writing - The Mary Celeste

I combined writing to literature and persuasive writing into one assignment. We read "The Mary Celeste, an Unsolved Mystery from History" by Lane Yolen, et al. My class loved the story and were engaged in the mystery of what happened to the Mary Celeste. This is a real event - we even googled it and looked it up on Wikipedia. I think that captured their attention even more - knowing that these events really happened and this mystery has never been solved. We talked through the theories, listing them on chart paper. Then we listed the facts about the case - like real detectives would. I had them each write what their theory is as to what happened. They needed to defend their position using facts from the story and answering questions that would discredit their theory. I was very pleased with the results. My favorite theory from my students is the theory that all on board the Mary Celeste came across an island and wanted to explore it. While they were on the island, the boat became unanchored and floated away - leaving them stranded. One of my students drew the boat on the bulletin board.