Three Day Weekend!

Today was pretty fun. I tend to like Fridays this year, even though it's the day I teach six periods. Three classes, lunch, three more classes. Bam!

So we chatted about theme for reading workshop. I asked them what the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White have in common. They, of course, knew that they were all pretty girls or princesses who got rescued or saved by a prince. And we talked about character/personality, too; the females are all kind and gentle but have no discernable personality beyond that, and the men have no personality at all. So these stories have themes that women's only purpose is to just sit around until a man comes along to save her. And that it doesn't matter what the men do or say, as long as they save a woman. No so healthy.

Anyway, then I read them The Paper Bag Princess. I love that book, it's short, easy to read, and the kids seem to like it too. They wrote quickly about the themes they heard there. AND we actually had time to let them do independent reading! Haven't done that all week.

In writing, I taught them correct dialogue format. I was so loving them because they knew some of it already and picked it up very quickly. After a couple practice sentences, we played the erasable-sentence-strip game. I dictated dialogue and they, in pairs, wrote the sentences correctly. Punctuation Practice=Fun Game. Win-win situation. Sweet!

If you don't have erasable sentence strips yet, get them! They are super fun. Whee! See what a fun life teachers lead? Don't you want to be one of us? You know you do.