A Peek at My Week {5-04-14}

I hope you are having a great Sunday!  Thank you for stopping by for my weekly linky party, A Peek at My Week.  I would love it if you would link up to share your plans for this upcoming week.

I have lots, lots, lots going on this week, both at school and at home.

My son is scheduled to take his driving test this Thursday to get his driver's license.  This is really scary stuff for a mom!  If you have already been though this, I would love some tips on how to survive handing your child the keys to a car and letting them go out on their own.  It's a good thing Thursday is Positive Thinking Thursday...prayers would be appreciated!  :)

As you know, this week is also Teacher Appreciation Week.  I want to take a quick moment to thank YOU for all that you do not only for your students, but also for us fellow teachers.  One of the wonderful benefits of being involved with a blog is the wonderful friendships that begin online.  I KNOW I am a better teacher because of YOU!  Thank you for reading and sharing your ideas and comments -- always!  As for our students, they may not always say it, but they really do know and feel the difference you make in their lives every day.

Source

Last week, we began our study of mythology and my kids can't get enough of it.  They BEG me to do it every day.  (Seriously....thank you Percy Jackson!)  We are using my Mythology Museum & More product and are working on researching for our museum displays.

This week, we will also continue to read and illustrate different myths.  As I read a myth out loud, the students listen, then they have to draw an illustration to capture the message of the myth.  This is a good time to read different versions of the same myth too.  Last week, we read two different versions of Pandora's Box.  One version left hope in the box and one let it out with the other evils.  What a great discussion we had about that!

In writing this week, we are continuing to work on Opinion Writing.  My students have really struggled with adding examples to their details. They think that just because they say something, it has to be true.  (Kind of like the Internet, right???)  So I  came up with this very easy Compliments for Classmates writing activity:

1. I gave them the name of someone else in the class.
2. They had to write three strengths or talents of that person.
3. They had to give two examples for each strength.
4. Put it all together into a paragraph with an interesting grabber.

Add an illustration and you've got a cute hallway display!

Finally, have you heard about the big SALE at Teachers Pay Teachers on May 6-7 (Tuesday & Wednesday)?  My whole store will be on sale for 28% off with the code TPTXO!

This would be a great time to pick up some of my most popular products!

Great for Common Core vocabulary work with prefixes and suffixes!

Teach the skill of research before assigning research and your life will be so much easier!

Timely & fun!  Your kids will love it!!

I've got my cart loaded up and waiting for Tuesday!

Just one more thing before I go....I don't know what is going on with Blogger, but it seems like a bunch of us have been changed back to "No Reply Blogger" status (myself included this week).  If you want to check to see if this has happened to you, you can read Jivey's post here.  Also, more and more, I'm seeing the "Prove You're Not a Robot" when I leave comments and I think that's something new for many of us that we thought we may have disabled.  To check and see if this is happening to your commenters, click on the down arrow next to your name in Blogger, click on Account Settings, then Security, and you can disable the 2-Step Verification (if you want).  

OK now...What does your week look like?

An InLinkz Link-up

Thanks for stopping by!

A Peek at My Week {4-27-14}

It's that time again...Time to get together for another Peek at My Week!  Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you will link up and share your plans for this week too!

I can't believe that we are winding down to the end of another month and that by this time next week, it will be MAY!!!  April sure flew by...

I'm excited because in  reading, we are going to begin a three week study of Mythology.  I'll admit, when we first started working with Common Core and I found out that I needed to include Mythology vocabulary and allusions in my teaching, I was NOT excited.  I had never read any Mythology and didn't know anything about it, but boy, did my students L.O.V.E. it and now I LOVE teaching it too!

This year, I designed a new product that is based on many of the activities we have been doing in my classroom that my students have enjoyed.  I call it Mythology Museum & More!

If you remember back to the fall, my students did a Native American Museum project to learn about a particular Native American group that lived in Wisconsin in the past.  This was the inspiration for my new Mythology Museum.

This week, students will work in groups of three to learn about a Greek god or goddess.  They will then prepare a poster board to teach the rest of the class about their mythological character.  These posters will be set up in a Mythology Museum for our class and others to visit.  The Mythology Museum displays will include:

A drawing or sketch of their god or goddess

Five fast facts about their god or goddess

A bio poem

Trading cards for museum visitors to fill out and keep after visiting the museum display

Carefully chosen artifacts to represent their god or goddess.

This is a great way for students to be creative and crafty -- 

Bring on the Legos!

After learning about the major players in mythology through this project, we will read different versions of the same myth to compare and contrast them. (This is a Common Core skill for 4th grade.)

We will also discuss allusions.  In the past, I taught the most popular allusions (Midas Touch, Pandora's box, etc.) but they always seemed so disconnected from my student's lives.  So in my Mythology Museum & More unit, students learn about the allusions, but also relate them to their own lives.

If you are gearing up to teach Mythology (or have avoided it in the past because you didn't know what to do), you can win this unit simply by pinning it and leaving the link in a comment below!  Two winners will be chosen on Tuesday.  Or if you can't wait, you can pick up your own Mythology Museum & More in my TPT Store on sale through Monday.

I know my students will be so psyched to begin working on their museums.  I hope to have our museum displays ready on Friday and will share more pictures next week.  This time of year, we need to bring out all the fireworks to keep our students motivated to keep working and learning and projects like this do the trick!

An InLinkz Link-up

I hope you have a great week!  See you back here on Thursday for Positive Thinking Thursday if not sooner.