Monday Made It!

Yay! **First Monday Made It Post** Yay!

Yay!!

So, for anyone who has been reading, you know that today was the first day I was allowed back into my classroom. You know what I made a lot of today?????.....

TRASH!!!

I cleaned....and I organized...and then I cleaned what I organized. Rinse. Repeat.

I made two of those huge, heavy-duty Christmas-Party-Chaos full to BUSTING!!

Too bad I didn't take a picture of it...if I had been thinking about this blog post when I left my room as I was while I was IN my room, then maybe I would have...but I didn't. I know...you're sad ecstatic you don't have to look at my trash!

Onto the real stuff...

I finally got to bind my Reading Response Letters. I originally got this idea from Ms. Leslie Ann over at Life in Fifth Grade...you can read more about HER idea here. Since nothing works for one teacher EXACTLY how it works for another, I decided to put my own spin on it. 

My students write letters to me once a week about what they are reading. I have a double resource day on Wednesday which gives me a weird 20 minute block right at the end of the day which is pretty useless since it's too short to do a lesson because of pack up/dismissal. This, I decided was the perfect time to do my letters. Additionally, every OTHER Thursday, I am pulled from my classroom at 2:15 for planning. My TA always needs something that the kids can do independently that actually interests them...**CUE READING RESPONSE LOGS**.

Here was the final product...

I know that the second and third photo are hard to see. Photo two is my prompt page. This is MY personal letter to THEM (reminding them of letter format first and foremost) giving them some ideas as to what I expect and what they can include, as well as some sentence stems. The third photo is my template for the letter. Depending on how experienced your children are with letter writing, they might just needs a blank piece of notebook paper. For my kids, however, they need a little assistance. 

My students have been reading and responding in letter form for several years, but only on a separate sheet of paper...therefore, I must admit, my format needed a little spicing up. I'm so excited to try them in JOURNAL FORM this year. So I took the time to redo the letter and prompt page in publisher and make it look all pretty. My templates are available on TPT here.

My third Monday Made it is another spin off creation. This one also comes from Ms. Leslie Ann. I have posted before about her Comp. Files. Today, I finally made my own. My school has a mandatory remediation block from 8:30-9:00 am every day. During that time, I pull my lowest students to review a skill they are either currently struggling with or scored poorly on a previous assessment. Meanwhile, the rest of my students are doing daily stations, one rotation per day. I figured that these Comp. Files were PERFECT for this because I can rotate them out each month. 

I decided to put ten passages in the file folder and the students will have the entire month to complete them. Ideally they will complete them two at a time, one set of two each week. I decided to do half non-fiction and half fiction. There were more nonfiction passages than fiction in her first collection, but that was okay. I was able to weed out a few passages that were content related to things we will do LATER in the year and will insert them as applicable. If you don't know about Comp. Files, you can check them out on TPT here.

Okay...I have one more Monday Made it...but it's more like a MONDAY IN THE WORKS so hopefully I'll be able to post about it next week.

Hope your Monday was as successful as mine!

Brianna