My Reading FUN!

I have a new job!! I get to work as an RSA tutor at Maia’s school! We were there yesterday for conferences so Maia took pictures of me by the sign since I always take pictures of them each year. She wasn’t satisfied with the first so she told me to try something else 😂. I really am SO excited!!

My teacher style ;) I texted Jen that it made me feel like Grandma Bair and Mimi from the 70s with the cute pant/flower top combination and I am here for it =)

My first week of school was so great! While I was figuring out everyone’s needs for intervention and getting to know the kids I read aloud the Word Collector and we spent the week with guided reading, context clues, and becoming word collectors! I have so many different ages and abilities I thought vocabulary can be fun for everyone! They liked it so I drew the boy from the book and had everyone pick their favorite word they collected during the week to my bulletin board so my room has a little more pizzazz now!

I introduced solitary, effervescent, and quest as warm up words this week and several kids picked them! Some picked words from books we read together, like code and beware! And come collected words they found in the wild after they left my group, like community, boisterous, flavorful, and katana! And some just picked things they like, like soccer, and one picked the name of their friend!

One of my groups collected so many words they needed two pages! And another filled the back of their collections with a chart of words too 🤩

One of my students wrote a sweet note that she rolled up into a scroll. My heart you guys 🥰

The kids were getting a little squirrelly with the white board markers so I was thinking of putting them out of reach for a bit. Then I went to erase the board 🥰😂🤷‍♀️. Left them out another day. 😜 (disclaimer, I added the apostrophe 😂 mini lesson on your vs you’re coming up 😜)

I also got to work at the book fair after school hours so basically this entire week was glorious 🥰🤩😂

I got to use the tents my dad built me and I tied dyed with my kids for a fun Flashlight Friday! The kids loved it and said they want to do it again which will be perfect when I need to do progress monitoring.

My first grade group was having some trouble generating rhymes during our phonemic awareness practice, so I’ve been having them give me a rhyming word as a sort of password/exit strategy when they leave my room. Today we started with Tap… zap… map… cap… yes, it ended just like you think it did 😂😂🤦‍♀️. Hey, using blends is an important skill 😜

Fun Friday! Needed to review and do some progress monitoring, so mixed in some fun for after! One of my groups is reading an Eerie Elementary book where there is a blizzard inside a school. One boy gets frozen to the floor and his friends save him by using salt to lower the freezing point of the ice! So I brought some big blocks of ice, salt and food coloring so they could see it in action!

My first group read a mystery with secret codes, so their review was an escape room code that opened my treasure box! So fun to get to use my word lock and one of my lock boxes!!!

I get to cover a class for the first time this afternoon so hopefully that goes well too 🤞😂

Since collecting words was a major theme this year, I got this cool word of the day calendar with funny artwork! The kids especially loved SWAGGER! They all showed off their swaggers as they walked back to class =)

I felt like we didn’t get enough practice with the heart words, so I made coloring bookmarks, go fish, and bingo for more practice.

So I noticed during writing time and assessments a lot of my students weren’t capitalizing sentences or adding punctuation, so I made a little anchor chart in Photoshop for proofreading that we’ve used when checking our work the last week. It worked great! Then today I looked at it a little more closely… can you spot the irony? 😳🤯🤦‍♀️😂😂😂

We had fun talking about cuisine in one group, so we posted a question to the other groups! It was fun, I’ll have to brainstorm more questions to ask all the groups.

Third and fourth grade had testing today, so I had no idea if any of my groups would get to meet! And, they needed my usual room for testing. So I grabbed my handy cart (best gift ever Teresa Stephens Nowlin) and moved downstairs for a few days! Since I didn’t know if anyone would make it or at what times, I set up stations for context clue fun! Context clues were a major focus the first six weeks I’ve been tutoring, and I wanted to shift gears to more fluency work, so I thought this could be a fun finish! I found Context Clue Bingo, a detective game, context Clue Uno, and a scavenger hunt/breakout box game that I adapted to use my locks! 🤩. I also set up a picture book corner with some SEL books in case any of my kids need some stress management, and a collaborative art project.

My first and second grade groups were normal, but I also played Obstacles with them which I LOVE for creative thinking. It’s hilarious too.

I had one second grade friend that tried my cookie detective game, and it was SO fun! She loved it and it was actually great to get some one on one time with her 😍

My last group of 4th grade boys went for the breakout box and they solved it with a lot of teamwork with two minutes to spare! They asked if they could do it again tomorrow and I told them it would probably take me longer than that to set up another game 😂🤩. But it was so fun to watch them figure it out!

Just as I was about to leave two of my third grade students came by, sad that they missed group time. They were excited by the stations and started the collaborative art project. I hope that works out, I’ve been told I need more decorations 😜😂

Context Clue Uno was the biggest hit aside from the Breakout Box. TPT at 3am is a wonderful and dangerous place.😂🤩🥳

I love collaborative art!

I uploaded my capstone paper and passed my test! I’m done!!! The first picture in this post I’m wearing my awesome reading shirt from Jen Thorp Zandbergen to celebrate!

Teacher milestone: I outgrew my first lesson plan binder 🤩😂😜 More school supplies for me! 😜

The best thing since my label maker 🤩🥰😂😂😂

Since most of my class had testing last week, I set up stations with review games and a collaborative art project in case their brains were tired. Look how it turned out!

A couple of my groups were reading a play, Queen Midas, and one of the lines was the lady in waiting offering the queen about ten different kinds of bread… most of which the kids had never tried. So we had a bread tasting day =)

Reading intervention is winding down for the year, so Monday is my last day! Our word collection made it all the way around the room. 😄Taking stuff home isn’t nearly as much fun as bringing it to school 😂. But even though I was not a fan of taking down our word collection I loved how excited the kids were to decorate their reading folders with their favorite words. We had a fun Friday with one last word collection breakout box, and they took home their words, folders, some photos I printed, and some bookworms to enjoy while reading. Now that my room is empty… time to transform it!

If I had to take down our words, at least we got to use them. They decorated their folders! One of my student’s teachers told me that she was so excited to show off her folder and that she loved being in my group!

We made it all the way around the room with our Word Collection! The last few weeks a few of the students were SO excited to add enough words to accomplish this. They started asking for extra papers and drawing pictures to go with the words. I love it!!!

Last day of school for me! I turned my room into a Starbooks Cafe! I put out books in lots of different genres for the kids to taste, and I put bookplates with notes from me and a sticker of our collaborative art in the two books they were most excited to read (from different genres) for them to take home. We also had “coffee”(chocolate milk with whipped cream) and “cake pops”(donut holes on a lollipop stick.). It was a blast!

The cups were tiny 🙂. That’s what I get for ordering online, but they worked with a refill or two… or seven when I wanted to get rid of leftovers 😂😂😂

Menus for them to fill out different books they want to try 🙂

Maia helped with the decorations 🥰

Soooooo sweet!

I got flowers! And a note with a class picture, and one boy in my last group brought cupcakes! 🥰🥰🥰