Close Reading is Cooler with Transparencies!!

This is just a quickie little post to show all of you who are in the same situation my grade level is in...well, our entire district really.  You see, this is the first year where we are FULLY implementing Common Core in our classrooms.  In my grade level team's case we were using some of the standards last year to get started despite having to also teach state standards for our district benchmark tests and our state's standardized test.  So, we already had a jumpstart...BUT, and this is a big but...we are really beginning to experiment with ways to stick to our district's adopted curriculum while holding strong to Close Reading.

We came up with the idea to make shrunken down copies of each of our basal stories...but our district's Print Shop had to start charging this year and we can't afford to do it. Waaaaah!  So...being teachers and all (AKA being used to figuring out how to be frugal and successful) we decided to order boxes of transparencies and use white board markers!!  Funny enough..my students seemed to think this was the bee's knees and were very enthusiastic.  They delved right in!

Today was the first day we tried this in our classroom.  We were working on finding interactions between concepts and ideas (a Common Core Standard we are all struggling with...but it seems very similar to cause and effect).  So they were trying to scope out some of those interactions between text events.  My kids are still learning how to annotate and so this in no way shows exactly how it should be done.  I am finding my kids are not used to citing evidence...le sigh...and so they are having a rough time annotating too much or not enough.  We will get there soon!

And just because...we used GoNoodle for the first time this school year.  It went so much more smoothly than last school year when our wifi was insanely bad and our videos would freeze a couple seconds in to the brain break.  My students are already HUGE fans and were pretty darn good at hurtling...as you can see in the photo.  Ha!