Central Message - ELA Lesson Plans #15

Are you ready for winter break yet?Holy moly I sure hope I can make it through the week.  This week's lessons are all about good quality literature from one of my favorite children's authors, Jan Brett.  The texts are sure to engage students and if nothing else, they will have students sitting quietly listening to the story for about 30 minutes.  The lesson plans are broken up by two days at a time to allow for a little chaos to ensue.  This keeps me from losing my mind when I don't get to everything.  We have plenty of Jan Brett's winter books to add in if time allows.  We'll end the week with The Mitten because it's an easier text for students to understand when all they have is winter break on their mind.  My present to parents is reading Home For Christmas and exploring the central message. It teaches students that their parents aren't as bad as they think and home is much better than other alternatives.  Writing will follow the same design as last week and students will explore another holiday.

Author's Point of View - ELA Lesson Plans #14

 How many more weeks do you have before winter break? We have two glorious weeks before we get off for the holidays.  Getting through to the end just may be the biggest test of my teaching skills yet.  This week will be all about thematic days.  Tuesday -Friday I will throw in food to help motivate my students to keep on learning .  We'll have a Cookie Day, Hot Cocoa Day, Candy Cane Day and a Gingerbread Day.  Monday is set aside for fruitcake, but we won't have any food because I spent the weekend loving on my family and not shopping for my class.  Each day we will also have a fun holiday read aloud, Grinch Reader's Theatre fluency time and Grinch sing alongs.  We will perform the reader's theatre, song and various poems at our holiday party.  Writing will look the same as last week, but we'll be writing about holidays around the world.  We are keeping the same format because otherwise kid's attention span wanes and we lose learning time.  Using a high interest topic coupled with a familiar format will keep the kids learning to the end or as long as I can possibly get them to.

We'll also be planting our traditional Candy Seeds.  You can find the seed pack and activities in my Peppermint Day unit by clicking on the picture below.

You can find my lesson plan page outlines from A Modern Teacher.

Arctic Animals - ELA Lesson Plans #13

It's that time of year again.  You know the time where you have a ton on your plate, the kid's lose their minds and all your interim assessments come due.  Yet we still want to make everything in class as magical as possible.  It's because of all of those facts that I make my lessons as engaging, simple and short as possible.  My lessons will be 20 minutes to hold student's attention.  My text will be available in my classroom library or print and teach because I need to keep extra work to a minimum.    Below you will find my December calendar.  Can you believe I've planned a month out?

Each day this week we will be learning about a new arctic animal. I'll have differentiated text for the students and a graphic organizer.  You can see them in the picture below. On Friday students will get to chose an animal of their choice to research and make a poster about.  They'll have a graphic organizer to help guide them when creating the poster. Each lesson is short, meaningful and engaging.  Click on the picture below if you want to see the resource that I'm using.

 

Writing is getting serious. Students have come a long way since the beginning of the year.  Now it's time for some of the students to learn how to structure a paragraph.  We will extend our reading into writing where students will write about an arctic animal of their choice.  We'll make book covers to put the writing in.  I'm using a fabulous resource by More Time 2 Teach.

Each day my students who don't lose Dojo points will get to make a page marker like the ones shown below.  Most of the easier ones take under 10 minutes to create. The first couple of days we will start with simple plain ones.  The students will be able to sell their page markers at our classroom market day with classroom currency.  It's a great way to tie in behavior and social studies.  The how to video came from Red Ted Art on Youtube.  You can link to her account by clicking on the link in my Instagram post.

My lesson plan templates can be found at TPT by A Modern Teacher.