five for friday

Hi all! Better late than never, right, for the Five for Friday? Here are five random things that have been going on this week with me!

Well, first thing - a publishing company by the name of User Design has sent me a copy of their book for review - it's called Punctuation..? and does a really nice job of explaining the purposes of all the different kinds of punctuation that writers use. It's got simple drawings that go with the explanations:

The book covers all kinds of punctuation: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation mark, forward slash, full stop, guillemets (just learned what those were!), hyphen, interpunct, pilcrow, prime, question mark, quotation marks and semicolon.

This book was published in the United Kingdom, and I love how they call a period a full stop - it makes so much sense to think of it that way and name it that - especially for kids!

I think this book would be a good resource for kids - maybe intermediate students. As it's best to teach grammar within the context of authentic writing, this would be a great resource for kids to have when they got to the editing stage of their writing process.

If you'd like more information on this book, check out the User Design website!

Last week on our district's opening day, I presented blogging to our whole staff! I was pretty nervous to speak to all the teachers in our district, but all turned out well!

Thanks to Colleen at Literacy Lovin Gals for the great pic!

After I talked briefly, I shared this iMovie with our staff - it recognizes all the D100 bloggers and also shares quotes about why we love to blog so much!

I need to be better at record keeping. Part of my position is to collect ideas for ordering materials. Last spring, I kept a list of all the things I wanted to order - submitted that budget to my principal (thinking it was too crazy high!) but she made it a little bigger because she thought it would get cut. Well, it didn't! So, we have lots of money to do tons of text sets, plus I set money aside for poetry and traditional literature collections, and more guided reading books for kinder and the bilingual classrooms. Which brings me to my problem: I didn't write down exactly what I wanted, so now I have lots of researching to do. I will definitely keep better notes next year!

There's a blog hop going on! I'm so appreciative to Carla at Comprehension Connection and Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars for putting this together, but there are 20 Reading Specialists and Literacy Coaches sharing literacy ideas for back to school. Make sure to check it out...you can start the hop here! 

We're having a tea party!

International Literacy Day is on September 8th, so as a way to support the World Literacy Foundation and to have fun at school, students will come to class dressed as their favorite characters! We are then going to have a tea party where kids will take on the persona of their character. I'm super excited!! I'm thinking about being Edward Tulane, but I need to find an Abilene!

Have you heard of International Literacy Day? Check out their website here and plan something with your students!

Well that's all for me this week! I'm off to our neighborhood arts fest - love that it's just two neighborhood blocks away! Enjoy your weekend!

Oh--and don't forget my Letters linky will be back again next Sunday! Check out our last one and get ready to deliver your letters!