Five for Friday and an Announcement!

What a great week...busy, but got so much done and now I have time to relax a little bit. I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs to share my Five for Friday!

First, I was happy to work with second grade coteachers to begin implementation of word study following Words Their Way. The kids did a great job learning the procedures of the lessons and learned lots about special vowels: short a, i, and o. Here's a few pics from our time together this week:

A word hunt in Just Right Books

Playing games with short a, i, and o

On Monday I presented at our Institute day - and I wish I had a picture of my co-presenter and I, but I didn't take one. But, Rachel, I have to tell you that I love, Love, LOVE working with you and I'm so happy to have you as a colleague and friend!

Rachel and I presented about close reading to middle school and then I did another session on Reading Workshop based on an article by Combs. After my Workshop session I realized how un-interactive it was, so definitely going to have to work hard to make my next one more hands on. Either way, good info in both!

This week I also had another presentation - with a Kinder teacher for our second Academic Parent Teacher Team meeting. We presented to parents about comprehension and how the kids are assessed with the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark assessment. We showed parents books from levels A-D (and boy were they surprised at how much the kids learn in kinder!) Then we showed classroom data related to sight words, letter name fluency, letter sound fluency, and comprehension. Parents set goals and then the kids taught them how they did their word study. Such a great night for parents, teachers, and students to be working together!

Here's a pic of one of our families...nothing but smiles!

This week in my research class at grad school, we had a guest speaker from the Chicago Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce (CGCT). 

I'm not going to get into it in detail here...I'm planning on writing about it more in depth later.... but they are a group who writes relevant curriculum for students. Their first unit of curriculum is called Urban Renewal or Urban Removal: A Grassroots Look at Chicago's Land Grabs and the Struggle for Home and Community. This unit starts waaaay back in history and explains how land was taken right out from under the Native Americans who lived here (in many cases through trickery) and still some of the same issues are going on where groups of people are being displaced by campaigns to "renew" our city.

These readings are appropriate for 8th grade and up, but I wanted to have it to learn about the history of Chicago for myself, and maybe share with some of my middle school colleagues! More to come on CGCT soon!

Last but not least...I'm excited for the Loving Literacy blog hop coming up next weekend! I'm linking up with all the reading specialist/literacy coach bloggers again to share our loves of literacy - favorite books and freebies to go with them! Make sure to check back on my blog next weekend to hop through all our blogs and collect lots of great freebies!

And, just a reminder - the 30th of every month is book club! Please link up with BigTime Literacy to share whatever you've been reading lately!

That's all for this late edition of Five for Friday! Thanks to Doodle Bugs teaching for sponsoring the Link Up!

Until next time...