This Week’s Lesson Plans: April 7th – April 11th

I have been home for the past two weeks, recovering from hernia surgery.  Luckily, I have an amazing team teacher who has been taking care of my kiddos.  However, on Monday, I go back to my little sweeties.  Here is what I have planned:

 Every morning, my students come in and work on their nursery rhyme – this week is Sing a Song of Six Pence.  Then they work on their differentiated vocabulary packets.  This week, we will all be working on the ESL Vocabulary Packet on Adjectives.  Hopefully, this will help them remember to add more interesting adjectives to their writing. After they finish their vocabulary, my students will work on their math textbook pages or their writing assignments.

Meanwhile, I pull reading groups.  Some of my students are still working on Reading A-Z books, but my Mister and Me group finished the book just before I left.  While I was gone, this group created an iMovie trailer pretending that the book was made into a movie.  This week, we will review their movie and tests, do a fluency check.  Then, we will begin working on Frindle.  My other group has been independently work on the Ice Wreck novel study, so we will spend this week reviewing their work and then begin the process of creating an iMovie trailer.

After snack and recess, my students each take a one minute math quiz – differentiated among 7 levels.  Next, my students work on their calendar books and their daily math. 

This week, all of my students will be preparing for their comprehensive trimester test by completing review sheets.  On Monday, we will also add our Math Idiom:  Two Peas in a Pod.   

This week, we will be reviewing the different ways to subtract long numbers and the different ways to add and subtract decimals. On Wednesday, and Thursday, we will jump into our new science unit: The Dry Desert.  While I was gone, the students watched 4 different videos on the desert and completed graphic organizers to reflect on what they learned.  They watched The Magic School Bus: Dries Up, BBC Planet Earth: Deserts, Polar Biomes and the Attacama Desert Explained.  So, we will take some time to review what the students learned, as well as to label a World Map with the location of deserts around the world.

  Next, we will look at plants and how they meet their needs.  I will break the class into 4 groups and each group will experiment with one of the needs of plants: soil, air, water or light.  We will use this sheet to plan our experiment and record our data.  Feel free to download the sheet for free from Google Docs.

Finally, on Friday, we will take some much needed work time on our Math Tutorial Videos, which will be added to our Online Portfolios soon.

In the afternoons, my partner teacher works on Writing and Social Studies.  This week students are finishing up creating travel brochures. In Social Studies, the students have just started to learn about Ancient Egypt. During this time, I work with a small group of first year ESL students, to give them extra support. 

Homework in my class is all assigned via Edmodo.  Monday and Wednesday’s math video links can be found on my collaborative math video Google Doc, which is always available to my students if they need to re-watch a video they have already seen.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into my plans for the week.  What’s on your plans this week?