Bio Poems

While we began writing our bio poem drafts on the second day of school, we finally had time to edit, revise, and publish them this week. Before we even began drafting our own, we read through and analyzed some of these bio poems here: http://www.tooter4kids.com/classroom/bio_poems.htm. We have no idea what school these students are from, but we're grateful they published their poems online for us to look at for inspiration. When we finished discussing those bio poems, we used ReadWriteThink's bio poem template to help us organize our poems. (Click here to see the bio poem template we used.)

While some of us are still putting the final touches on our bio poems, here are several finished ones we'd like to share:

Factors

Lately, we've been reviewing and learning quite a bit about factors. We've played Factor Captor, Factor Bingo, and Falling Factors to help practice finding factors of numbers and to apply what we know about factors already. Today we also made and decorated factor rainbows like this one:

This is a factor rainbow for 12 since 1x12=12, 2x6=12, and 3x4= 12.

Here are some factor rainbows we made that are hanging up in our classroom:

Read to Self: Day #1

As part of learning routines and procedures for Daily 5--new to both 5th graders in Room 121 and Mrs.Allen--we began learning about everything Read-to-Self encompasses this afternoon.

We discussed the importance of reading to ourselves: become a better reader, become smarter, learn about new and exciting things, and become more independent. Then we talked about and agreed on behavior expectations during Read-to-Self for both students and teacher.

Here's our first I-chart for Read-to-Self as part of the Daily 5.

When we were finished with our discussion, we had several volunteers demonstrate examples and non-examples for what Read-to-Self looks and sounds like. Myka and Madison were model readers who  made it so easy for the rest of us to match all of the behaviors on our chart to exactly what they were doing. Landon and Caleb showed us exactly what not do by moving around, reading aloud, distracting others by throwing things across the room, and hardly reading anything at all.

With just a couple minutes left of school before the announcements, we were able to practice Read-to-Self as an entire class. It took about 30 seconds for everyone to find a spot and begin actually reading, but they soon got right to work!