I was inspired by Head Over Heels for Teaching to do something different for Valentine bags this year. Joann has great step by step instructions on how to print directly on paper bags! You can read them here. So, I created these bags for my students to color as their warm up last Friday.
After they were done coloring, we lined them all up along the counter so the kids could hand out their valentines. Then I had a few kids help me tie all the ribbons on.
Having the bags neatly tied closed made it easier to have the kids wait until they got home to open them. I figured after having our Valentine sundae bar...
they didn't really need any more sugar which seems to come with so many of the Valentine cards these days.
Not only was Friday our Valentine party day, it was also the day of our first reading celebration of the year! Everyone in the class had recently reached a milestone in our 40 book challenge, so we celebrated by having a flashlight read in!
Everyone snuggled up with their favorite book, pillow, and blanket. What a great way to spend one of our coldest days of the winter!
While the kids were spread out around the room reading, I had a few at a time come up to my desk to make a new bookmark. I just rounded up some fabric scraps from my mom, some ribbon, a bookmark pattern copied on card stock, and a heart punch.
We finally finished all of last marking period's post-assessments and this marking period's pre-assessments so we could begin a new reading unit I just created on the civil rights movement. This is the time of year that we begin working on reading nonfiction, so it was the perfect opportunity to combine that work with learning about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Linda Brown, and so much more. I start the unit by seeing what the kids already know about a list of words associated with this topic.
Not surprisingly, some of the students had a little bit of knowledge about Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks but not much beyond that. But that's okay. I asked the students to choose words from the list that they wanted to learn more about, and each day throughout the unit, they have the chance to do just that.
Each day's lesson involves a read aloud from some great nonfiction and historical fiction books along with shared reading. Students do close reading of common texts where they can practice the annotating that we have been working on all year.
We end each day with reading workshop where students can choose from a wide variety of books about the civil rights movement that I found at the school library and two of my local libraries. It's fun to see the students get excited as they encounter the words and people that they weren't familiar with at the beginning of the unit but are coming across in their reading each day. If you would like to check out my Civil Rights Movement Reading Unit Bundle, you can find it at my TPT Store.
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