Labor Day Lesson Planning

    If you would have talked to me a couple of weeks ago I would have said that a long weekend right after the first week of school seemed too soon and I would have rather waited to have one later in the month.  However, after completed the first week of school and being completely exhausted and already behind on lesson plans, I am very thankful to have the day off to catch up.  Today I am linking up with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings to share a peek at my week.

There is no school for Labor Day so my plan is to catch up on some work I need to get done.  I also need to create a new cd for our cheerleaders half time dance this Wednesday.  I'm trying to learn how to add a voice over to the sound track but it is much more difficult than you would think.

I teach two different levels of classes, one regular class with many students reading far below grade (which I will refer to as Class 1) and one advanced class with some students who can already read at a tenth grade level (which I will refer to as Class 2). Therefore, my lesson plans vary for each class.  

 In both classes I will begin teaching Summarizing.  Class 2 will respond to the mini lesson using the book they are reading and writing me their first reading response letter.  I will begin reading the book Wonder as a read aloud to Class 1 and will have them write me a summary about what I read.  I also will be introducing vocabulary to both classes.  Before I give them their weekly words I will introduce what the words prefix and suffix mean.

 Last week I introduced the five themes of geography and started a lesson on location.  Everyone created a map of either the classroom or their house.  They are going to play a game with these maps to review location and then we will begin learning about latitude and longitude.  I have an inflatable world globe that I will be using to have students catch and tell the coordinates in latitude and longitude that their thumb lands on. 

After school Wednesday is our first football game.  I am very excited to see how my cheerleaders do.  They have worked really hard so I hope that we will as ready as I want them to be.  

   We will be having library orientation for both classes today so I will be doing a short review about summarizing before the orientation and finishing what we didn't on Tuesday.

 We will continue to study latitude and longitude.  I have a game called Message in bottle that students will play to practice using map skills.

  Thursday I will begin reviewing comprehension strategies, I will be using different poems to discuss these strategies.  Students will then begin to write a poem about themselves.

  We will start the next theme of geography which is place. Students will cut and glue different aspects of a place inside of their interactive notebooks.

 I will continue reviewing comprehension strategies with other poems.  Students will also be finishing their poem about themselves.

  I will start teaching the theme of region and students will make a foldable to go in their interactive notebooks.

This is just a tentative plan for the week.  My goal today is to write out everything and figure out how to create lesson plans on PowerTeacher which is our counties new system for attendance, grades, lessons and everything else.