On Monday of last week, we started summer school. Although I hate that my summer ends abruptly..I can't beat the money I earn for teaching 15 half days. Who could complain about teaching Monday through Thursday and working 8am to 12pm. That is unbeatable! This summer I will be teaching 5-8th grade reading. In the past I have taught art---which I loved, but I thought I would try something different this year. :) So far, I am a week and a half in and I am loving it!
Besides getting to see the kiddos and getting a little extra summer cash (cha ching!).....summer school has another perk---you get to try out all of the neat ideas you have pinned on Pinterest, read about in blogs or have been told by fellow teachers. Summer school is like a mini-school year where you can let the creative juices really flow. The teaching freedom is great--- especially because we (the teachers) are without the pressure of state assessments, progress monitoring, teacher evaluations, or any other stress experienced during the school year.
One of my dear friends, Shari at Keeping It Fresh in 6th Grade, raved about the interactive notebooks she used in her class last year. She pretty much got me hooked, and I have been dying to try them out ever since she first told me about them!
It may take a couple of blog posts...but for the next couple of weeks I would like to showcase what our interactive notebooks entail.
The first pages in our interactive notebooks is the "Word Work" section, where students work with the most common prefixes and suffixes. Prefix and suffix work is heavily stressed with common core--which I am thrilled about! If students can correctly identify prefixes and suffixes they can easily decode words and discover their meaning--win win!
Pictured below is the foldable we put in our interactive notebooks every Monday. We spend 10 minutes identifying, defining and writing examples of 3 prefixes and 2 suffixes. Please disregard the misspellings and kid handwriting---this is authentic kid work after all!!
For the rest of the week we spend about 5-10 minutes a day doing various activities around our focus prefixes and suffixes. We will do word hunts where they search for words containing the prefixes and suffixes in their reading books or magazines; we may complete a worksheet, or even play some some games.
I love that the kids can constantly refer back to these pages to help them define a word or even decode it. These interactive notebook pages are a hit!
Do you like the template I used??? I wish I could claim it as my own---but it isn't. Mad props goes to Belinda at I Love 2 Teach for creating this awesome foldable. If you are interested go get it for FREE on her blog I Love 2 Teach.
Katie
I love "authentic kid work!" I'm so glad you found my Prefix & Suffix Foldable useful. Yea!
ReplyDeleteBelinda
I Love 2 Teach
Our summer school starts directly after regular school. I wonder what it would feel like to be out for a month and then have to go back...hmmmmm. By the way....
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Surviving Sixth Grade
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ReplyDelete~Amy Marie