Five for Friday May 15

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. Thank you for hosting, Kacey! 

Here is an update to my Trouper post a while ago.  

My class absolutely fell in love with Trouper and his story.  Each of my students wrote a letter to Miss Dot thanking her for all that she had done for Trouper and asking her questions they had.

Sweet, sweet Miss Dot wrote a hand written letter back to each of my students.  They were THRILLED!  

First of all, they could not get past the raccoon footprints all over the envelope that meant that Trouper, himself, had seen their letters and helped get this package together.

They read and reread the letters, then shared them with their friends. 

Next, my sweet mother (who introduced us to Trouper in the first place) had a surprise for the kids! She had the restaurant down the street (Gigi's Place) make raccoon cookies!  They were a HUGE HIT!

 

If you're looking for a fun lesson this time of year, Trouper is it!   I also posted other books I love to use to talk about being kind to animals. We made some posters to hang up around the school to remind everyone to be kind to animals.

I love Whimsy Workshop's Directed Drawing and Writing Prompts!  The packet has such a variety of activities that I use some for morning work and some for our writing lessons.  The children just love them because they feel successful and proud!  Susanna has some prompts that are just for practicing drawing. Some with speech bubbles to fill in ( a favorite!). And others with different amounts of space for writing.  This is  great because for morning work, the speech bubbles or one to two sentences of writing is perfect.  For our writing time, I used more lines for writing. 

I put some of the sea creature activities together to make a packet for writing last week.  Each day we read books about the sea animal that we were going to draw and write about first, so the children had some great ides to include in their writing.  Some books were nonfiction and others were fiction.

I may have mentioned this book before, but I am mentioning it again because if you don't have it, you will want to get it.  My kids ask for it EVERY DAY!  In fact, I was out for screening one day, and the kids begged the substitute to read it.  She said she never pays full price for a book, but went right home and ordered it. My friend Leslie who teaches across the hall from me asked her daughter to get it for her for her birthday! It's a good one!

 It's just magical for the kids.  And what a great way to let them see the power of written words!

Here are some pictures from the book.

Here is a video of B.J. Novak reading some of the book so you can get an idea-

My sweet friend Holly teaches second grade next to me.  She had her students choose their favorite body part and write about why it was their favorite.  I loved the idea and wanted to share it with you.  They came out so great!  It was amazing because they were all different. Even if a couple students chose the same part, their reason for choosing it was different.  

                                                 

Finally... this is reminiscent of my brush with sadness when my Celebrity Match was Boris Becker and then Michael Keaton....  That was so sad it was actually hilarious. 

So, this time I thought I'd torture myself with the internet telling me what my name should be. 

My neck is named Caroline which is OH SO CLOSE- but my head is... Zack.

Ashley is cute. I decided to stop  with that one and stop trying pictures.

HAPPY HAPPY WEEKEND!