Giveaway, Observations, & Spiders!

Happy Sunday!

Lots of exciting things happening in the upcoming week! 

Too many exciting things ;)

I have two observations this week! The first one is on Tuesday for 1.5 hours. The district will be observing a student I work with and will be making important decisions that will affect his education. Please send positive vibes that they do what is right for this precious boy. 

The other observation is a video taping of a Close Reading lesson. One of the assistant principals and I are participating in a Text Complexity course and she will be taping and providing feedback for our "mid-course project." 

Close Reading occurs as a whole group during our comprehension block. As a special educator, I pull small groups to check for understanding...i.e.: we may do an additional passage (versus close reading a book during comprehension) and I will explicitly model going back into the text to highlight the evidence. I also have two first graders participating in a close reading activity during a pull-out intervention. This is such a fun time when we are close reading a "theme" and digging deep using a variety of multi-sensory strategies and texts. 

Last week was our autumn theme kick-off, 

and this week it's all about spiders! 

We will be exploring the following texts this week:

The Very Busy Spider

National Geographic Kids: Spiders

I also put together a quick nonfiction Spiders emergent reader with vocabulary cards: 

and created rhyming word cards to match up

after reading Aileen Fisher's poem Spiders:

As we explore spiders this week, we will be incorporating all of our senses with our weekly rotating sensory bin. I was sad to see last week's go, but then I remembered...it's not about me! 

I wonder what my students will think of this:

It's filled with plastic spiders, black beans, pom-poms, etc. plus the vocabulary and rhyming cards mentioned above. At first, I had made a bin using the fake cobwebs (both the white fuzzy kind and the fishing net -style) - I DON'T RECOMMEND IT! I ended up throwing the whole thing out (!!!), except for the tiny pieces that will forever be part of my house now :(

I also found so many great slime-y ideas and pinned them to my SENSE-ational board. I'm just not brave enough to use them. 

I made 4 QR code cards for early finishers. 

There are 3 read aloud stories and one video about spiders! 

Please click here to download the cards.

I plan to bundle up all my fall themes soon! 

They need to be student-tested and approved first :)

Today (Sunday September 28th) is the last day for my GRITTY Giveaway! Please click here to enter to win my GRIT Trackers: Student Data Notebook packet! 

This post is linked up with Mrs. Jump's Class

and

I also shared this post with Simply Centers

Have a fantastic week!