A peek at my week and a freebie

It has been too long since I've posted. I no longer have internet at my house so it makes my blogging time difficult. I'm hoping my husband is on getting internet at our house again. Life has been kind of crazy lately. I don't think that I've shared on here that I was called for Jury duty. So far I've only had to report one day for orientation. I was suppose to report tomorrow and Wednesday but we're testing so I'm excused. On top of that, I have been having issues with my right knee. It's bothered me off and on since I was in high school after I had a skiing accident. But this past month and half it's been awful. So I went to the doctor and was told I have arthritis in my knee and referred to a specialist. Friday I saw the orthopedic doctor and got some bad news. The arthritis is caused by a torn acl. So I've had a torn acl for the past 15 years. I knew when I had my skiing accident I was hurt but I really didn't think it was that bad and I was scared to tell my parents. I was afraid they wouldn't let me ski. I continued to ski and play soccer throughout high school. Whoops. So now I'm looking at a total knee replacement if I don't correct this problem soon. I have a MRI Wednesday and meet with the doctor again a week from today. So hopefully I'll know more then. Chris is going to go with me since I didn't think of all the questions I needed to ask. Anyway, so that's the craziness that is my life. I really want to get back into sharing what's going on in my classroom so I thought I would share what we're up to this week.
In reading, we're still working on building up stamina for daily 5. We've built up to 20 minutes for read to self and we're holding steady there for a little while. We've slowly been building up stamina for read to someone. I think we're up to 8 minutes. We've also been working on building stamina for working on writing. I'm not sure how I'm feeling about daily 5 so far. I think I'll be more on board once everything is in place. This week I'm introducing some working with word activities. We're going to use magnetic letters, stamping, a game, and a magazine hunt. (These activities can be found in my Words that Pop Up unit) I think that by introducing some of the activities I want them to choose from, it will help us when we start building up stamina. We're also working on incorporating some reader's workshop ideas. I have been enjoying Kim Adsit's Reading workshop units. They have some great lessons in them. This week we're working on some mini-lessons from the book Growing Readers. The kids have brought in their favorite books and we're going to share them and look for things that are the same and things that are different. We're also going to work on sketching our favorite reading memories.We started the reading series last week but in the midst of all our testing we didn't quite finish what we needed to do. So we're continuing with that.
In math, we're working on addition. We've been working on different ways to make numbers so adding in addition sentences isn't too much for them. I'm pretty disappointed in myself though. I haven't been able to get math workstations going yet. We had some introductory time with the manipulatives but that's about as far as I got. I have a few activities that are set up and ready to go but I need to just bite the bullet and finish getting them together. I did make a game that I'm super excited to use this week. It's called paw prints addition scoot. It's a scoot game with three different versions working on addition problems with numbers 0-5. I have it up on my TPT store for $3.00. You should check it out here.
We started some science last week. We just talked about what scientist do and then did the mentos and coke experiment. I was definitely the coolest teacher Thursday afternoon. This week we're talking about what tools scientist use. I plan to use the mystery box to introduce a few of the tools to them. We're also going to be working on using our senses and being scientist. They are going to find something outside to observe and recording their observations on the following sheet. (This is where the freebie comes in)

I'm so excited to be sharing a freebie with you. Maybe this means I'm getting the hang of school again. At least for now. I hope to be back later this week with some more information involving math work stations and a science experiment. So be sure to check back.