In My Opinion...

Thank you all for the great comments and suggestions about the suggested ELA adoptions for my district. Tomorrow is our first meeting, a little anxious and curious. I think it's hard to adopt a new series, it will be as though we are guinea pigs....there are bound to be problems with ANY new curriculum and/or series. I am also curious to hear what other teachers in the district think about using these. Let's hope I can control myself, and maybe not share TOO much of my opinion.

Speaking of opinion (you like how I did that!?!?!) we have been working on opinion writing since before the winter break. I always start the basic opinion writing before Christmas because Christmas lends itself to many different opinion topics.

This year I chose to use a cute packet, My Opinion Matters by Panicked Teacher, to help guide my initial introduction of opinion writing. I LOVE the cute graphics and fonts. I also loved how I could print little pages for the students to glue into their writing journals, and project the color ones on the board. Click the picture below to check it out in her TpT store.

We also did our first opinion piece called An Elf for Hire by Teresa Kwant. It's FREE, so you may want to grab it now and put it in one of those many files you have on your computer. My students LOVED the idea of working as an Elf in Santa's Workshop. Click the picture to link over to her TpT store.

Now that we are back from the break we are working on a "less scripted" opinion piece. My friend from GA sent me a link to a WONDERFUL site called The Reading and Writing Project. There is a HUGE amount of resources all in one spot! My students have narrowed it down to two topics that they can choose from individually... Should lunches brought from home be banned at school? or Should chocolate milk be banned from school lunches? I love the website because they have compiled YouTube videos, articles, and websites for these topics. Head over and take a look: The Reading and Writing Project (this link will take you directly to the digital nonfiction text section that I used for the opinion writing).

Finally here are two of my newest topic posters: 

cute graphics are part of Nicole Shelby's 5th Grade Reading Interactive Notebook Packet

Topic Charts

I am alive and well...like most teachers you dive into the school year and are lucky to come up for breath before Thanksgiving! We have done some fun things, and every time we do something I think..."I would love to blog about this!" Then before I know it...another week has past.

One of these days I'll catch up...no promises though!

I did want to share my old and new topic charts that we are using in the room. It's just a general chart that shows an overall "snapshot" of our topic we are discussing/learning. I don't really consider them anchor charts, to me those are more specific. But they are a quick reference for the students.

Sorry for the short post, but enjoy the pictures (my good camera is on the fritz so these are taken with my phone).