Prepositions and Interactive Notebooking

I have been using Easy Grammar for two years now. I mainly like the structure of the curriculum as it introduces prepositions first in order to aide students into simplifying sentences by removing prepositional phrases. When kids can do this, it leaves the simplified sentence easier to dissect in order to go into depth with studying nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. So, I have been teaching prepositions for the past couple weeks.

I also have ventured into trying to create interactive notebooks this year for students to have 1) a notebook they can reference throughout the year, 2) a portfolio to show parents and administrators of student work, and 3) a way for students to be reflecting and writing more about their own thinking and learning. So, with a lot of inspiration from other teacher blogs I follow, some freebies I found on TeachersPayTeachers.com, and Pinterest, I created a plan to structure our Interactive Journals. I still have a lot to develop, but I am really proud of the first entry we did on Prepositions, and I really think the kids enjoyed it and got a lot out of it. Now, I know that the entries are supposed to be for input, but my first entries will be review lessons instead if input lessons. I am actually interested to compare them later with input lessons. Anyway, I will post some pictures of the Prepositions entry in our Interactive Journal under the tab Language Arts (we made tabs in a binder for Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies, and ELD). I will also do another blog entry later where I discuss more about what an Interactive Notebook is and how I have set mine up.

Venturing into the World of Blogging

I have been wanting to start a class blog for a few years now, but haven't had the guts to really try it out. However, I'm going to just jump on into this world of blogging and see what comes of it! I have tons of ideas, but I'm not really sure how to organize them all, and I honestly don't know how I can do ALL of them, but I figure I won't know until I try. So I am going to start by blogging about some of the activities I will be doing with my students this year and then hopefully will slowly start to add student writing. My goal will be to eventually have the kids blogging on their own! So, here goes!