Choosing Good Fit Books

It's been a whole week in the land of 3rd grade for the 2016-2017 school year.  The first week was CRAZY and I'm already behind.  Go figure.   I was supposed to do this lesson last week...Unforseen, air problems that caused us to have to move classrooms prevented me from doing so... SO, here I am sharing it with you today! :)

I love using "big" words with my kids to build their vocabulary.  If I don't get a hand raised at some point during the day asking me what a word meant... I know I need to step up my game.  The other day,  I said "genre" and they had NO idea what I meant... Holy canoli, we have some work to do.

Today was choosing books that are going to help us grow as readers.  We first analyzed the reading profiles of 3 students: 1 who read 100 easy books last year, 1 who read 3 really hard ones, and one that read 42 that were sometimes a little tricky but they could figure out what the author was trying to say.  The kids discussed with a partner who they thought was going to grow the most.  Nobody said the 100 book kid - I was pretty surprised, a few said the 3 book kid, but we fixed that one pretty quick. Most said the 42 books and they had great reasons why!

Then we compared choosing books to riding a bike.

I'll let the anchor chart talk for itself.  Notice the uphill bike sweating, ha.

Hope you got an idea or two! I'll be back with some more ideas as I begin my 5th year with this new group of sweet, sweet 3rd graders.  

We Feel Better When We're Learning - Song Share!

Before I share this new song, I just need to get this off my chest...

SCHOOL STARTS TOMORROW, Y'ALL!

Oh em gee.  I cannot even believe it.  Didn't we just end like...yesterday? No 6 weeks ago? Ay.

Excited. Scared. Butterflies.

It's sad knowing I won't have the same kids that I had for the last 2 years but so exciting to know I have a bunch of new kids ready and anticipating their #bestyearever.  Send me your energy, I'm gonna need it!  I imagine this will be me tomorrow afternoon...

Onto the reason for this post--

Every year I love to have a sort of "theme song" for the year.  Last year was Best Year of Our Lives.  You can find that post here.  I LOVED that song and so did my kids.  Everytime we were listening to music and the real American Authors song came on, they'd sing our song and remind me how much they loved it.  It was and always will be our song.

This year, we needed a new song...and so I began brainstorming and one day it hit me when I was dancing with my class to Meghan Trainor's, "Better When I'm Dancing".  That's when,  "Better When We're Learning" was born!

Here are the lyrics. If you click one of the pictures, it will take you to a file that you can download.

And here is my horrible, no yes, that's what I meant...horrible recording of it :).  Sorry the music is so loud.  That's probably a good thing. It's drowns out my non-Meghan Trainorlike voice.  Hope you enjoy and that maybe you'll sing with your class!

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