Peek At My Week 2/28

Disclaimer: Affiliate links are included for your convenience.

This week, the book was The Hat by Jan Brett. I was really pleased when I asked the kids what they thought would happen and they said the animals would all get stuck in the hat. They remembered The Mitten from last week (if you missed that post, check here). Sometimes they can't remember what they had for lunch ten minutes ago, let alone last week!

I grabbed some free worksheets from Making Learning Fun for a quick and easy follow up activity. I've found that once we read the book and answer questions throughout (I usually have the students retell the events during the book too), I have little time for an activity. That's why I don't usually plan a big, elaborate activity. We colored the items as we went through the book. I love Jan Brett's book because they are great for prediction. She always has clues as to what will happen next (plus her illustrations are just amazing). She has a wealth of ready to go activities on her website too!

My 5th and 6th graders learned about the luge. We read an informational article and watched this video to learn more about how these athletes train. They have really enjoyed learning about the Olympics and I loved that I got to work in non-fiction reading comprehension along the way.

However, the true star of the week came about by accident. Some of my 4th graders are working on explaining associations and overall expressive language. I happened to find this free Association Dice activity from Kari Radovich on TpT. I printed it out and used a free dice app. Each student got to roll the die twice so we knew what category we'd be working on. Once they determined that, the fun began. I told the students that we were going to play a game. I set the timer for 30 seconds and told them to write down as many things that fit that category as they could. When the time was up, we shared our answers (I played too). Each student got a point for each answer they had that others didn't have. Let me tell you = huge motivator. Plus, it worked on word retrieval and vocabulary in a fun way!

What did you do this week?