Winter Wonders Blog Hop

Welcome to one of the stops on the Adventures in Literacy Land Winter Wonders Blog Hop!

This time last year a group of amazing bloggers launched Adventures in Literacy Land as a way to share great tips and advice for teaching all things literacy! I am delighted to be joining them as they start their second year and look forward to being part of the team and sharing more of what I am up to in my classroom with you!

To celebrate their one year anniversary and first birthday, Adventures in Literacy Land have organised a great chance for you to pick up some fantastic freebies and enter an amazing giveaway for a chance to win one of FOUR $25 Barnes and Noble gift cards! 

Make sure you hop all the way through, gather up your freebies and enter that giveaway! Now on to my little gift for you...

My school is in an area where our youngest children often join us with lower than average language development and it is one of out biggest challenges to build their vocabulary and continue that development throughout their years with us. 

Every classroom (and I'm sure yours too!) has a huge focus on vocabulary displays to support the children. I became bored with one of mine recently and have decided to change it with each season as a way of introducing more ambitious and relevant vocabulary that is likely to support a lot of the writing we will be doing in class.

Here is my Wintery Words display (minus any actual wintery words!):

It already has a lot more on it than this - words I have added (a few at a time), words my class and I have collected together (though class discussions and shared books) and words they have found in reading books or heard at home and have decided to add themselves (I leave post it notes out below the display). Currently there are just nouns and adjectives on display but I plan to do some work on similes and other figurative language soon. 

I encourage them to refer to this display during writing sessions but do have to swap out some of the words every now and then as too many things seem to become 'blustery' or 'glittering' - that's the sign it is time to introduce some new vocabulary! I never discourage the overuse of ambitious vocabulary at this stage in their writing development - even when it is not always used correctly (this does depend on the child and their maturity to some degree) as making and refining choices when it comes to vocabulary comes a little later. I do make sure they have plenty of words to choose from though so I don't go crazy! 

(Click on the images to link to the websites you can download the vocabulary from for free!)

When I taught further up the school I loved exploring idioms with my class - it was always a lot of fun to teach and really improved their writing by making it more interesting for the reader. We don't explicitly teach idioms in the year group I'm in now but I thought I would make a mini wintery idioms pack freebie for you to use in your classroom to help children build their vocabulary in a fun way - click on the picture below to download. I hope you find it useful!

Here is what you will find inside:

I plan to share some more on activities to build vocabulary in the classroom soon so watch this space! In the meantime, I would love to hear from you about displays or activities you find really effective in supporting vocabulary development in your classroom - I'm always looking for new ideas so please comment below!

Your next stop is the lovely Tara over at Looney's Literacy - go pick up your next freebie (and don't forget to enter the giveaway at the end of the hop on Adventures in Literacy Land)!

Thanks for stopping by!

Monday Made It Freebie!

Hello!

Thank you Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics for hosting Monday Made It!

We're still busy at school here in the UK - 17 more teaching days left till the holidays start! 

(I'm limping towards the finishing line...)

 Next Monday is meet the teacher morning and I will have my new class with me for a few hours to get to know them before the start of the new year.

It doesn't seem to matter how many years I have been teaching - I can never seem to remember what I did on the last meet the teacher day or first day back in September - wish I knew why!

Ready for Monday, I made a little All About Me booklet for my new class to complete at some point during the morning. I do remember I usually have a sheet like this for them but wanted to include more and make it a booklet that I can display ready for September this time. As they fill it in I will go round and speak to them all individually and find out what they are writing about, their families, favourite things etc.

I have made it so that it will form an A5 8 page booklet. The space on the back is a free choice - they might tell me what makes them unique, some interesting facts, write a summer bucket list or just draw a picture!

Here is a preview of the pages - you can download the booklet for free and use it as a start of the year activity with your new classes.

I'll change this to 'what I enjoyed in Hedgehogs' and What I am looking forward to in Otters' as those are the class names. You could put class names, year groups or grades.

We will use the question page to base a little circle time session on at the end of the morning.

Click on any picture above to download for free. Please leave feedback and feel free to follow me on TpT!

Any other ideas for meet the teacher morning? What works well for you? 

Have a good week ahead!

Monday Made It

Hello!

I'm linking up with Fourth Grade Frolics for another Monday Made It!

I finally got around to making the social media icon links that I wanted this weekend. I used the video tutorial made by Carol at Teachers are Terrific! It was really easy to follow and I'm so pleased with how they look!

Feel free to follow me on bloglovin', TpT or Pinterest!

I was hoping to share a crafty item - a cushion in my classroom colours that I was planning on making this weekend but unfortunately time got away from me and it will have to wait for another time.

Instead, I am sharing another classroom display I made a while back. It's one I keep up throughout most of the year and just add to with new adjectives and a few new decorations throughout the year. The kids really use it a lot to make sure they have some 'juicy' adjectives in their writing. A few too many things are 'gleaming' at the moment though so I think that word needs swapping out so a they can build their vocabulary even more! (Sorry - the picture isn't great quality!)

What displays help build vocabulary in your classroom?

I've also updated one of my free products on TpT. I bought some great new puzzle pieces from Graphics from the Pond and used them to add 20 new compound words to my existing compound adjectives packet. You can download it for free here.
 I would love it if you left some feedback if you like it!

Don't forget to link up with Monday Made It!

Non Fiction Explorers

We've done plenty of work on non fiction texts this year - looking at them in guided reading sessions and writing information texts, non chronological reports, instructions, recounts etc. 

I just wanted to check if some of my class could remember and recognise the main features when looking at non fiction books. I stumbled across this free resource on TpT and it was just what I needed.

I declared us Non Fiction Explorers and we started by matching the feature picture and name together:

Next I gave them the scavenger hunt sheet. Some looked at books from the library and other looked at big books on the carpet with me. They chose a book and ticked off the features as they spotted them. I had some of them use sticky notes to draw arrows to and label the features so I could be sure they were really spotting them and were getting it right (and were not just ticking them off without actually finding them).

The big books in school just seem to gather dust these days as texts are so easily available and shared online and on the IWB. I've realised they are perfect for guided reading though and that the kids loved having them out on the carpet and sharing them together. They'll definitely be featuring in my guided reading sessions for independent work more often now.

Once they were done finding the features they read in pairs and recorded interesting facts ready to share with the rest of the class at the end of the lesson. I learned at lot during that time...

Did you know that foxes have whiskers on their legs as well as their faces, which they use to help them find their way? And that astronauts can see the Great Barrier Reef from space? My class thought these facts were amazing!