It's Grow Time: I'm Sorry... and Baaaaack!

Hello there, long, lost, blogger-friends! I would like to start this post with a big, giant APOLOGY.

I'M SORRY...

The past few weeks/months have just flown by and I have been up to my eyeballs in everything from planning, to creating, to completing my Cycle of Inquiry for BTSA, and blogging just hadn't made it to the top of the list. So... I decided to give you a little bit of test prep stuff today and have some more posts in the works. Check back tomorrow and you'll (FINALLY) get a classroom tour!

This is my first year with California STAR testing, so this whole prepping thing is new to me. I have a biweekly review planned into my regular Language Arts curriculum and we are continually spiraling in Math, so my kids are always practicing with skills that we have learned, but what I needed to do was to review things like parts of speech and testing vocabulary to really give them the tools they need to be successful. Luckily, I have all of you and your wonderful products to help me through. (On a side note, this is MY FAVORITE part of being a part of this blogger community. You all have such great ideas and are so generous with sharing photos and products, etc.!) We used the Vocabulary Star packet from Amanda over at One Extra Degree and my kids loved playing "Musical Chairs." They didn't even realize that they were reviewing. I really liked this activity because it refreshed their memories to the academic vocabulary that they will be encountering on the tests next week.

We played a few parts of speech spinner games from The Teacher Wife.

We also used Christie's Synonym Roll unit to review synonyms. I actually made cinnamon rolls at recess (we have an oven/stove in our pod) and the kids were ecstatic!

We did our version a little differently than suggested. I had students work in groups and each group had two words to list synonyms for. Each group had a thesaurus to use and had to list synonyms on a sticky and we shared out as a class and added additional words to our lists.

We used a few foldables that I saw a picture of on pinterest, but I'm not sure which wonderful I found them. (If you know... please let me know so that I can give credit here.) You can download my version here. I have one more day before our Language Arts test and I'll be blog-stalking and pinterest hunting this weekend to finish up strong.

Well, I am off to help at an amazing event that has been organized by a fellow teacher at my school. We do not have any pull-outs at my school and the arts have been on the back burner for quite a long time. This event is to raise money for classes both during school and after school for our very worthy kids. Check out all of the fun things happening at the event by clicking on the picture.