Tried it Tuesday: My first FOLDABLE & FREEBIE!

Today I'm linking up with my BBB, Holly from Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried It Tuesday! I am super excited for this post because if you read my post from yesterday, you read how we just started our interactive notebook. After seeing other posts from amazing blogging teachers using interactive notebooks, I felt like I was missing something. I mentioned wanting to create some foldables, but I had no idea how. Sweet Bethany from, Hunters Teaching Tales, emailed me some tips. Since I am working on inferences in the classroom, we talked about a graphic organizer type of foldable that would be fun and helpful. I whipped one up in about two minutes and was so excited to test it out with my kiddos today. (Click on the picture if you'd like a free copy!) :)

If you've been keeping up with my blog, you know we are studying how literature can teach us what we have in common with one another. We are focusing on homes, families, and traditions. Another one of my BBBs, Jivey, recommended an amazing book Knots on a Counting Rope. Being only the first week of school with my little ones, I found the book very deep and great for inferencing. Many of my students have no background knowledge on Native Americans so some things went right over their heads. I was happy I read it slowly because it started a ton of great conversations with talking partners.

When it came time to stop and infer I had a lot of hands go up. Some of the ideas were totally crazy, but others made sense. The part that really surprised me was that the kids didn't get that the little boy in the story was born blind. We used our inferring skills at that point and it finally made sense. Now that I just gave away most of the book to you, I won't spoil it anymore. We actually made inferences throughout the whole book and used the Note & Notice strategy "Again and Again" I was very proud of my class for working so hard today. I will end this with a direct quote from one of my students, "I love that you are letting us color and cut out for reading and writing! It makes me love reading MORE!" That leaves me :) !!