Five for Friday 9/25

I'm Hi!  I can't believe it, but I am back for another week of Five for Friday!  

We have actually had a pretty good week.  Our students and staff were off on Wednesday due to the UCI Bike Championships that are happening in Richmond, VA.  But here's what we did the rest of the week: 
We have been very busy with reading centers this week. We are learning how to understand the centers chart and rotate through each job. Here is our stamping center this week. 

This week, we started our following directions activities. These are called TLC Activities - though I'm not sure what their real name is. Here is the bus we did this week.

We started the stamping center today. I only give them the letters they need for the words they are stamping. I learned this from a teacher friend last year. It's brilliant!  Here, I just had them stamp a name to get used to using the center. You can see the little containers there that I put the sets of stamps in. 

 We have to do a beginning of the year writing assessment. We did that on Monday. And now that it is finished, we can start writer'so workshop Monday! Yay!  It's one of my favorite times of the day. I love seeing their writing grow!

Now...brace yourself...this is the math assessment that came with our newly adopted series. After 15 minutes for just 3 students, I put the whole stack in the recycling bin!  I couldn't handle it anymore!  Instead, we did the old school sorting of shapes that were different size and color. Everyone passed and it is a far better age appropriate assessment. 

It's so sad, this is what we get as an assessment now. Do you ever feel like you have to pitch something and go with your gut on what's age appropriate??  I'd love to hear how your centers are going too. 

Now head over and see what everyone else was up to this week. Have a great weekend!  Cheers!