Reading Street Linky & Boom Town FREEBIES!

Happy Dance!  I am officially starting the first story in Reading Street this week, and I am kinda excited to have some consistency (& a starting point) this year.  It’s only my second year with the program, but I feel so much more relaxed than I did at the start of last year when I switched districts and my whole teaching world changed.  Woooo hooooo!

This weekend, I typed up the most organized lesson plans I’ve ever written…  thanks to my sweet friend Erica Bohrer, and I LOVE it so much more than my old template! 🙂   {You can read more about how to snag the template from Ms. M. here!!!}  If you want to take a look at how chaotic my first “official” week is, then go ahead.  I repeat the same lesson with two groups… so I really only mapped out three days so far… and I think I might still tweak them.  My plans are never super stellar at the beginning of the year when I am trying to get into the swing of things.  Does anyone else ever feel that way?!  I usually really get in the groove after a few cycles.  🙂  Click on the pic to download!  It’s not editable… but you can check it out for ideas if you want!

While I was planning this weekend, I created journal prompts for Boom Town.  (I plan to create these one story at a time.  Grad school is KILLER!)   They are based on the questions of the day.  I think this is a critical component for fostering reflective thinking! 🙂  If you’d like to check them out, you can find them HERE!  Of course, these match up perfectly with the Essential Questions in my packet.  If you haven’t snagged it yet, what are you waiting for?! 🙂 

I finally finished my vocabulary list for Boom Town too!  Again, this will be completed one story at a time, because I am WAY too busy to knock it all out of the park in one weekend.  I also included a word rating chart for the vocabulary words in this story!  It’s in the same file!  Check it out!

Last year, I created Editing/Revising Checklists.  If you’d like to snag one for Boom Town, you know the drill.  🙂  Grab it!

Friends,  I know I already posted about my new spelling sheets a while ago, but if you missed it and you’re interested, you can snag them by following this link! 

I already posted about my new spelling test template as well.  It’s also free in my little ole’ shop!  Grab it! (I created a pre-test template today, so I added it to the existing file.  If you already have it, you MAY want to download it again! Just a friendly F.Y.I coming your way!)

I made Theme Posters that you are welcome to have as well! 🙂  They hang out on my focus wall!

This is a poster I created last year to teach Realism/Fantasy! 🙂

This is the anchor chart I created last year to teach the character description piece to my kiddos.  If you want to read about the lesson, you can read about it HERE.

In other news, I wanted to share some other supplemental resources I’ll be using throughout this story!  🙂  I bought a cute supplemental packet  for Boom Town from Sarah Kirby.  I’m using some of her posters for my focus wall.  It’s worth a looksie!

I also plan on using Amy Lemon’s Strengthen Your Sentences pack to reinforce sentence skills throughout the first unit.  I think it correlates perfectly!

I will beef up some of the writing in unit one with my Writing on Target unit.  It’s great for launching peer editing, working on target skills (in this case: VOICE) and getting the kiddos to pay attention to the author’s craft. 

Since we’ll be working on spelling throughout the year, I plan on using these two resources pretty consistently: my Words Galore Goodies and Abby’s Spelling for All Seasons.  I already mentioned her product after the TpT sale, but seriously, I am so pumped!

Of course, I am totally going to work my School Days Craze centers into the mix too! 🙂 So FUN!

Since our Social Studies overlaps, I plan on pulling some resources from my Economy 101 file and my Lemonade Economics bundles to try to tie everything together throughout this nine-weeks & unit.  Our program can get a little dry! It’s nice to be able to shift everything around to make it fit together perfectly!  I also plan on using some of Hope King’s Economoney unit to tie into our curriculum & school wide economy.

In somewhat unrelated news, I also wanted to let you know that I’ll be plugging in some Constitution Day activities as well.  We’re required to teach it, and I’m excited to do it again this year!

Lastly, I have to acknowledge two great resources for RS teachers.  I LOVE the reading trifolds by Cindy Hulsey!  I found them last year when I was scouring the Internet for RS resources in a frenzy.  I love how they correlate with each story and address the questions that the series suggests.  It helps me hit the skills we need to hit without clutching my manual too much, and it was a great weekly routine too.  Well, as fate would have it, I actually got a little email from Cindy last week.  How fun is that?!  She wanted to let me know that she will be adding vocabulary booklets throughout the year for each story, and she sent one to me to check out!  It looks FAB-u-lous, and I will totally be mixing that in as well! She left a link to her website, and that’s when I made the connection that I already use & love her trifolds.  All of her resources are free, and she is the sweetest lady ever! 

The other great free resource is Carl’s Corner.  I think it may have been the first website I found as a brand new baby teacher.  🙂  Anyway, it has lots of wonderful resources including RS goodies by grade level, and I especially love the poems.  Cherry Carl uses the vocabulary words in the poems and ties them into the overarching concept of the week.  I just love it!  I plan on using them as Poems of the Week for my fluency folders (another freebie) and classroom fluency work.  (I DID revamp the layout of mine…simply because I have OCD. I don’t plan on sharing them on here out of respect for Cherry… but here’s a screen shot… so you can see the kind of work that she does!  You can find her copies of the poems HERE!) If you don’t want to do a poem of the week, you could make a great anthology of RS poems instead!

Whew!  What a MONSTER post! 🙂 I thought it would be a quickie, but I guess I had more to share than I realized.  I get a lot of emails about RS, so I thought that I’d TRY to make a blog post about what I’m doing.  It doesn’t mean I have all the answers, because I SO don’t.  This is only my second year with the program, so I am sure I’ll make lots of changes throughout the year.  I’d love to hear your favorite Reading Street resources and websites, so feel free to link up! I know that Waltke’s Web is always near the top of the list.  It’s another WEALTH of resources, for sure!  Also, if you have Pearson SuccessNet at your school, become friends with it.  It’s a fabulous site, and it saves me from lugging home my manual on a daily basis!  It also has a great database for leveled readers!  I pull a ton of stuff up on the SMARTboard from the site!  It makes my heart HAPPY!

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