Detective Day

Wednesdays are shortened days for us, so we don't have reading interventions in the morning. Because of this, I use it as my day I squeeze in most of my whole group literacy instruction. I was trying to think of a way to make it a little more fun and exciting today, and I came up with the idea of having a detective day! We started off the day "warming up our brains" by partner reading the I Spy phonics books I ordered from Scholastic last year. Each book highlights a few letters from the alphabet and my students LOVED them! 

Next we practiced our spelling words by doing Secret Code spelling! I found a link on pinterest to a secret code (simple pictures to represent each letter) and wrote out our spelling words for the week in code! The students' job was to decode each of the words, and then come up with their own word (or sentence for my high students) for their neighbor to decode. They had a great time!

Here is the printable I made up for that.

 Next we played "Mystery Sight Words." This was super easy to prepare and the kids also loved this activity! I chose a few words from our word wall and wrote clues for each one. For example, for the word "what" I had the clues: starts with the letter "w", if you took off the first letter it would say "hat." Or for the word "have" I used the clues: starts with the letter that comes after "g", has a "v" in it, and the last letter is an "e". When the students figured out what word I was describing I had them point to their brain, and after all (or most) of them had figured it out I had them give me the answer in a choral response. It was fun!

Our basal reader for the week is "How To Be A Nature Detective" so we read that as a class and then decided to be nature detectives noticing signs of spring. I had planned on letting the kids bring these printables on clipboards as we went on a nature walk around the school and record the signs they saw.

Unfortunately the weather today was horrible! We had wind, rain, hail....so no nature walk! I let them peek out the windows instead. After recording and discussing the different signs, we began writing information texts about Spring.
Our graphic organizer is a flower (found on edhelper) with the topic in the center and the supporting details on the petals. We finished the prewrite and begin our rough drafts. Hopefully by Friday we will be ready to publish and I think it would be fun to find some sort of art project to go with it!