Peek at My Week—Back to School & Printing Booklets

Let's say you find this cute little book on-line that you want to print and make into books to use with your kids. The first thing you do is print, you might have to cut the pages in half, then get all of the pages in order, and finally you bind it together! Wow! That takes FOREVER!
It's great to have smart friends. My friend, Kathleen, taught me how to use the booklet feature to make this process so much easier! After reading about our week, I will tell you how we did it!



We are just finishing up our first week of school. I’m excited to be working with Megan’s former teaching partner to share a peek at my week. Week 1-Procedures, Procedures, Procedures! We worked on establishing our rules and procedures. We also got our reader’s and writer’s workshop going! These are simple lessons! The kids “worktime” was only about 5 minutes. During reader’s workshop, we spent time exploring books in the various areas of the room. Each day they went to a different area. If you want to read about how we organize our book area, you can find that post here.  During writer’s workshop, the kids were mainly drawing pictures, some were scribbles. Some were using random letters, and a few were using some letters purposefully to label their pictures.  Woo Hoo!

With the extra time in our day, due to shorter workshop times as we develop stamina, we did a few crafty type items. The kids love this and it helps to keep them busy! We are doing our centers a little differently this year. One of the big changes is that we are doing a mini lesson using the workshop framework.  It was amazing to watch the kids really “get it” as we practice each procedure.  I’m excited to be pairing up with Deanna Jump to write a series for centers with mini lessons, have to activities and can do activities! I love working on projects with others! It is great to brainstorm, discuss, and plan together.

During Math, we taught a few games, but we spent most of the time introducing all the manipulatives. We want to give them time to “play” so that when we get ready to use them in a lesson, they will be ready!
This coming up week we are going to do some assessment to see how they are doing.  I will share those with you next week.
You can download the plans here!

This past week while my friend Kathleen was down to visit, I was finishing up the Back to School guided reading unit. How excited was I when she shared how she has organized the units to use in her classroom.

If you’ve seen these units, you know that there are 5 different nonfiction books and each title is written at 3 different levels. Kathleen showed me a great way to print them! Here’s what we did:

1. First, select the pages for one of the books. You will need to print one book at a time.
2. Then, click on booklet.
3. It will print 2 pages per piece of paper.
4. When the printer stops, you will turn the pages over and feed them back through the printer again.
5. This will print two pages on the back of the paper.
6. We only laminated the page with the cover.
7. The other pages are white copy paper, just like a real book.
8. Lay the pages flat and, use a along neck stapler to staple along the bind.
9. And look! You have a real book!
10. Less paper, less ink, less time!

Kathleen has been printing her books and organizing them into notebooks along with the lesson plan and the practices pages for each book.

You can get the slips for the binds here. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7ubnOnZF__xQUd2a2FrZUVkRDA/view?usp=sharing
Thanks Kathleen for sharing those with everyone! This makes it easy to find the units quickly.
Here are the resources I used to plan for this week:


Now, jump over to DeeDee’s blog to see what others are doing this week!