Anchors Away Monday 5.12.14

This week for Anchors Away I'm sharing an anchor chart/graphic organizer that my fivers and I developed while we were reading The Worst Best Christmas Pagent Ever by Barbara Robinson. We were in the midst of our study of parts of speech, particularly verbs and their tenses. I always make sure that my students see how the parts of speech are used in published writing to give them a definite purpose for learning them.

We often display pages from the book we are reading on the Smartboard via my Kindle app to annotate and note particular literary items. For whatever reason, the Smartboard was down so I resorted to a simple piece of chart paper and post-it notes. What was a last minute alternate became one of the best resources of our year! We noted characters and the verbs that described them as I read aloud from Robinson's book.

Notice the different colors of post-its? Those represent different tenses of verbs- a suggestion made by one bright young lady who observed the variety of tenses and connected it to a lesson they had been learning earlier- and adjectives (for a while EVERY word was an adjective). Totally cool so my fivers thought! They still refer to this chart as we discuss characterization and verb usage. LOVE IT!

Do you use anchor charts in your classroom? If so, you will definitely want to be sure to stop by Crafting Connections where Deb is hosting this awesome weekly linky featuring Anchor Charts.