Woo Hoo!!!!!!!!!!!! It's a four day weekend!!!!!!! Our district gave us Thursday and Friday off for Rosh Hashanah. So, Happy New Year to those of you that celebrate!!! For me, it's just a lovely four day weekend. I'm determined to have two of those four days be NO SCHOOL WORK days. I do need to rework my planbook, make my lesson plans/prep for next week, and grade some papers. Hoping to get that all done today and tomorrow leaving Saturday and Sunday free. We are supposed to have some lovely fall weather this weekend here in NJ, and I'm planning to enjoy it! I see a trip to the orchards and some pumpkins and apple cider in my future. Thanks so much to everyone for all the great feedback on the anchor chart binder idea I posted. When I finish this post, I'm going to go back and add a little P.S. to answer a couple of requests and questions that I got about it. On to today's post. . . I am taking no credit for the two anchor charts I am posting today. The first is almost exactly copied from another anchor chart I saw online. The other is an exact copy of an anchor chart I saw online. Here's the problem. I found them online over a year ago and now have no idea where. If they are your charts, please let me know. I'm happy to give credit where credit is due. Making Text Connections Making connections is something we all probably teach and have a chart about. I think I did tweak this chart a bit from the original I saw. I am planning to tweak again to add more to text-to-text connections. In my class, we define text-to-text connections as connecting to not just a book, but connecting your book to another book, magazine, movie, or television show. Basically, connecting the text to another type of media. In fact, my techy little friends have made text connections to podcasts, blogs, and I even had a friend make a completely appropriate connection to a reading app he has on his Ipod. So, I'm thinking I really need to revise this soon to reflect 21st century learning. These kids can make me feel so old sometimes! Stop, Think, Jot! Now this chart, I remember for a fact copying it exactly as I saw it. I loved it that much! It has been a great chart for introducing the use of sticky notes during their reading. I wish I could remember where I saw it originally, because I would love to credit and thank the author. It's pretty self-explanatory, which is great because my friends get it. And, we all love the smiley faces. I'm planning to do another post soon about how we use the sticky notes in our reading. I've found a great way to use them to monitor the level of thinking my friends are doing and as a way to generate a grade. Our report card still requires A through F letter grades, so I always need quantitative grades. 10/2/11 UPDATE! I found the link for this anchor chart/poster. It is from a Scholastic blog post by Danielle Mahoney. Visit her blog by clicking HERE! She also has a link for bookmarks that go with this idea. Her blog is well worth reading. Thanks so much Danielle! Those are the two charts I thought I would share today. As I said, these charts are not my idea, but nuggets of goodness I found on the web. :-)