Fairy Tale Plays and Chicago Teacher Bloggers

I know these two things have nothing to do with each other, but I thought it might be annoying to post two separate posts in one day :)

Ok...first...I totally forgot to post my kids' fairy tale plays. If you remember, I did a fairy tale unit in December that included group projects and plays (to incorporate some storytelling and drama). I finally got to grading the fairy tale projects last night (they were due the day before break) and was pleased with some aspects of the project, but not so pleased with others. Some Most of my kids are really having trouble writing paragraphs correctly, some of them are struggling with summarizing stories (including too many details or filling up their graphic organizer but not getting to the ending of the story). Is anyone else having that issue? Maybe it's still early in the year? I am going to try to be patient and do some extra modeling. It is definitely a mental note for next year to do more modeling and reminding for this project - maybe I need to even start the project a week earlier to make sure there is enough time for all that modeling haha!

Anyway...the plays my students performed we absolutely amazing. I had no idea what to expect because we hadn't done anything like it so far this year. I was so impressed! We had four plays: The Three Little Pigs, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Little Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I have scripts that were sort of like fill in the blanks so they got to write a lot of their lines but the basic story structure was there for them. Here they are for your viewing pleasure ;)

Chicago/ Near Chicago Teacher Bloggers!!!! Are there any of you out there? I keep reading about these blogger meet ups going on around the country and I thought it might be fun if we had one of our own. Would anyone be interested?