Current Events, Teachable Moments.

This has been a crazy week for us in Colorado. Since Thursday cities all around Colorado have been suffering from some devastating flooding. My family and I are very lucky to be safe and dry where we are, but many of the surrounding areas have been evacuated and are experiencing serious flood damage. We can't really go anywhere because of all the road closures around us. The rain finally stopped yesterday for some much needed blue skies but unfortunately it returned today and is supposed to continue all day long. 

Here are a few pictures I gathered from Friday of the flooding in and around our area. It's hard to believe that there are parts of the state that are under much more water then what you see here. :(

This is a road I used to drive daily to get to my old school. 

Our state's major highway, about a mile from my old subdivision.

We could see this flooding of the Big Thompson River from a hill in our neighborhood.

I had originally planned to start my Guided Reading Groups mid-week this past week and blog about it but we've been out of school since Thursday. Our district is closed tomorrow too and some of  the other districts where the flooding is more severe are already closed all of next week. Right now I can't even get into my classroom to grab stuff to work on which is a bummer. So I'm sorry for the lack of content to share with you guys this week. I will try and make up for it just as soon as we're back in the classroom! Until then, please keep Colorado families in your thoughts.

My teacher brain of course is already thinking about how I can turn this into a teachable moment. I have my whole Weather Is Wild Unit which I'm sure will now involve lots of conversations about flooding when get started with it in January. But for a more immediate lesson I thought we'd learn about some non-fiction text features. We will be studying newspaper articles and then write our own about the floods. This is a sample of what I will be going over with my class.  

Right now our newspapers have lots of photographs that we can cut out and use for our articles and captions. I'm sharing the blank Current Event Writing Template I've created for this in case you would like to work on a similar writing pieces about events in your area or elsewhere. Click HERE to grab it for your class.

Hoping to be back soon with happenings from our rain free classroom!!