Ahh...It's October!

Wow! Here we are in October and I am just getting to this blog for the first time this school year! We have become completely overwhelmed with CCSS Core Knowledge Listening & Learning and will begin the math modules next month. This new curriculum has really cut into our ability to be creative with our students learning styles, but I'm not here to complain. We have done some really neat things this year and I hope to be sharing more regularly. 

First, based on my evaluation last year I needed to create a way for my youngest students to evaluate themselves. Since they really can only consider their effort I created these 1/2 sheet evaluations for them to complete on random activities of my choosing. With practice, this will hopefully help students to better meet my expectations and complete work that makes them proud. 

As a multi-age classroom, every couple years we end up with a large split in our classroom. This year we have 4 second graders, 1 first grader and 4 kindergarten students. This makes creating effective independent centers difficult. So we created a set of 5 centers for the kindergarten students and word work stations for the 1st & 2nd graders. We use their first day of school pictures as a management system so we know who has finished which centers. The small pocket charts are from the dollar store and I just used picture frame stands to hold them (also from the dollar store). 

 This is the beginning of our Alphabet Museum. I found this idea on pinterest and put my own twist on it for my classroom. We collect objects through the week that begin with the letter of the week and save them in shoe boxes. We also use our bodies to create the letters and take pictures to go in the box. This is a large bulletin board outside my classroom and it will be filling up as we move through the alphabet.

Communicating With Families

Each week we write a short newsletter home to families giving tidbits about our week and what we are looking forward to in the next few weeks. We are beginning to wonder if this is truly the best way to communicate with families as these newsletters are often still in their take home folders on Monday morning. Starting this month we will be changing to a monthly newsletter. I've also been playing around with our classroom website available to parents through the district website. I'm trying to include pertinent information for our classroom that is included in every newsletter. We still only have one official blog follower, but I would like some feedback from anyone who happens upon our little blog. How do you communicate with families?

Also, check out our parent website. What would you add/change/remove?

BUILDing Math Skills

We spent some time this fall trying to figure out the best way to meet the extremely diverse math needs of our class this year. I LOVE pinterest so that was my first place to research some new ideas. We came across this blog with the BUILD math centers from the Daily Five program. We used that idea and adapted it to fit our classroom. This is what we came up with. We use name tags to move the students through each center. They only work at one station per day which makes it much easier to manage. While the students are working, I can pull 3 math groups to work on specific skills. (DM)

Watch as my reading GROWS!

This is our first year in many that we do not have an aide assigned to our classroom so we needed to find a new way to run our ELA stations while we saw guided reading and speech groups. I came up with the acronym GROWS and we made a chart: G is for guided reading, R is for reading to self, O is for on the computer, W is for word work and S is for speech. Guided reading and speech groups are pretty regular but the middle three change frequently.

At the bottom we planted a reading garden with a flower for each student. As they make progress towards their reading goals we add petals to the flowers. Hopefully in the spring we will have a beautiful garden!

Reach for the Stars!

Our school is slowly integrating the 7 Habits of Happy Kids program. One of the habits is to "begin with the end in mind." So in September we had the students really think about something (school related) that was hard for them and set a goal. Each arm has their goals written on it. The stars will hold their many accomplishments that they reach throughout the school year. We are hoping to fill the board and maybe even the wall. They are so excited to "add a star" when they have succeeded at something that was once very hard!

UPDATE: June 20,2013

 

The kids had a great year and many of them reached their goals. We created a little poster with their pictures from the first day of school and yesterday in front of the star board. It is amazing how much they grow in just one school year. They had fun re-reading their goals and celebrating their achievements!

Fall leaf people

Mrs. Moody did a great language lesson about falling leaves today. She read Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert and then the students needed to follow directions to complete a leaf person. This required a lot of fine motor skill to fold the paper, align the pieces and glue them together. You simply need 2 leaf cut outs, 4 strips of paper and fun google eyes.

Our LARGE word wall. For years we used a typical sized bulletin board for our word wall. We noticed how disruptive it was during a quiet writing time to have students getting up to look up words, sometimes having several students at the board at once. We decided it was worth it to use a large portion of our classroom as our word wall. Now the students can see the words right from their seats and our writing time is much more productive!

These are the simplest posters I could make to help my students remember what is being asked for when using WH question words. I have used these in all subject areas and refer to them frequently during guided reading. These are FREE and in color in my teacherspayteachers.com store.