Spring Break is not a break!

So Spring Break is looking more like a snow break, but I'm still managing to do a lot to prepare for the last quarter of the school year. It was really too pretty to ignore for the first day. I posted a video of it snowing at my parent's house. The break had a very calming start, but now I'm in high gear!

Reading

I'm still doing the Daily 5 in my classroom for reading groups, but I'm noticing that some of my students are struggling repeating their Word Work station so I'm planning on having a sign in sheet where they write in what day they did the activity on. I've also limited the options to only 5 choices because I think I may have had too many choices as of late which is why they may be getting confused.

I've also been checking out pinterest a lot for more options for my word work station. I'm already picking out some Spring themed word work for the first week of April. I'll try to get better about posting that once I get it in April. It's hard to keep up with when I'm teaching!

Math

I'm also still using the BUILD math model mentioned in a previous post and this is another creation for those centers.  To help students work on fact families, they use the numbers on the peace signs. It's crazy how much more students enjoy practicing fact families when the numbers are on glittery neon  peace signs! :)

Also, kind of with math is my new whole class behavior system.  They met their cocoa compliments goal and now they are working to get 10 numbers in a row on our 100s chart.  At the end of the day, if the class agrees that we had a good day then I'll have one student pull numbers to decide what number we get to color in today. I think they'll love it!

This idea is from pinterest from this blog. This time I think we'll work a classroom party-- they really enjoyed that the last time we had one. 

Classroom Management

I already have behavior contracts set in place for several of my students, but I know with the end of the year in sight that I may need to change it up a bit for my students.

For most of the class I'm going to use Caught You Coupons when they follow directions for the first time. I'll give them the chance to "cash" those in for computer time at the beginning/end of the day or prize box.

I think it's important to have a prize that everyone can get (not just target behavior students) because it's important that the students see that good behavior is rewarded.

For my students who have more behavioral needs, I found a site that had so many behavior charts I was up to my neck in them! Sorry I couldn't help being cheese-tastic! :)

They have behavior sheets for all ages of students ranging from ages 3 and up. They have some for parents at home too!

I did already have some behavior sheets, but they weren't a great fit for the skills the students were working on. I love the sheets I found because they have single target behavior or multiple behavior pages.  You should certainly check it out if you want to mix it up. Get the link here and look around! They have contracts, homework charts and tons more!

New Happenings!

As promised, here is my new smart board!!! I am in love with it and so are the students!

I adjusted my classroom so all my seats are turned so they can have a view of the markerboard up front and can turn their heads the other way to see the smart board.

I'm really happy that I set it up this way because then everybody has a chance to sit in the front.

I've already done several lessons on it and am looking forward to using it for centers especially once the ipad the school gave me is up and ready for me to give to the students as well!

New Management

As expected, eventually old classroom management systems can lose effectiveness which is why I've started this:  Cocoa compliments.  Every time I catch the students complimenting each other, a teacher or our class gets complimented, they get a marshmallow. Once they get it filled up to reach the word cocoa, our class will have a cocoa celebration! They are very excited and so am I (I love hot chocolate!)

Recess Contracts

Also, unfortunately, it seems as though this is when we really start getting into bullying-- especially at recess. Therefore we had to agree on a recess contract as a class.  Everyone had to write down these rules and sign it.

These are behaviors that are expected at recess, if they are not able to follow them then they will have to sit out for part of their recess. So far, I've only had to have someone sit out once and I was happy that they knew they made a mistake and that they needed to sit out for a bit.  Hopefully this will last until May,

I would love to hear anyone's suggestions for addressing bullying at recess. So far that's the only trouble area that our class is having and I think it's the hardest place to manage!

President's Day

We have done a lot of work doing shared reading and highlighting the main idea in papers written about popular presidents. The students have been very interested and are working to write a paper of their own using just the main idea.

It also has worked out as a good cross-curricular move because I have a group studying Franklin D. Roosevelt and we discussed the Great Depression.  In the read aloud I've started, Bud, Not Buddy, it takes place during the Great Depression so that group was able to help tell the rest of the class about that time as we wrote in our reading notebooks.

Have a wonderful President's Day!

MLK Day

Soooooo overdue! This is just a recap on some of the activities we did in my classroom for Martin Luther King Day.  We did a lot of writing that went along with some free TpT resources, mainly booklets.


Some videos that I'd recommend to show classes are a Student-made video and a Animated "I have a dream". Both were very informative and got the kids talking. From there we started by first outlining living conditions then and what MLK wanted to change.  After we wrote about that, we did a class brainstorm on people today who need help and then we tried to dream BIG to think of how we would want to help them.

He was thinking about preventing animal abuse.

Most of this post will just be pictures of their work.  Some were incredibly creative and others definitely pulled at your heart strings.

I won't share some of the more serious ones to protect their privacy, but there was definitely some mature thinking.  We talked about the death penalty, health care, animal abuse and social security to name a few things!  I have no doubt that my students will go on to really make a difference if their hearts are so big already!

Will have more posts soon--including pictures of my new smartboard!! :)

Homemade classroom goodies!

While I spent most of my Christmas break with my family visiting from Ireland, I have been able to in the past two days to really crank out some homemade new learning activities for my reading centers and my upgraded math centers.

Firstly, I would strongly recommend that you look at this link. This is where I got the ideas to make all of these centers and where I will be going to get more ideas. It also includes a sample worksheet that you can use with each center! I will probably just have students record work on notebook paper to save on paper (it is scarce!).

Word Family Cans

I used snack size cans for the container, milk/orange juice lids and notecards to create a great review center for students doing word work.

Students will record their created REAL words to turn in for accountability.

Paint Stick Sentences

I used paint sticks from Home Depot, clothespins and notecards (although when I can, I will probably find some flash cards to use instead). 

Students will take a notecard with a clothespin to plug into the sentences on the paint sticks to create a sentence that makes sense. They will then write down their new sentence.

I think this will be very helpful for my ESL students because I'm trying to use visuals to help them understand a patten in sentence structure.

Dolch Word Cards

I cut apart paint cards from Home Depot to write the Dolch words from each list to sort into groups. Now I may use these as a practice flash card center or what I really like to do is make a telephone center.

For the telephone center, you have two telephones linked to each other. One student calls the other, the student will say one of the Dolch words to the other, then they must write the word correctly. The student will hold up the word they wrote, the caller will check it; if the word is correct then they hang up and switch roles.

Now I just need two phones.....

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I am doing something brand new in Math. I've been really happy with using the Daily 5 for reading. The students love it and I've seen tremendous improvement in almost every student. I was looking for a way to bring that kind of excitement and results to math when I found BUILD.

They are math centers set up a lot like the Daily 5 with a lot of independence. It stands for:

Buddy Games

Using Manipulatives

Independent Working/Reading

Learning about Numbers

Doing Math

I'm going to start with whole group math and then pull small groups for reteaching and reinforcement while the rest of the class is doing their BUILD centers. I am so excited and I think the students will be too!

Clothespin Facts

To help build (ha ha) up their knowledge about fact families, students will choose a number on a notecard and then must find facts in the container that equal that number. Students will write down their answers on an accountability sheet for every BUILD station (just notebook paper for me!).

The first one I've made is just addition facts for numbers 8-18 that have switched factors. I tried to focus on double, double plus 1, and plus ten facts when choosing the facts.  I think for my next one I'll have just subtraction and then maybe mix them once the students get really good at this.

Math BANG!

This is a fun game that just requires popsicle sticks with math concepts and skills written on them (mainly for review) and some sticks with the word BANG! written on them.

To play this game, a group of students would take turns drawing sticks from the container. If the student can answer the stick correctly, then they get to keep the stick. They keep playing until someone draws a stick that says BANG! which means that round is over and whoever has the most sticks won that round. The sticks go back in and the game restarts. 

I think my students will love this :)

I looking forward to kicking off the new year will all of these new goodies! I will continue to be posting more homemade things that I make so you can see what we're up to in class and you might want to make your own!

Smart Board Interactive Websites!

Okay so this is going to be a really short post, but I was very excited to share some news. All of the teachers at my school are getting smart boards! I am busy looking into great resources to use in my classroom with my smart board. I just wanted to share some of what I found and if you have any suggestions for more ideas feel free to post. BTW all of the sites are FREE!

I am very excited to use this as a classroom management system. Class Dojo is this awesome site that lets you create little icons for each of your students and during class you can give points to students to reward them for being helpful, participating, doing well with partners, etc. You can also take away points for negative behaviors. I LOVE that parents can also log on at any time to see how their child is doing. I'm planning on using it to reward students once they reach a certain amount of points.

I'm also looking at working on nouns, verbs, and adjectives soon and I found this game that I thought would be great to play as a class. It's called Noun Dunk. I think they kids would be excited about getting up to play the game. It's fun to check out if you have the time!

The last one that I think I'll have to try out is mainly for science. I've used it before hooked up through my Document Camera (through the computer), but being able to create the static electricity and do the different experiments by actually touching the balloons together on the screen would be a ton of fun! The main website has tons of science interactive demonstrations where the students need to move items to create reactions. The site is called Engineering Interact and I recommend it!

One more goodie that I want to share has to do with place value. It's like Pacman, but with place value! Looks like a super fun game that we could play together and then I could have them practice on their own on laptops! It's called Place Value Eaters!

I hope you enjoyed all of the goodies! I am very excited for a smart board and excited to let the kids use their hands with this technology for learning!