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!! :)