First full week of school

We are wrapping up our first full week of school. We've spent a lot of time on placement tests and getting things organized and routines in place, but I'm also happy to share some of the fun things we've gotten to do!

Reading Centers

We've practiced the Daily 5 rotations which are: Silent reading, Reading to someone (partner reading), Listening to reading, Writing (which is actually done in our writer's workshop after centers) and word work.

The students have gotten very good at moving through the centers and had a lot of fun today working on the different word work stations.  The word work stations put a focus on phonics, sight words, and sentence construction AND they're always very hands-on so they are always a crowd pleaser. I'm hoping to create more this year too!

Math

We started math with a math about me project to display for meet the teacher night. This was my first time doing this project, but I was very pleased with how they turned out.

We also started the new Math Envision curriculum. I've been very pleased with it so far and the students love the workmats that come with each lesson, interactive videos, and center activities.

Science

We studied nutrition and the food pyramid as well as building well-balanced meals. We put this into our science journals-- we also saw a very good explanation of the new food pyramid, but it was through United Streaming so I can't share that link.

Very soon we will kick off our research unit on insects!

Social Studies

We just started looking at communities and will start looking at urban, suburban, and rural communities and then we will move into leaders.

Behavior

 

As shown in the previous post, I am using a clip up system for individual monitoring. I like that it's more positively focused and it gives students the chance to turn their days around (not "stuck"on red). I don't have a picture of the exact same calendar I've been using as a recording sheet, but here is an example one.

Many students got the chance to "cash in" their 5 good days today (green or better). Some of the things they can earn are: a hat day, no shoes, positive note home, prize box, bring in a stuffed animal, show and tell and if they save up for 10 days they can do lunch with me-- I usually go outside if the weather is nice :) They seemed very excited about "cashing in" today!

I hope this has been an insightful update!

Planning for next year

As my bucket list (on the last post stated), part of my summer bucket list is to do summer planning so here I am! I will say that Mr. Kietzman and I will be moving this summer, but I will try to keep up with posts while I am packing and planning :)

Behavior Plans


I found this on pinterest, of course, and it really got me to thinking that maybe I'll try using this form as an alternative think sheet or more than likely, I may use this sheet to fill out with the student when we conference about a certain behavior. Hopefully it will help them and me understand their behavior. I really like that it starts with reasons for behavior, goes to a description of the behavior and then has the students reflect on the consequences (how they feel, how their actions affected others) and then a plan for improvement.

Here is a link to sheet if you'd like to use it: Cause/Effect of Behavior Sheet
I'd certainly like to credit Laura Candler for this freebie! Lots of good stuff!

Center Plans


I'm posting this so I can hold myself to this goal, but I found these ideas online too for reading/math centers that I want to make this week.

The reading one should be pretty simple. I'll need to do some laminating and creating through word, but once I make it I'll be able to use it again and again! I may even end up turning it into an interactive bulletin board, but I am certainly going to get started creating it this week.

This idea can be adapted for a lot of different subjects, but I think I will at least start with the number bottles. The way it works is that students turn the bottles around and add up the numbers as they see them. I would probably either use bigger numbers or change it to multiplication for 4th graders.

There are also a lot of science ideas for discovery bottle centers-- like a magnetic bottle, sink/float, tornado, etc. I would certainly check out the link below. It gave me a ton of ideas that I am going to start on this week!

She also created a recording sheet to go along with the science discovery bottles that you can access here.

There are more ideas and pictures at the Discovery Bottles website.

More later!