Back to the Grind…Five for Friday 11.6

I've been through a roller coaster the last few months! I had my beautiful and super smiley little girl, Baby L. I love her to death and her older sister loves her as well. The transition has been pretty smooth for K actually. We have visitors for quite a bit of my maternity leave, but I'm very thankful to have had the help around. Just before I was to go back to school, my precious grandpa passed away. I have not had to deal with death in my side of the family and it was, and still is at times, very difficult. Because of that, I extended my leave for a week.

 The week I went back was a fabulous week *sarcasm* to go back. It was Halloween week, Red Ribbon Week with dress up days, full moon, and Parent/Teacher conferences. Let's just say I was exhausted by the time Friday came around.

This week I did my best to get the kids used to me and what our now normal routines are going to be.  I also wanted to put into practice some of the things I've thought about while I've been away.

My social studies topic for this quarter is explorers. I had planned on doing a different project that we did last year. We were to begin this the my extra week off, so I wasn't quite ready when I had to go take care of family things. My wonderful sub and I were able to quickly put together this and I'm loving it! I still need to tweak a few things, but I'm glad we did it.

I came up with a list of required facts the kids had to find and at least 3 extra facts of their choice. I also gave them the freedom to decide how they wanted to present their information. Most students did choose to make a poster, but a few ventured into making iMovies. Today we watched the iMovies using Reflector. Tomorrow we will do a gallery walk with the other posters. 

To help our staff become more comfortable with Kagan structures and not overwhelmed, we are doing a Kagan structure each month. In my intervention reading class, we used "Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up" to share their responses about things they collect. (We just started reading Donavan's Word Jar, and are using Mrs. Jones's book study.) They paired up three different times with someone who was not their neighbor, then sat back down. 

I pulled out some partner plays from Deb Hanson to practice fluency. They loved the fun little stories! They also rolled their eyes at me when they had to read whatever part they were handed. That meant that a few of the boys had to be "Mom." They got over it and had fun it.

Here they were reading the plays from her Fall/Halloween plays.

In math, we have ventured back into using Gaggle to watch my lesson videos. I can now include exit ticket questions directly in the Gaggle assignment! I'm excited to see how it works out when we get to a lesson that doesn't need drawings in the answer. However, my workshop for when they are finished with the video needs some work. To help with it, I decided to whip up a basic "Number of the Day" to review basic things. After more decimal lessons, we'll move into using Teaching to Inspire with Jennifer Findley's "Of the Day" resources 

Click to download my Free Number of the Day packet.

My sweet family at our school Halloween Safe Night Carnival

We have Rapunzel and a sweet strawberry.

My husband just wore his fire duty clothes, I was a last minute witch.

Linking up with Doodlebugs!

Thanks for stopping by! I will try to stop in myself a little more often with more things to share!

Keep Smiling!

*Steph*

Monday Made It…with Freebie…Hopefully :)

I haven't been very productive with making things for awhile due to family visits and my trip Outside (the lower 48). This last week I went into my classroom to try to help me get into school thinking mode. It worked! I went and bought new fabric for my white walls and I started placing the big furniture around. I said "good-bye" to my teacher desk as a teacher desk and started thinking about my year with a kidney table. 

I knew I would need one of those fabulous teacher toolboxes! Are you tired of seeing this in Monday Made Its? I'm not! I love to see what everyone decides to put in their drawers and the labels they use. I'm not as crafty as some others when it comes to creating fun labels so I used the labels I found at  Teaching with a Mountain View. You can find all sorts of pre-made labels if you look. 

I'm also not sure what to put in the last two little drawers so I am going to leave them and see what accumulates that needs a home. :)

 I also decided I needed a shelf or table of some sort for my toolbox and phone. I found this table at WalMart. I "made" it all by myself! I was pretty proud :) It may be too deep for the space I am wanting, but if it is I have a couple of other places I can probably use it. 

My brain kept spinning and spinning and thinking about things that I necessarily couldn't complete right away and it was driving me crazy! I am one that if I write it down, I can usually calm down and leave it alone. I decided to make a Back to School checklist. This has already helped me focus on what I can accomplish now and what I have to talk to other people about first.

Finally….. a freebie!! I do not have a TPT shop and don't have plans of opening one. I don't think I'm the type that could handle that and my family in my time out of work. The blog is enough for me. :) However, I may create some basic thing every now and then for me, so why not share? Please let me know if you are able to actually download this. I'm using dropbox and I'm not quite sure how this works sharing with the public. 

Kagan Table Numbers (Or Mat)

Thanks for stopping by!

*Steph*

Monday Made It {June 2}

I love the idea of keeping myself accountable through out the summer. I know that if I don't have a list, I tend to just veg and then wonder where all my time went! That's also part of why I started this blog. I'm really good at starting projects and then not completing them for various reasons. I've technically been out of school for almost 1 1/2 weeks, but I had a week long training so I consider this my first real week of summer!

My training was in Kagan cooperative learning. It was great! I had heard a lot about Kagan and it actually worked very well with the GLAD training I've previously had. The main thing about setting up Kagan structures in your classroom is having your students grouped in heterogeneous groups. That means looking at all of you kiddos and organizing them by their academic scores and then arranging them into groups, keeping in mind your "difficult clients." I was a little overwhelmed at the idea of needing to do that with all my kids, as we switch for reading, math and science/social studies. That just seemed like a lot of work that I would have to continuously be doing. I'm not a fan of work that continually needs redone (dishes and laundry are going to be the death of me for this reason!), but decided to just accept it and go forward 100%. If you don't give it your all, then you'll never know if it really works. In this case, I'm really excited about the possibilities that the Kagan structures may allow to happen in my room!

So with that… I luckily already have my class list for next year for my homeroom, reading and math classes. I decided why not make my card early and have my first groups already formed! I know that I'll have some students end up not coming and new students that do come, but the bulk of the work is done! It's not a very exciting "made it" but it's something that I won't need to do in the fall when I have a lot more to do.

This is the suggested way to create student info cards. I decided to use the colored index cards for a couple of reasons. I can color code by class. Pink is students in my reading class, and orange is students in my math class. Also, I already had them, so it was free! Best kind of project!

I filled out their SBA (state test) scores from 4th grade and their 4th grade Spring MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) scores for that subject. I also left room for their 5th grade MAP scores. Students may change colors throughout the year but I wanted to be able to quickly see if that happens by looking at their card. Each kid is also assigned a color based on where they fall within the class. 

Blue = High

Green = Medium High

Yellow = Medium Low

Red = Low

I will have the intervention reading class, but whoever my top kids are, are colored blue. I like that. I'm excited to have this done and in my brain. This will really help me when I'm thinking/planning over the summer.

Thanks for stopping by and hopefully I can include some home made its! 

*Steph*