Student Material Organization & Five for Friday

Hello world! I have been pretty absorbed in my own little world consisting of my classroom and my family. This year is a big change for me in school since I changed grades and math programs.

I'm going to start off with how I have organized my slightly small classroom.

First of all, I already rearranged my desks from my classroom tour. I was excited about Kagan Structures and they suggest using pods or clusters. It drove me insane! I don't think any of our upper grades ended up keeping them. We are a very structured school and a lot of us tend to like the rows of some kind. My desks are now in 4 horizontal rows with 2 outside rows facing in. I have 30 desks so each row has 5 desks. At the end of row is a 3 drawer tower.

The top drawer has the team supplies. 

It includes highlights, red correcting tools, markers (2 sets), colored pencils (2 sets), glue and a hand held sharpener for colored pencils.

There is also a scissors basket because I have the 7" blades and they are too tall to be upright.

This is also the drawer I use for my social studies class. You can see some green folders under the tub. It currently is holding the Native American packet from Rockin' Resources. These folders will change colors every 3 weeks depending on which homeroom class I have for social studies.

The second drawer is for math. 

They have their "entry folders" and their journals.

When students walk in, it the the #1s job (the student sitting next to the tower) to get out everyone's folder. The students then work on their Daily Math while I walk around and check in homework. 

You see the example says Math Minute. I am not currently do the Math Minute due to time.

They also have their time math fluency in their folder. After fluency, I have each row stack their folders into two piles, those that finished and those that did not. 

At the end of the day, I quick swap out those that did no finish and put their folders back in their tower. After I check those that are finished, I put in what they need and back in the tower. 

The bottom drawer is for reading. 

We do a lot of work in our white binders or our notebooks, both kept in their drawer.

In the white binder they have:

bell work- spelling words and DLR

fluency passage for the week

writing for their workshop time- Paragraph a Week by Teaching in Room 6

lined paper for workshop tasks

a copy of the week's story for note taking 

I received my Alaska postcards that I created thru Heritage Makers to send out!

I've already gotten a postcard from PA and CT! 

My kiddos were excited! :)

 and 

My math kids are ready to have me back in the classroom. For the last 3 afternoons, I have been able to spend the time filming some math videos. My hope is to be able to somewhat flip my math class. They will be watching the videos in class but independently on their iPads. It is definitely a chore to make the video, but I keep reminding myself that I can use these for the next 5 years since we are on a 5 year program adoption plan and this is our first year with it.

Here is what my instructional coach and I jimmy rigged to use as an iPad holder.

 One thing about technology is wait time…here's what I did while waiting for one of my videos to upload to YouTube. 

Check out my first three videos off my school website {here}. I have them unlisted so you have to have the link to view them. They are definitely rough but I'm learning!

Proud mama right here! 

My baby girl is reading to her babies. :)

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*

Simplify Tips: Scissors & Extra 'Stuff'

I thought that I'd share just a couple of things that I used in my classroom this last year that really saved me a headache! 

Simplify Tip #1: 

Now I can't take the credit for this tip. One of my team teachers did this and I thought it was brilliant so I did it too. The last few years, we have done community supplies in our 4th grade. Partly because our students are moving from room to room all day and we didn't want them hauling things all over the place. They don't really have a place to store the extra stuff. This is how I ended up storing the scissors for use in my room.

It's just an empty basket turned upside down! It worked great for passing out, picking up, and just storing. 

Simplify Tip #2:

I do not like student materials on the floor. With our kids switching rooms, they don't always have a place to put the stuff they aren't using. We also got iPads and I definitely didn't want that on the floor, but I did want them to be able to set them out of their sights. Thanks to my wonderful mother, I was able have these awesome chair covers in my room!

They are perfect for a binder, textbook, and iPad. You can purchase some covers like this at various teacher stores. These are made from outdoor canvas based of the look of a seat sack found at SeatSack.com

What have you done to simplify your classroom?

*Steph*

A Book A Day {Day 2} & Math Literature Organization

Day 2 here I come!

Hosted by Confessions of a Teaching Junkie

Today as I was thinking about what book to post, I went to my stash of math literature. While earning my Masters degree, I took a class based on connecting math and literature. I received a bunch, I mean a BUNCH of different books that have math connections through that class.  

When you have that many books, organization is always needed. I decided to use the system that my instructor uses for her books. FIrst you need to get a box of different colored folders. I used the cheap paper folders and they work just dandy. Each color is then assigned a topic.

Blue = Numeration & Operations

Yellow = Geometry

Green = Measurement

Black = Graphing

If you want, you could break it down even more by standard and strands.

Label the folder with the title of your book, put your book inside one pocket, and put any extra resources in the other. Viola! Everything you need in one place and could even be an excellent activity for a substitute.

Now on to the book for today…

The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns

This is a great book to introduce polygons. However, you can also use it to look for relationships between the number of sides, angles, and vertices in a polygon. As my kids and I read it, we filled out this worksheet & activity that I found for *FREE* on TeachersPayTeachers. I was late on finding this so we weren't able to actually use the marshmallows and toothpicks. Next time! I really like the column that has the kids think of example of that polygon. It's always a good thing to make connections with students' prior knowledge.

Do you connect literature and math? 

I plan on sharing more math books throughout the month of May!

S.Udy