Hello New Year!

Well I haven't blogged since before our winter break... but I'm back! Anddd linking up a day late to Doodlebugs Teaching for Five for Friday!

New Year's Resolution time... My teaching resolution is to work even harder to get Whole Brain Teaching techniques into every lesson and into our day more often. This means... more gestures, more use of the scoreboard, more references to our rules & more consistent use of the Super Improver Wall. If you want to know about any of those wonderful WBT goodies, check out my WBT tab & hop into a WBT Wednesday (which I PROMISE I will get back into!!! especially now that I "met" fellow WBTer Heidi over at Droppin' Knowledge who also does a WBT Wednesday.

I'm so excited to be working with one of our amazing reading consultants & my fabulous teammates & one of our special education teachers to start a new fluency block during our week. We sorted our second graders into types of readers and are each taking a group of 10 or less kiddos and teaching fluency geared at the types of reader we have.

Our reading consultant introduced this awesome fluency book that is really guiding us through this process. Right now we are meeting 2x a week for 15 minutes and will reassess in 6 weeks to see how much our students' fluency has improved.

I've had the somewhat bad habit of coming up with math games on the fly lately... but this one was a hit for working with double digit subtraction WITHOUT regrouping. Grab it for free...

To play, just have your kiddos roll a dice 3 times (I had them roll a double dice and a 12 sided dice - 10, 11, 12 kiddos picked any number). They fill in the boxes with the numbers they rolled, being sure they create a larger number on top.

I also created this one this week to practice counting back by 10's before we delved too deeply into double digit subtraction. It was a nice little refresher on Monday to get back into school mode.

This was a little less "last minute" and even has directions right on the top of the page for ya ;)

We've been working hard on nonfiction text features. The kiddos loved this super simple activity this week. We had a shortened amount of time due to our new fluency rotations so I gave each partnership a nonfiction book about animals (National Geographics for Kids series) and 4 pieces of highlighting tape. Their job was to try to find a heading, a caption, a map and a label and they only had 5 minutes to do it. They did SUCH a great job. Every group whose book had all 4 of these features found them. A few of the books didn't have maps, but those groups found the other 3 without a problem :)

 

And finally, I just can't help but share the AWESOME gift my students' families got for me... talk about the coolest teacher chair ever!!! I am so lucky for the group of families I have this year!


I hope you all had a great holiday and are starting the New Year off right!

Feeling the Stress of the New Year!

It's been a while since I posted. I started a new grad class the first week of the year, and am feeling the stress. My past 2 classes have really integrated our classroom into our work, so it didn't feel like we were doing a ton of "extra work" or it felt like it was benefiting our kiddos so much that the extra work was okay! This class is called "Educational Issues: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives." That being said, it's a lot more about becoming aware of and learning educational issues that affect us as teachers and gaining a better understanding and perspective on them. Well this is all well and good, but the assignment load is feeling unbearable.


The good news is my big research paper and presentation will be on Whole Brain Teaching, so hopefully that means a few WBT posts in the next 8 weeks!

Before I show you what's been happening in my room, here's a great project I took on the day before we went back to school after break. It was super easy, all you need is a glass jar (I re-purposed a pasta sauce jar), stickers and mod podge and if you want to paint the lid, I used acrylics. Oh, and a small notepad to tie to the jar or just have available near the jar. The purpose of the jar is to put happy memories in it during the year so at the end of the year you can open up the jar and read all the happy things that happened over the year :)

Alrighty, here's some of what we've been up to since the new year in my room...

We had one awkward day back (Thursday) pretty much knowing we'd have a snow day on Friday, so we did a lot of New Year themed things. Resolutions was our #1 project for the day...

Each kiddo shared with the group what their "classroom" resolution was. They they could take that resolution (or choose a different one) and tell what they could do to reach their goal...

We also started a non-fiction unit... so we made an anchor chart for text features.

When making the anchor chart we tried to focus on how the features help the reader rather than a "definition" for each. This proved to be a little difficult for some of the text features!

In the theme of non-fiction we've been doing a lot of animal "research" which the kiddos have LOVED. Here is a simple Can/Have/Are activity we did...

The next few are a mini frog and bat research project where the kiddos worked with a partner doing a KWL then doing "research" on frogs/bats by reading a grade level nonfiction text on bats. I plan on posting these in a "mini unit" on TPT soon so be on the lookout!

 

 

I differentiated these "by hand" writing in some "hints" for my struggling kiddos and questions like "why did you choose this fact/why is it important" for my high flyers.

Our next step is to read about birds and use our bat research to compare and contrast birds and bats. These will also be included in my upcoming TPT product. Currently I have 2 "levels" with more or less difficult vocabulary.

 

 Hope you enjoyed the catch up... hopefully I will post before the end of my 8-week class!

Here's a little puppy love to leave you with...