Summertime

Today is day 3 of summer vacation and it's the first time I've had a chance to be at home in the morning. But it's been a great start to a summer. Tuesday I got up to go walk with a friend and then we got to work on our summer reading project. She's a fourth grade teacher at my school and we're both on the board of our local library. She came up with a great idea of taking books out into the community and to the weekly rentals we have in our town. Several of the motels in town have been turned into week by week rentals. There are a lot of kids that live in these places and they are considered homeless. So through the library, we've been working on a summer program to bring books to these kids and read with them once a week for about 5 weeks in the summer. I'm really excited about it. I think it's going to be great for our community and a great opportunity for us to give back. Tonight we have our first training for the volunteers. So this is a big chunk of how I'll be spending this summer.
The next big chunk of how I'm spending my summer is keeping my niece one day a week. It is so much fun. She's 2 and a half and a riot. Yesterday I got up earlier than I normally do for school to go keep her. We had a blast going to the park, getting ice cream, target, and just playing. It amazes me how much she has learned and how much she retains. She loves Pete the Cat and Don't let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. (I'm pretty sure that I have something to do with that.) We watched the ad video on Youtube for Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons like 15 times yesterday. She could recite it before the day was over.
This was right when she was telling me not to take my picture.
The next way to spend my summer break is to do some professional reading. This always seems to be my plan and I don't always get to it. I was reading some old posts from last summer and I had several books on my list that I never got to. So maybe this summer will be the summer.

Here's the stack. I'm not sure where to even start. I'm thinking either the Math for All or In Pictures and In Words. Those were on my lists last year and they didn't get read. Chris and I are headed to a Comic Book Convention this weekend and then to our youth retreat. Then we're home for a few days and then we go on our vacation. Busy Busy. But in a good way. I'm trying to keep myself organized. I've been wanting an Erin Condran planner for a while but I just can't seem to spend the money on one. I saw this pin on pinterest the other day that had a filofax planner and some great color coding. The filofax planner was just as expensive but this pin gave me an idea. So yesterday while wandering around target I found a planner I liked. It is made by Mead and has a page for each day and then a month calendar. I also got some flair pens to do some color coding.

That's the month of June all color coded and filled out. I have purple for personal stuff, red for school related stuff, green for library/reading outreach stuff, blue for scouts and church and then orange for all blog and creating stuff.  It's all well and good for now. I hope that I'll be able to stay organized and color coded. I'm such a nerd when it comes to school supplies and pretty pens.
I haven't figured out what projects I want to work on for school yet. I know that I want to work on materials for our new reading series. Our system has adopted Journeys and I'm pretty excited about it I think. It is at least going to give us the rigor that is expected in common core. But with any new adoption comes a learning curve. We don't have our teacher's editions yet but I was able to access some things online and get started on a document with themes, words, and letters. I hope to get some sight word items together and some flipcharts made this summer. I also know that I want to implement a sensory table for next year. I have a sand table for my classroom that I have never used. Something about sand just grosses me out. But thanks to some of my friends in kinder, I've been swayed to use the table as more of a sensory table. I've been pinning like crazy some ideas. But that's more like a July project. I need to be able to get in my classroom and get the sand table cleaned out. We are getting new floors in our rooms so I had to pack everything up more so than usual. On Monday during our half day, my room was emptied of all furniture and stuff. It was so weird. I had everything labeled but it still makes me nervous about it all coming back to my room. I think it was making me nervous because I'm going back to kindergarten and I switch out materials and furniture with the teacher next door. Hopefully they will get things back where they belong.
Well, I guess I should get off this computer and get busy on getting my house in order and things packed for our trip. I would love to hear about how you're spending your summer and what's on your list for summer reading.

Daily 5 chapter 3

So I'm skipping chapter 2 of the Daily 5 book study since I was on my honeymoon while that was going on and I don't feel like going backwards. I'm linking up with Mrs. Freshwater's Class to share my thoughts on chapter 3. Check her blog out to see what others had to say.

So on to my thoughts on the chapter:

• A Gathering Place : We have a gathering place in my classroom. It's just the carpet area in front of my promethean board. I use to have a rug but it got kind of gross. I'd love to have one of those rugs where they each have a square of color to sit on. (Maybe I'll work on a Donor's choose for one of those.) Currently I just put a piece of tape on the carpet and they know that's there spot. We have our morning meeting here and any whole group learning takes place there. I also do a lot of my small group phonics instruction in this spot too. 
• Good fit/Appropriate books: Last year I introduced some of the Daily 5 concepts to my classroom. The first being the Read to Self component. I never got around to do the official good fit book lesson. We talked about different places we could get ideas for books. I partnered with my librarian at school and she gathered AR books for the kids that were our lowest levels. I also used our leveled readers that are part of our reading series. They were great because I knew my kids could read these leveled readers. I probably had too much control over this than I should have. I hope to do the shoe lesson for the good fit books. I think it's a great lesson. I also downloaded an i pick chart from the Teacher's Cauldron that I plan on using. (Well unless, I decided to make one of my own since I've changed my theme of my classroom. ) I loved the idea of including this in your newsletter so parents know how to help kids pick out good fit books. I definitely plan on doing that and think I might talk about it with parents at open house night. We have an open house about 2 to 3 weeks after school starts. I plan on revamping my classroom library this summer. (It's almost July and I haven't even thought about starting this project.) I would like for my books to be more accessible for the students. I asked parents about sending in books and I got some decent ones from a couple of parents but I don't think I was as proactive about it as I could have been. I plan on checking out our public library as well for checking out some books to use. In the past, I've always had baskets of books on the kids' tables from day one. I've found some of their favorite books to look at are board books that have colors, numbers, vocabulary. The Target dollar spot usually has these this time of year. These are especially good for ELL students because they work on vocabulary.
• Book boxes: Last year I used ziplock bags for the first half of the semester, but they started to tear real easily and bigger picture books didn't fit well. I found some bags at the Dollar spot at Target and started collecting those. Then I found some Dollar Tree. The Target ones didn't hold up well at all while the Dollar Tree ones were still going strong at the end of the year. I thought about asking other teachers in the school and parents about donating tote bags they don't use anymore. I have my students keep their book bags under their backpacks on the hook. I saw this pin on pinterest where they used a coat rack to store the bags. I'm on the hunt for a cheap coat rack.
• Anchor Charts: I have a love/hate relationship with anchor charts. I love all the cute ones I see on Pinterest and blogs but I just don't have the room to put them up in my classroom. I understand their importance for creating meaning. I currently make a lot of my charts on my promethean board and we review them as needed that way. I love the cute ones but I'm not that great of an artist so it works out for me to type them up on the computer. Maybe I'll do a little better this year with this piece.
• Signal/check in: I don't have a great signal for stopping my students. I try turning off the lights but then I'm across the room reading with kids. So I think I'm going to investigate some chimes. I found some wooden chimes when cleaning out my things recently. So maybe I'll figure something out with them. I love this quote from the book " One of our goals is to help children become self reflective about their behaviors and learning." The check in piece is so important for this quote to be true. I think I made some improvement last year about checking in with my students and I hope to better next year. They truly understood last year, why were working on reading and building our stamina. It cracked me up because they loved using the word stamina. I really liked the Sisters idea to use thumbs up and thumbs to the side to check in with students. 
• Model correct and incorrect: This part of this chapter changed how I was doing a lot of things. I realized that I was not modeling enough in any area in the classroom. I love the idea of modeling the correct way and the incorrect way. Although some of my students had a hard time with understanding what I meant when I wanted them to do the wrong thing. The other piece of this that I think is so important is the building muscle memory the correct way. I had never really thought about kids' muscle memory getting use to doing things incorrectly. I had 2 students that really struggled with read to self and doing it correctly. I stopped the class every time those students were off task at first. But then the rest of the students were doing so well, it was hard to stop the whole class for 2 students. I chose a spot for one of the students to sit at and that helped him. I also just had private conversations with those students. There were some language issues that were going on as well. But as they all got on track and we had met our goal of 15 minutes of stamina, I did stop the whole class if someone was off track. I think it helped. 

I think those are all my thoughts about this chapter. Be sure to check out the rest of the posts. Chris just asked me if I was writing a book over here, so I guess that is a hint to get off the computer. I will back tomorrow with a freebie or two for my new classroom theme, Super heroes. I'm super excited about it!

Math Monday on Tuesday

So I've got my google reader down to 730. It was over 1000. There were so many blogs to catch up on, google reader wouldn't even tell me how many. I finally got Chris and I's bedroom cleaned and organized. Now to continue tackling the rest of the house. Chris moved the rest of his stuff in yesterday.

I'm trying to take a picture everyday of our first year of marriage. This was the picture from yesterday. We're slowly combining our lives. It's so weird to be living with a boy.
Anyway, now that the wedding and honeymoon are over, it is time to focus on some school projects. I have quite a bit of reading to do. I need to read chapters 1-6 of In Pictures and Words and then review Daily 5 chapter 2 and 3. I also need to continue reading Math workstations. But I did read chapter 3 before I went on my honeymoon so here are some thoughts on that chapter.
You can see my first post on Math Work Stations where I talk a little about chapter 3 and the need for modeling.
Diller recommends making a chart about what math stations look like, sound like, feel like. This reminds me of the tree maps we've made on other topics. This is also similar to the charts that we've made in Daily 5 about what students are doing and what teachers are doing during the different components. I think this would be a good chart to make when moving from the exploration stations to the more work stations. She also suggests posting this chart with digital pictures of kids actually doing the behaviors listed. I love using the kids' pictures in charts and books. I think they pay more attention to things that way.
Her suggested schedule is to have a minilesson (this is a lesson about math work stations not math concepts), math stations, and then sharing time. I like the idea of having a sharing time after you finish work stations for the days. In the back of her book, Diller provides questions to guide this time. I made a smaller version of them but I'm not sure about sharing them. Anyone have any ideas, if that would be ok or not?
Another idea in this chapter that I really liked was making I can charts with the students for each station. I've seen this in a lot of TPT items and DeeDee Wills has them in all her things she sells. We tried some of this last year but I really didn't utilize the I can chart to it's fullest potential. Some suggestions were to use a 4 x 5 index card and post on the lid of the tub or an 8 x11 paper and post in the area.
The last thing I really took from the chapter was the math talk cards. Kids need to be using the proper vocabulary while doing math. Diller suggests making these with the students and using illustrations to help explain the term. Of course there is modeling involved in using these math talk cards. This is something that I definitely want to try next year. Have you used math talk cards before? I've used math vocabulary cards that I put on my word wall. I have plans to finish a set of those to share with you guys, but I think the file is on my computer at school. This seemed like a good opportunity to review math concepts that you already have taught.  I think I've completed all my crazy, scattered thoughts on chapter 3. I'm so ready to start this next year. I made some cards to help with organization that I've shared before on my blog. It has numbers 1-8 and then some literacy station cards that are loosely based on daily 5.The frames are From the Pond Graphics. If you download them, leave me some comment love. I'd love to hear about how you do math stations in your class.  If I figure out whether I can share the questions I made, I'll share those and some headers for a math station anchor chart. I'll back tomorrow with thoughts on either Daily 5 or In Pictures and Words. Hopefully, I'm keeping my niece Sophie tomorrow and she keeps me busy.

Math Station Card

Math Monday

For Math Monday this week, I'm going to look at a couple of chapters of Math Work Stations: Developing Learning You can count on, K-2.
I know that last summer there was a book study on this book. I hadn't discovered blogging until this book study was well under way so I didn't have the chance to participate in it. So this summer, I'm having my own independent book study on my blog. So I'm going to share some of my thoughts and notes about some of the chapters.
Chapter 1 is a introduction chapter that discusses what a math work station is and how it compares to traditional centers. This is really similar to Debbie Diller's ideas in her Literacy work stations. These are not activities done in isolation of what you are doing in class. You've introduced the materials and activities in class and the kids have had the opportunity to explore with them already. I love the opportunities for differentiated math instruction and helping students really think about math and math concepts. I didn't take a ton of notes about this chapter because I felt like I was pretty comfortable with these ideas already.
Chapter 2 is about Organizing and managing math materials. This is where I need a little work. Some of my materials are organized but they aren't labeled well. Diller gives 3 steps to help with this process.
1. Sort your stuff and stay put while you sort.
2. Purge things you don't use for teaching. (I need to do this big time.)
3. Put what you'll keep in containers and place them in a storage area.
4. Maintain the storage system.
So in July when I plan to return to my classroom, this will be one of first tasks to complete. I found some great math labels for free at Joyful Learning in KC.  I liked these because they had pictures on them.
The next task I plan to work on when I return to my classroom is setting up a math corner. Diller talks about how we set up library corners and places for reading but don't do the same for math. I seem to keep running into this idea over and over. That we need to set the same expectations and strategies for math that we do for reading. In this corner, I want to put materials to explore and use, white boards, and books. Does anyone else have a math corner set up in their room? I would love to see some pictures of one.
I also need to make some math mats. This could simply just be construction paper laminated so they have an area to use manipulatives on. I'm not sure what I want to use. I probably need to take stock of what I have before creating anything new.
Chapter 3 is about Getting Started with Math Work Stations. This is where I took  the most notes. The biggest thing I got from this chapter was Model, Model, Model. "Assume nothing, model everything" is a quote that I took from this chapter that I need to keep in mind the most. I think this is one of the things I've struggled with in the past. I don't model enough period. I don't model enough in reading, writing and even math. Since I've been reading Debbie Diller's books and blogging, I've been more conscious of this need. I think I did better last year than I have in the past but I still need to work on.
I really liked the idea that she shares about allowing for exploration stations for the first week or two (this is for first grade). I always try to give my students a chance to explore with a manipulative before we use but I love the idea of only exploring for a week or two. They are allowed to explore with a partner and hopefully will discover a little math along the way. Do you do this in your class? What manipulatives do you use?
I have quite a few more notes about chapter 3 but I want to make a few freebies to go along with them so it will have to wait until the next math Monday.
I'm currently on my honeymoon but I have guest bloggers lined up for the next few days. So be sure to check back and see what they have to say.

Summer Reading and other projects

So I've been awake since 3:30 this morning. At about 4:30, I decided to just get up. I think my brain is full and I need to dump some of it out. What better way to solve that problem than blogging. First I need to thank Lacey at Wild about Teaching for helping out my dear friend Teri with her blog button. I knew if I put it out there she needed help someone would come through for her. This is why I love blogging.
So go check Lacey out and give her some love if you don't know her.

In my craziness that is the end of the school year, I've seen a ton of fun linky parties out there. I haven't had time to link up with any of them, but being awake at 4:30 there is no time like the present. I have several projects that I want to work on with my teaching this summer and have several professional books to read to help me with that. So I'm linking up with Clutter Free Classroom's Summer Reading party.

The biggest thing I want to work on this summer to have set up next year is math work stations and differentiating my math instruction. So of course I've got Debbie Diller's Math Work Stations book to read. I also have this book Math for All that has been on my shelves for a few years. I haven't had time to read it so I'm hoping this summer will be the time.

I'm also participating in 2 of the book studies going on. I slowly started implementing Daily 5 in my room last year. I hope to blend that with my literacy stations this year a little more. 

Eventually I would like to read the Cafe book as well but I'm not sure that's on the schedule for the summer. My second big project to work on for the school year is my writing instruction. I don't know that I will be able to implement quite what I want to next year if I'm going to focus on Math but I think adding a little here and there will be good. So I plan to participate in the book study Mrs. Wills is hosting for the book In Pictures and Words.

I also hope to read a lot of non professional fiction books. Books full of mystery. Books full of other people's lives. Books full of futuristic societies. I love to read and in the summer I can sometimes find myself reading several books a week. 

Summer hasn't officially started for me yet. I still have a day and half of work time at school. But it's already shaping up to be a busy summer.  I'm going to keep my almost 2 year old niece, Sophie, once a week. I'm starting to teach a class at church on Wednesday nights for 1st and 2nd graders. Then the month of July, I'm going to be tutoring some of my students. I have 6 signed up. We'll see how it actually pans out when July rolls around. And there is the the business of getting married and being a wife. That happens in 17 days or so.
I am also trying to plan a workshop type thing for my school sharing some of the things I've learned through blogging. It is just an idea in my head right now. With our new evaluation system, to get a good score on some of the professional rubric you need to lead things. So I've been turning this idea over in my head. I would love to share the things that I've learned and it would help with getting a higher score in my evaluation.
I'm excited about all that is going on.What are you reading? Check out Clutter Free Classroom's Party. 

Reading update

I appreciate the comments on my last post about scheduling issues. There were some good suggestions and I'm always open for more ideas. I try not to be too rigid in the way I do things so I'm open to finding the way to best meet my students' needs. One of the suggestions was about integrating my daily 5 and my literacy centers. That's my ultimate goal but I'm not sure how to transition into that. Right now we're only up to 8 minutes of read to self so I haven't been working with any students. I finally have literacy centers working for me and my students trained. So I'm not sure how to combine them. I think it would work if I didn't do some math and art in literacy centers. But that's the only way I can get some math centers in and some of the art projects in. So I'm still turning this all over in my head. I guess I want the best of both worlds and that isn't always possible.
Daily 5 is progressing pretty well with my kids. I've only introduced read to self. As I understood from reading the book, that's the way the sisters recommend it. Did any of introduce more than one at a time? All my students but two are reading to self with no problem. We haven't shopped for books yet or discussed i pick. I've just been letting them pick books from the library that are on the lowest AR level. The two that aren't I'm not sure what to do about. We would be at 10 minutes by now if it wasn't for these students. They won't read. They just flip through their books and don't even try to read the words or the pictures. They are two of my ELL students and I think they understand what they are suppose to do. At first I stopped us when they started flipping through the books. We modeled the bad behavior and the correct behavior. Then I just let them flip through the books as long as they were occupied the whole time. Yesterday they were finished in no time and they were just staring around the room. So I stopped us. The rest of the kids are getting frustrated because they can do the read to self. I would love some input or suggestions on what to do. I have talked to both students individually during read to self time and after. I hate for two students to prevent the rest from success.
I wanted to update about 2 of the things I've tried from Tim Rasinksi. The first was fluency practice with a poem. They are doing pretty well with this. Friday was the first opportunity we had for some of the students to read the poem to the class. They did awesome. I had a couple that could actually read it, some who had memorized it but it was ok. Then I had a couple that couldn't read it but were content to track the words and repeat after me. I think it was a valid experience for all of them. The other thing was the mining for interesting words. The kids seem to be noticing words more as we read. I finally made a poster to post them on and I think after a week on the interesting word wall they will move to our word wall. I'd love to post some pictures but my camera is still mia but I did get an iphone last night so hopefully I can post some that way.
This isn't the most exciting post but it's a peek at what we're doing for reading. Friday is the 100th day of school so check back to see all the fun we had.

The End of Molasses Classes Part 3

I'm a little late with linking up to this part of the book but I've been busy.
I'm a huge Harry Potter fan. I love the books so much (the movies not as much.) So I absolutely loved principle #50 Set an electric tone on day 1. I love the fact that they have houses at their school and they go through a sorting hat like ceremony. It got me thinking about doing something like this with my class. I have groups but they are usually pretty fluid and I don't tie everything in with them. But after reading this section it made me want to develop some kind of point system for my students. I have my kids for 2 years and the more they can bond and learn to work together the better. I only wish I had started reading this book this summer rather than a month or two ago. But there is always next year.
The next principle that really caught my attention was #65 Encourage children to cheer for one another. I love teaching kindergarten and first grade for this very reason. They are proud of each other when they accomplish things. I have one student in my  class who is always encouraging other students when they move their clip up. They are also good about encouraging the ELL students when they answer questions or talk more. I love the idea of encouraging this more instead of just allowing it to happen naturally.
I really struggled with the principle about dressing the part. I believe that we as teachers we need to take ourselves seriously so that others will. That if we want to be treated as professionals we need to act professional. But I also think I teach Kindergarten and dressing in a suit everyday just doesn't work. My first three years teaching, I taught in a school where we could only wear jeans on Fridays. I had to dress more professionally but I also taught 3rd grade. It bothered me when other teachers would wear velour track suits and that was ok. But where I'm at now, we don't have much of a dress code. We can wear jeans whenever. I try not to dress sloppy and for only comfort.  But to be honest, I spend a lot of time on the floor with my kids and for some reason they tend to get me dirty with paint, mayonnaise (true story. One little girl got mayo in my hair my first year in kindergarten.), snot, fruit roll up. I can't afford the dry cleaning bill that it would take to clean my suits. But I think if I taught an older grade, I would be more likely to wear more professional clothes.
I'm linking up with the TBA book club. Come check out others' thoughts on this awesome book.

No More Molasses Classes Book Study

So I read the second part of the book last weekend and I've been turning it all over in my head since then. I think Ron Clark has a lot of great things to say and if all parents and teachers read this book we'd have fewer problems. I think the biggest thing I got from this is to make it a partnership between the family and the school. I try to offer parents opportunities to be involved in their child's education but it doesn't always work out well. I have had a few issues with a mom who I think it wouldn't matter what I do it would be wrong. I really don't want that to be the relationship we have. I have my kids and their families for two years. I had the goal of making an effort to make postitive interactions with her this week. But I didn't follow through like I meant to. The week got away from me and her child wasn't exactly praise worthy this week. But there's always next week.
I think sometimes we get caught up in all we have to do and think that when parents don't do what we expect that they don't care. But I had some of that thrown in my face this week. I have one family that comes in at least once or twice a week or calls me to tell me something or ask something. I find myself getting frustrated because I don't want to be bothered. But they are wanting what is best for their child. They want her to be successful in school and they don't always understand what I'm expecting. So I have to remind myself to be patient and help the child and parents accomplish what is expected.
The second incident was with a hispanic family. This year we have a larger ELL population in kindergarten than we've had in the past. I taught ELL when I first started teaching and loved it. My experience was those families wanting their child to succeed and they do whatever it takes to do it. I had a meeting with one family because their child is having behavior issues in their pull out ELL. His behavior has improved leaps and bounds in my class and he is making some progress academically. We discussed what we needed to and I asked if they had any questions. They wanted to know when they were suppose to bring snack. They had wanted to send snack home but didn't know when. I took out the calendar and explained it to them. It reminded me that I need to be more clear in my expectations before assuming the family didn't want to be a part of their child's education. They brought in more than enough snack today now that they understood the expectation.  I guess I needed the reminder between Ron Clark and my own class to make my expectations more clear and partner with the parents in their child's education.

Make It Happen!

I saw an excerpt from this book on a couple of blogs and knew I had to read it. I love Ron Clark. I read his book The Essential 55 when I was in college and starting to teach. He inspired me. He was what I wanted to be. But as I've gotten bogged down in teaching, I've drifted away from his ideas and rules. I had already decided that this year would be different and reading this book was going to help. I had planned on participating in the book study with Faithful in First and was bummed when it didn't work out. So I decided to write some posts of my own about the book.
The first principle that has really struck a cord with me is number 9. "Make it happen. Don't give excuses; find solutions!"

I  love the idea of not making excuses for things but just making things happen. It is so easy to complain about things in our education system The negatives are right there. We don't have time to teach all we need to teach. We can't have fun in kindergarten anymore. Kids won't do their homework because their parents don't make them. These are things I've been complaining about. I want my kids to leave kindergarten and first grade (I loop) knowing how to read, loving school and learning,  being able to think and reason. I've set this goal for myself before school started. I decided this year would be different. I was going to have fun and enjoy the kids. Then school started and I remembered what little time we have to accomplish so much. I have found myself complaining and thinking I just can't do it. As I was reading this book on Saturday and got to this principle, I sent myself an email with the words Make it happen. I knew I needed to have these words somewhere so I could see them. I made myself a sign that hangs over my desk that says "Make It Happen."

I hope to add some pictures of what I want to make happen underneath the sign. If you watch the show Jerseylicious on Style, you'll know what I'm talking about. One of the characters, Olivia, makes a vision board of her goals and what she wants out of life. I got the idea this summer that I would do something along these lines. But I needed Ron Clark to remind of it. So this year instead of excuses, I plan to make it happen. What about you?
I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago before the book study started about The End of Molasses Classes. I reread it just now to see if I had other things I wanted to say about the part one. But with things that are going on with me at school, I feel like this is still the most thought provoking principle for me at this time. I think this is the kind of book you could read parts of over and over and depending on what is going on it would affect you differently. I was reading someone else's post as part of the linky party. I don't remember who it was  but I related to them saying that it was hard to read in some parts because it hit so close to home.

Centers verses Workstations

With my introduction to the world of teacher blogging, I've discovered a lot of new authors and books that I want to read. I'm currently reading Debbie Diller's Literacy Work Stations book.( and Ron Clark's The End of Molasses Classes) I am only a few chapters in and I already see things I need to change and work on. I would like to move more to workstations as opposed to centers. I love the idea of the workstation. While I've done some of the things Debbie Diller talked about. I'm trying to teach with the materials and then put them in the center but I realize I hadn't given enough instruction with my expectations. We had worked with play doh and the stamps before and they are doing well with those centers. They had also already sorted with the materials I had in the math exploration center so that one went well. But this week with adding a reading center, I had every intention of really talking about what they needed to do. I had books we've already read there and big books we had been using. I also had some wands and this is where I really messed up. I didn't give enough instruction with these wands or use them in instruction. But after reading this book, I'm starting to see the error of my ways and we'll do some mini lessons like Debbie Diller suggests.
I changed my promethean center this week too. I gave them the charts we had already used in class to work on. While some of them did well with it, there were some things they need some more instruction on. I didn't even think about how they didn't know how to move from one page of the chart to the next. So another mini lesson is coming their way. I'm always looking for ways to improve my teaching and make things run more smoothly in my class. Workstations are my goal but it will probably take us all year to get exactly where I want to be. This week we're continuing on with the same activities we had last week. But I have these mini lessons planned.
Monday - Reading center expectations. We're going to make an anchor chart and have some students model the behavior.
Tuesday - Promethean board expectations and mechanics of how to move from one page to another
Wednesday - Play doh center expectations and routines
We have a field trip on Thursday and Friday is our fun center days. Hopefully these plans will help me move more towards work stations. Check back later this week to see how it went. Do you do centers or workstations? Or have you even thought about the difference?