We have been doing lots of fun
things at school.
I am using the 100 Book
Challenge from The Teacher Wife. Some of my kids have totally bought in to it
and are reading 10 books a night; others are not feeling it at all. I explained to them that they have 6 months
to read 100 books – that’s not very many books.
But some still feel overwhelmed.
Any ideas for how to get parents on board with this?
Here are some of the keeners in my class. They have brought in their chains to show each time they have needed a new sheet of chains.
We are doing a mini-unit on
Penguins. This is mainly a language
unit, but can also be overlapped in to science.
I was happy to see, when scrolling through the Genius Ladder slides,
there was one for penguins. We will be
doing this one on Monday. If you are not
familiar with Genius Ladder, it is another motivating activity from Whole BrainTeaching. You start with a ‘blah’
sentence, then move to ‘spicey’, ‘extender’, ‘genius sentences’, and lastly ‘genius
paragraph’. With younger students, you
start with oral writing and then move to paper.
My kiddos are buying into it and their writing is greatly improving!
The children are enjoying the
Power Pix from WBT. The other day, the
resource teacher came in to talk to me, and I heard all this noise behind me
[you know, the typical, when you are distracted, the kids go wile]. Well, when I turned around to tell them to
follow Rule 2, I was pleasantly surprised to see one student had gotten a
pointer and was pointing to the Power Pix, and the rest of the class was
reciting the definitions and doing the gestures! Teacher Heaven as Chris Biffle likes to
say. J
I greatly appreciate JessicaTravis’, over at 'Wild About Firsties', freebie of interactive digraphs. It is
fantastic and gets the kids engaged. I
introduced one digraph a day, starting with ‘sh’. Before using the handouts, we sat at the carpet
and came up with a huge list of words that started and ended with ‘sh’. When we moved on to ‘ch’, the third day, I
noticed many students were confusing this sound with ‘tr’. They were suggesting words like ‘train’. This greatly helped me in understanding some
regular spelling errors. Each day we
have practised where to put our tongue and teeth with each of the different
sounds.
Update on Abu Dhabi travels: my teaching diploma arrived, so
I have all my paper work together that I have to get authenticated. Now, just waiting to get an appointment with
the lawyer. I am following lots of blogs
of teachers that are in Abu Dhabi now. I
am selling off things and the house is up for sale! I am looking so forward to this great
adventure!!!
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