Day 25?!

If someone could find the first 25 days of school for me that would be great!  Can you believe that we are already 25 days into the school year?  That means we are 1/4 of the way to our 100th day celebration!  It also means we are a little less than 1/7 of the way through our school year...crazy.  

Anyway, enough about how fast the school year has started, let's get into what we have been DOING during those 25 days.  I'm sure many of you know that I have been out of the room for a few days which is always hard, but it is easier to do knowing that the kids are continuing on as though I was here and are still doing a great deal of learning.  

I think I will go back to the first couple of weeks of school and then work our way to the most recent.  In this post I will show you some pictures of what we have been up to and give a brief explanation.  Hope you enjoy!

This first set of pictures are of us at the end of August practicing our Read To Self time.  Read To Self is one of the Daily 5 rotations we do during our literacy time.  We spend the first several weeks of school building our stamina so that we can work independently at the different rotations. This is because it is during this time that I am meeting with small groups for reading instruction so it is extremely important that the other students know what is expected out of them, as well as to have the tools to do what they need to do.  The rotations during this time are: Meet with the teacher, Read To Self, Read To Partner, Word Work, and Work on Writing.

 As you can see, during this time students can spread out throughout the room and find a way to get comfortable.  The next group of pictures shows us during one of our writing lessons.  The students loved getting their writing notebooks and have already done a great job at filling them up!  I have not ever had a class that enjoys writing as much as these guys do and I hope that they keep it up! Here they are during their independent writing time.  Some days this will be done like this as a large group, other days we will have the lesson and then the students will work on his/her story during the Daily 5 Work on Writing rotation.

 I am very excited about these next few photos!  Over the summer in a couple of my classes I had the opportunity to learn of a new tool called Kahoot!  It is a free online resource where I can enter a survey, quiz, poll, whatever I wish.  The program puts it all together and what we get is a fun way to gather information.  For example, these pictures are from the first time we did it so I just filled the kahoot with questions such as, "What did you do the most this summer?" and had options such as "go camping, play outside, go swimming, watch TV".  There are MANY things I like about this such as the fact that each student gets to use a computer to learn some great technology skills, the questions go up on the big screen for all of the students to see along with the timer (on the left) a count of how many answers have been recorded (on the right side) and the answers (the colored boxes below).  On the student's screen all they see is a red rectangle with a triangle, a blue rectangle with the hexagon, the yellow rectangle with a circle, and when there are 4 answers there is a green rectangle with a square.  This is a great way for it to be adapted to early elementary!  Anyway, after each question we can also see how many (but never who) answered a certain way and it is a very quick way for me to gain information about us as a whole.  I also receive a report that tells me what answers each child chose so I can follow up with lessons if a child is still struggling with a concept.  We have only been able to use it a few times, but I am excited to start using it more!

Below is the one quick picture I could capture during our WIN time over the past few weeks.  WIN is a time we have each Wednesday and it stands for What I Need.  The students are grouped based on what skill he/she needs extra work/instruction with and for 45 min every Wednesday is grouped with students from different classes to work on that skill.  The kids love it because they get to see their friends in other rooms as well as learn from other teachers!  We love it because we can really focus in on what the students need and because we have all teachers helping (Title 1 reading, music, PE, art, Guidance, media, etc) we can break the groups into smaller numbers.  It is really a great time in our week and the students LOVE WIN WEDNESDAY!

 Ah!  We are finally all caught up!  Today was a BEAUTIFUL day and I couldn't stand the thought of us not being out and soaking up the sunshine!  So, we packed up and took our classroom outside!  During this time the students had a choice, they could work on their spelling words or they could read.  The class was split on who wanted to do what, but they all were working hard while outside.  Here we are enjoying the sunshine, beautiful weather, and learning from each other!

 Yes, she is in fact reading a book about snowing.  I found it extremely ironic and loved every minute of it! :)

Well, that is all I have for now.  Conferences are next week and I am looking forward to touching base with all of you and talking about your child(ren).  Hope you enjoy the rest of your day and thank you for stopping by!