Assess Me: Get to Know You Linky

Quick, fun post today!  I am linking up with Rachel from The Tattooed Teacher today for her new Assess Me linky!

How fun are these!?!  Make sure you head to her blog to join up!

Making Connections and a WBT Freebie!

Making connections are one of the reading strategies my students seem to love the most.  As I'm sure you well know, elementary kiddos love to talk.  And talk, and talk, and talk.  When they make connections to what they are reading, they get to tell you stories about other things.  Win-win.  They love talking about things they are reminded of...and we know it is helping to improve their comprehension!

I always have posters in my classroom year round with the types of connections students can make.  We refer to them every time someone makes a connection.  In the past I have placed these low enough that I could have the students put post-it notes with their connections underneath the appropriate heading.  I have also had them make paper chains with their connections that I connect below the posters.  The kids love to see which one wins.  (It's almost always text to self)

I added my posters to TpT along with a quick recording sheet I use when I am just starting to introduce connections to my students.  Click on the picture to hop over to my store to grab it for only $1.50!

At the very end of the school year last year I went to a quick informational session about Whole Brain Teaching.  It has definitely peaked my interest!  I need to spend more time researching it to see how much of it I want to incorporate into my classroom.  To start with I have decided to use the Super Speed Math for my fact practice this year.  You can get that here from their website.  It is under freebies but you do have to create an account to get access.  I will keep you updated on how that goes.

Secondly, I have decided to utilize an adapted version of their rules.  My classroom has always had one simple rule, "Respect."  In theory...it's great!  But, I never refer back to it and I think my students forget it is even our rule.  This year I want to use the 5 Whole Brain Teaching rules with the motions.  We know that students are more likely to remember things the more ways they are putting it into their brain.  My hope is by moving and saying the rules they will "stick" all year!  I plan on having them say these rules with me at the beginning of each day for at least the first month or so of school.  From there it will probably depend on when it is needed.

I looked around for rule posters on TpT and didn't find any that fit both the changes I wanted to make and my classroom decor.  So here is your freebie!  Click on the picture to grab it!

I have included the following rules:

Rule 1: Follow directions quickly.
Rule 2: Raise your hand for permission to speak.
Rule 3: Raise your hand for permission to leave your seat.
Alt. Rule 3: Listen carefully to the person speaking.
Rule 4: Make smart choices.
Rule 5: Keep your dear teacher happy.
Alt Rule 5: Keep your dear teachers happy.

I switched up rule #3 simply because there are certain things I have my kids leave their seats for without permission.  Getting kleenex, throwing away trash, and getting a new pencil from row bin are a few of the things that I do not want them interrupting lessons to ask permission to do. 

Do any of you use part of Whole Brain Teaching?  What do you think? 

Five for Friday - July 17th

This week has been very up and down when it comes to Dollar Tree.  I stopped in to see what kind of storage containers they had and immediately fell in love.  I knew the long ones would be perfect to redo my classroom library with!  My parents live about an hour away and close to 5 other Dollar Trees.  My father calls himself "hunter gatherer" so I knew he would be up to the challenge of finding the extras I would need.  Two days later he drops of his finds while in town....they're completely different.  Turns out the other stores don't carry the adorableness I found...at least not in pink...or the right sizes...  After much frustration and a few other trips to my Dollar Tree (hoping there would magically be more) I bought other styles and made it work!  I do love the results!  It just turned into a much bigger project than I had originally planned.  I suppose that's the life of a teacher.

 In my "family room" (what I call the area of our classroom where I read to the kids and we have meetings) I have had a dark blue rug for a few years to help identify the area better.  Slowly with little fingers picking and picking the rug has started to fall apart.  Of course, so has parts of the shelving and other things kids find to pick at, but that's for another project.  Well, back to the "hunter gatherer" that is my father.  He calls me one day to tell me he found some cheap rugs.  I wasn't a fan of the patterns and mentioned that if I got a new one I'd really like a cute chevron rug.  Next thing I know he is ordering a rug from Target and it is showing up on my doorstep.  (Addressed to my maiden name might I add)  It is chevron!  It is enormous!  It is perfect!  :)

My husband and I took Liam with us to meet his babysitter for the school year.  She is a former coworker of mine who decided to stay home for awhile to be with her children.  I couldn't be happier knowing that he will be in good hands.  At the same time going to her house, discussing details, and seeing him interact with her little one started making the reality that I am going to have to leave him for the bulk of the day soon very real.  It overwhelms me just to think about it.  I don't know how all of the moms out there do it! 

 I had someone randomly stop me in the school parking lot today to ask me when the office staff would be back to work at the school.  Being that it is summer, I of course had to pull out my phone to look at the calendar.  Checking for him, it hit me that I am down to about 2 weeks this coming Tuesday!  2 weeks?!?!  Where did the summer go?  I have spent the bulk of my summer at school and I know I have accomplished a lot, but I still feel there is so much left to do!  I know we've come so far, but we've got so far to go...  Hairspray anyone???  No?  Yeah...just me.  

One thing I did finish up this week is my homework folders.  Last year my teammates and I changed up the way we do take home folders and homework in general.  This led to us purchasing our own folders (with prongs) and supplies to fill them followed by many hours in assembly line form putting them together.  It is a long/pricey process but completely worth it!  I will go through one of my folders more in depth next week so you can see what all goes inside!

     

The Start of My TPT Store

I wanted to share a quick post about a few of the products I have up in my TPT store.  I currently only have 3, so it won't take long.  :)

This freebie contains 3 math chant posters that I use in my own classroom.  If you teach place value, odds and evens, or subtraction with regrouping, make sure and head over to my store to grab this freebie!  These are chants are awesome learning tools that my students love!  They are not my wording and I could not find anywhere who they are originally from.  I just dressed them up into simple posters to display in my classroom and thought others might enjoy them as well!

My school uses Houghton Mifflin's Journeys for their reading series.  I created challenge spelling word lists to help differentiate my spelling each week.  In my classroom I give a spelling pre-test on Mondays. After grading this, any student who missed 2 or less is given the challenge words for the week. The two blanks on the page are spots to write any regular spelling words they missed. I staple one copy to their test and the other I keep until Friday to use to give the final test. On Friday’s test I split the challenge students into pairs and they test each other while I test the rest of the class with the regular list. I only count the regular words for a grade so challenge students are based on their pretest plus any missed words they took again on the final test. In my classroom I use coins as an individual award so students get one coin per challenge word they spell correctly. They can then use these in our weekly store.

Phew...that was wordy.  I hope that made sense!  It works really well, I promise!  :)  The set contains all 30 weeks to go along with Journeys' phonics skills.  It is for sale on my blog for only $2.50! 

This set of worksheets contains 6 number of the day worksheets.  One of my math centers each day involves collaborative groups.  Number of the Day is one of the collaborative tasks I have my students work on.  It is a great way to review skills and I change out what is being asked of them based on what we have learned and what they need review on!  Grab this for just $1.00!

I have tons of things in the works to add to my store, but with a 5 month old and school around the corner it will be slow going!  Click on the pictures to go to my store and grab what you need!  I am hoping to finish a few miscellaneous tasks in my room decor in the next few days so I can take some pictures and get that up on the blog.  Stay tuned! :)

My Attempt at Long Range Planning

Being awake constantly at night with a newborn has given me lots of hours to spend getting ideas from teaching blogs.  One of the coolest things I found was from Amanda over at TeachingMaddeness.  If you don't read her blog, you are missing out!  She was describing how she does her lesson plans by creating a long range plan for the entire year.  At first I thought that sounded impossible.  Then I started to think about how I will have a little one who I want to be able to come home to after school instead of spending evenings/weekends working all the time.  A long range plan seemed like the answer to my dreams. 

Fast forward to finally getting my keys back and being allowed into my room after maternity leave and I dove straight in!  I started by creating a document that had all of the dates we will be in school.  I then looked at all of the units/topics I wanted to hit with our new standards and plugged them in.  This took a LONG time and many revisions.  One thing that was sort of helpful is that our school is having us teach specific units in a specific order starting next year.  Not that they have any details for those units, more just titles and some of the standards we should hit in them.  Here is a picture of the first quarter. 

I would share mine, but it would just be a mess because it is a huge table with lots of merging as well as text boxes turned sideways to fit.

From there I followed her lead and created actual unit plans.  I broke each unit down into lessons and planned what I would teach for those lessons.  This has been most of my summer so far.  But I can happily say, I am done!  Now of course there are things I couldn't plan for, my CAFE strategy groups, individual meetings, etc.  However, the "meat" of my day is planned.  Here is what one of the units for reading looks like.  And yes...I know I haven't typed in all of the standards yet...

Of course I realize during the year there will be lots of tweaks.  Some things will work, some won't.  And of course it's Indiana...there will be snow.  That is why the lessons are called Lesson 1, Lesson 2, etc. and not specific days.  Flexible!  Now, Amanda puts all of her units into plastic containers to organize.  Well, I don't have the space or money for that.  However, I do have a huge filing cabinet!  I purged it at the beginning of the summer and designated drawers for subjects.  I then put master copies of anything I needed as well as any read-alouds I would need into the file folders themselves.  These are the math and reading drawers.  You will notice on the pictures I did end up having to double up on lessons per file folder for space.  (Also some books were too big to fit!)

I am beyond excited to try this out and see how much time it will save me for planning.  I am still going to use my daily/weekly lesson plans but write on them using my unit plans.  If you haven't, I would head over to Amanda's blog to get details on how she does this each year!  

Welcome to Mrs. Bru's Brainstorms!

I have always loved stalking reading teacher blogs.  They are full of ideas and inspiration!  It seems that every night when I scroll through my Bloglovin' feed, I end up with more and more things I want to find a way to utilize in my classroom.  Well, I finally decided to join in the blogging/TPT madness. In my usual insane fashion...I have chosen to do this after having my first child about 5 months ago and getting ready to return to school after maternity leave.   I like to have a lot going on at once.  ;)

At the moment I am busy getting my room prepared for next year, working on a new year-at-a-glance planning system (blogpost to come), and spending time with my adorable new son.  I am hoping that once the school year gets started I will have more time to blog about my ideas, create things for my TPT store, and figure out how to get my header to line up with the rest of my blog!  Hopefully by the time most people read this the header issue will be fixed...  Stay tuned!!