January is often known as the "magical month" for teachers. When students return from winter break, often they are suddenly more mature, smarter, and the things you have been working on every. single. day. have finally "clicked". We are two days in, and I have already seen some light bulbs come on! This is promising, considering we are trying to get back into a routine after two weeks off, and they are more than happy to see their friends (which translates to CHATTY). Despite battling a massive head cold, I am happy to be back with my kiddos:) We are hard at work this week, and I am soooooo thankful that the holiday madness is over. Let's just say it's exhausting as a teacher. We are pumping up Daily 5, and I am now working on Read Naturally with three of my reading groups (great for fluency building). I have added some new word work (including the new favorite: make your own word search), we are going to be adding writing rubrics to work on writing and starting our Young Author's books, and soon I will be introducing the other component to Daily 5, CAFE! This is a great way to work on reading comprehension. Now that we are becoming more fluent readers, it's time to start focusing more on comprehending what we read. We are going to be BUSY!
We are still trucking along with Whole Brain teaching, and soon we will be adding number towers to our number walls to work on place value. I have two students that have reached level 5 on the Super Improver wall, which is BIG! Our scoreboard has also morphed into a happy snowman/sad snowman for winter (or maybe they are sandmen...that might be more appropriate for Arizona), and we are working on earning a new class reward, but this time it's a mystery!
Another exciting thing I am testing out (yes, I am crazy trying to juggle all of these things, but I LOVE technology and I HAD to implement this right away) is called Class Dojo. It's an awesome app that works perfectly with my classroom management system and allows me to track behaviors (positive and negative) using an app on my iphone or macbook. It will also provide detailed parent reports with graphs and charts (another favorite thing of mine). It also provides instant feedback to students doing a great job, and those that need a reminder to do the right thing or stay on task. Students will also be able to view and track their own behavior and reflect on where they struggle. I am super excited to try it, and so are the kids. I let them choose their monster "avatar" today. Fun times.
Finally, I have to throw in a leftover goodies from December:
