Friday, September 6, 2013

I think I survived!

Now that I made it through open house and the first few weeks of school, I might be able to breathe again. I am so tired, it is not even funny. I'm sure I will feel much better after sleeping 14 hours tonight! :)

Last night was Curiculum Night, and I think it went well. I once again did a scavenger hunt so parents could look around the classroom with their child in an organized way. I love doing this, because I'm not the center of attention!


In addition to preparing for Curiculum Night, we've been busy getting to know each other, creating goals, and learning all about Third Grade! For goal setting, we've created many goals, both academic and social or personal. We are graphing our NWEA results and creating a goal for when we take the test next week.


 I have been teaching Thinking Maps for the first time, which has been fun and challenging. So far I have introduced the Circle Map and Bubble Map. For the Circle Map, we used it to develop our rules, our classroom volume, and what a great student looks like. So far, I have used Circle Maps to teach about describing characters in a story and an apple. This was such a great way to introduce adjectives. They came up with some great words!

My focus this year is to delve deeper into Common Core for ELA. I have been using some great resources on Read Write Think. They had some great community building and conflict resolution ideas that were really helpful for establishing a positive classroom environment. This lesson, Getting to Know You had the students interviewing each other and completing a bio-cube as a culminating assignment. I used this activity to begin our study on asking and answering questions (RL.3.1).

To introduce the idea of bullying as well as how to respond to literature, we read A Bad Case of Stripes. Read Write Think's lesson helped me to develop the lesson.



We've done other things, of course, but this has what has worked really well for me these past few weeks!
If you are interested, the Curiculum Night Scavenger hunt is available {here} and my goal setting packet {here}.

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