Monday 28 October 2013

Guest Bloggin'

This summer I posted about completing a sliding bulletin board project in my classroom. It has been so good to share something I created and have so much positive feedback.

Many people complemented them and asked for more information. Jenny over at Luckeyfrog's Lilypad asked me to be a guest blogger and create a post about the bulletin boards. I am so grateful for the opportunity to work with another blogger and share a little of myself with her followers. For a complete breakdown of the bulletin board DIY head on over to her blog and check it out! 

Thursday 17 October 2013

Giving Math Rotations a Spin

This summer as I was surfing the many different teaching websites I stumbled across the idea of using math rotations over at 3rd Grade Thoughts. The more I read the more excited I became. Last year I found I had a difficult time differentiating my math instruction and had thought about trying to work in small groups but wasn't sure how to start. Stephanie's blog posts gave me an idea of how to get going.

After a month of introducing the concept to the students we have finally completed our first few weeks of full Math Rotations. Right now I'm trying to convince myself to stick with it. It is definitely going to take some getting used to. I have learned that I am still developing the habits and pre-planning necessary to make these rotations work. On the plus side though the students love it. They are always more excited when they see Math Rotations on the schedule instead of plain old Math class. It  has not gone as smoothly as I hoped but I am learning first attempts seldom do so I am going to share with you some of my thoughts, reflections and plans for moving ahead to try and make this system work for me and my students.

First of all I have to say that I am loving the chance to work with smaller groups of students. I feel I have a much better grasp of where students are at and how I can help them which is great. One thing I need to work on though is ensuring my high group is feeling challenged in their learning and my lower groups are able to complete the practice sheets provided by the curriculum. I am still trying to decide how I am going to deal with this. I find it is a common issue to have in math - one group finishes the required work in 10 minutes and another group needs 40 minutes to do the same sheet. I might try giving the lower group fewer required questions (they need to finish part a and b of each question) to complete and see if that works. If they finish the required amount early they can try to complete the rest of the questions. As for the higher group I am hoping to gather a collection of challenge sheets that will push them beyond our current curriculum to ensure they don't get bored. Like I said... still working it all out.

The other aspect of this that is fairly new to me is the Math centers portion of it. In the last couple years I have spent more time putting literacy centers together and haven`t really gotten around to Math centers. Our curriculum has lots of hands on activities and games scattered throughout so I never really felt the need to use centers before however with Math Rotations centers are pretty much a necessity. For the first month I tried to have centers related directly to our unit of study however I found students seemed to be getting bored with them since it was a lot of the same thing over and over again. I think when I change them up I will try to have centers dealing with different math skills I think are important. That way they get extra practice as well as some exposure to concepts we will be covering later in the year. One thing I do know is I will be spending some a bunch of time figuring out new centers in the next couple weeks. How do you plan/organize your centers? I would love to get more ideas on how to keep it as simple as I can for myself. 3rd Grade Thoughts has some great ideas but I am always looking for more.

Finally I am re-evaluating how I have organized my centers. So far it has worked fairly well and the students always seem to know where they are supposed to be and what they are working on I'm just not sure I like how I move the kids through the centers. Right now I am using a checklist to keep track of what center
students have completed and am trying to constantly remind them to keep track of things in their Math journals. It's slightly chaotic and I feel there has to be an easier way. I think I may try putting together center packets and having students use their Math duo-tangs to move through the centers. I will still use the clips with their names and move them from center to center but my hope is if they have everything in advance they can be a little more independent and move through the centers themselves.

Wow... that was a long one. Basically my thoughts on Math Rotations are this:
1. They require a lot of pre-planning to ensure you have everything ready to go.
2. It takes work to keep it organized and to update the centers on a semi-regular basis.
3. They are totally worth it if you want a way to differentiate your instruction and keep students engaged in different math activities during class!




Thursday 10 October 2013

Social Studies Journals

I am so excited for Social Studies this year. Usually Social Studies is way down on my list of subjects but this year I am going at it a different way and I can't wait to see how it turns out. In our curriculum we learn about countries around the world: Peru, India, Tunisia, and Ukraine. The students really enjoy learning about new cultures and trying to picture how people in different countries live. I think I get an added bonus at our school because we live in an incredibly diverse community (my last class had 23 students from 11 different countries) so students already get to hear about different places and cultures.

Last year I used the classic textbook, discussion, worksheet/posters approach that seems to fit with Social Studies. However I noticed that my students, especially the boys, lost interest in what we were learning after about 15 minutes or so. This year I want to avoid that. It means a little more work on my part but I am excited to try my take on a Social Studies learning journal.



The students all have a journal which they will use to record what we learn. Rather than give them pages of information we will focus on 1-2 key ideas per lesson. I hope to use a bunch of pictures, videos, and stories to bring these different cultures to life. Basically the idea is more experience, less research. We will use different foldables, diagrams, and reflection questions to record what we have learned throughout the year. As well I have at least one big project planned for each unit. Our first country is India so we will be making paper lanterns for the Diwali festival of lights! Anyway we haven't actually started this part of our curriculum yet since we just finished up our Mapping unit to help us understand a little more about the world and its geography. I will keep you posted on how it goes though!

So why am I writing about these journals when I haven't even tried them yet? Because we decorated the covers today last week (it just took me this long to take pictures of them) and I love how they turned out! I gave the students clip art relating to the different countries and the overall themes of our curriculum so they could colour and decorate their journals. Students then got a chance to organize the pieces in whatever way they wanted so their journals could still reflect who they are as individuals. They are so colourful and the kids did such a great job that I just had to share them with you.

Here they are:






Stay tuned to see what happens on the inside!