Saturday 15 August 2015

Welcome Back to Mrs. V's Grade Threes

Wow! I can't believe how time has flown. Two years ago I started a blog and had hoped to stay on top of everything. If you go back through old posts I am sure you will notice that is not really the case. 

Heading into the next school year I am hoping to jump back into blogging and am setting a goal of posting on a semi-regular basis. When I first started this blog I wasn't really sure if anything would come of it or if anyone would get anything out of it and then today I found a Pin on Pinterest that links back to one of my blog posts! If my ramblings about classroom life, projects, and teaching in general can help inspire even one other teacher out there then I feel like it is worth it. 

So all that being said here is a little update about last year:

I taught a grade 3/4 split with 29 students. I learned a lot about my management style and also that I can actually handle a class of that size. Before this my largest class was 23 students. I am very fortunate that my principal understands how difficult it can be to teach a split so he hired a part time teacher for the grade 4's Math, Science, and Social Studies so I only had the full class a little more than half of the time. While I welcomed the support for the core subjects I also learned how much I have come to depend on having some flexibility in my schedule so having to stick to a specific time frame every day in order to accommodate the split schedule took some time to get used to. 

I had the opportunity to attend some PD on Project Based Learning last year as well. As with most things my first unit didn't work out exactly how I wanted but I am eager to try it again this year with a little bit a lot of tweaking. Stay tuned for an update on that later this year. I did absolutely love the fact that the unit was basically all hands on learning and the students seemed really excited about their final projects. I think the hardest part is each group created one final project and then had to decide who got to bring it home. I'll have to see what we can do about that this year. 

Outside of my regular classroom teaching I also continued coaching volleyball, basketball, badminton, and track and field. My husband and I have put a lot of time and effort into growing the current sports program at our small school and it is so exciting to see it taking off. As the school continues to grow so do the teams and they have done well competing against the much larger schools in our district. 

Since I don't want to bore anyone with a long rambling post... which let's face it may have already happened, that is a basic overview of my 2014 - 2015 school year. As usual I have been using a bunch of my summer to prep for the upcoming school year and I am excited to share more ideas and insights with you as the year goes on. Welcome back to another year of Mrs. V's Grade Threes!!