New Favourite for Organization

Anyone who knows me as a teacher knows that I love to organize absolutely everything in my classroom. I enjoy finding new ways to store materials, resources, and other classroom goodies in a way that keeps everything neat and tidy but still easily accessible. Enter one of my new favourite finds for this year:

I found these plastic binder envelopes at Costco this fall and I love them. They can hold up to 100 pieces of paper and are strong and durable. I have to admit I don't actually use them in binders as I find they tend to stick out too far when the binders are closed (just a hint of OCD when it comes to my classroom) but if I cut off the 3-holes with scissors they fit perfectly in the white magazine holders from IKEA.









The best part about these babies is the price. It cost $10.00 for 25 plastic sleeves and I can think of so many uses for them. At this point I am using them to hold all the little bits and pieces I use for each of my Math units. Some of the envelopes hold the pieces for our interactive notebooks while others hold the cards needed for Math games. I was actually surprised at how much they held. The nice thing I can easily label them with a Sharpie and since the plastic is nice and smooth I can take the Sharpie off using a whiteboard marker later. (If you haven't tried this yet by the way you need to. You can remove Sharpie by colouring over it with a dry erase marker and then wiping it off.

I had hoped to use them as a write on/wipe off cover for worksheets but I think they are actually a little too thick (as in hold too many papers) to keep one piece of paper in one place for students to work on. What would you use these for? I would love some more ideas.

Teaching Procedures and the First Week of School

The first week of school is done and I am happy to report my students and I survived! I am excited about starting fresh with a new group of students and can't wait to get to know all their little personalities. As with most elementary classrooms we spent most of this week learning procedures, expectations, and our classroom management plan. I have to admit this is probably my least favourite part of starting a new year. I love the excitement of the first few days and getting to know my new students but the constant reminders and practice of procedures is not why I do what I do. That being said this year I promised myself I would take the time to teach every procedure I could think of before really getting started with curriculum.

This summer I took some time to create a list of procedures for our classroom. I wrote them down and added a little bit of information to remind myself what I want students to be able to do independently of me - at least that's the goal. So far students seem to be getting the morning and end of day routines down pat but we still have a lot of work to do on our transitions and some of our active listening skills, and some of the smaller procedures too.

Heading into the second week of classes I plan to continue emphasizing our classroom expectations to get everything running ship shape but I am also excited to begin our first units and really get into some learning. I can't wait to get the students excited about the content and activities that await us this year. Hopefully everyone else had a successful first week back. Here's to another wonderful school year ahead!

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!!