A Peek at My Week Linky!

Have you heard about Mrs. Laffin Laughings' new linky?  It's all about looking at what we're doing next week!

This coming week is my first full week back with the kiddos.  We had them for 3 days this past week, and I am EXHAUSTED!!!  Five days will be an adventure, I think.  At least we'll be getting started on our normal routine.

Here's a few things we will be doing:

• Writing our Class Code.  We didn't get to it last week.  As a class, we brainstorm a whole bunch of rules/guidelines and then consolidate them (basically until we get to Be Safe, Respectful, and Responsible, which are our school-wide behavior expectations)
• Launching Daily 5 (Read to Self and Word Work are my goals for this week)
• Studying Place Value and learning about Math Workshop.  After the first two weeks of school, we rotate classes for math (we change about every month).  Like I did last year, I'm going to train my homeroom kiddos really well about Math Workshop so they can help the others learn my procedures during each rotation (since there will be a handful of mine in each class).
• Studying Maps - I'm still working on planning this.  If you have any ideas, please let me know!
• Building our working-time stamina.  Last week, they couldn't quietly work for more than about 10 minutes. 
• Saving Fred - check out my post here if you haven't heard about Fred (he's in the Teambuilding section)!

What are you up to this week?

Spread the Sunshine!

I briefly mentioned Sunshine Notes before.  Now, here's some more!  (Do you like my rhyme? :p)

One of my fabulous grade-level teammates gave me this idea and the slips for it.  Big thanks to her!

This pic certainly wasn't taken on a Friday.  That thing is overflowing by Friday!

When I introduced Sunshine Notes, we talked about how they are a way to say thank you when someone has filled your bucket and a way to fill other's buckets.  We also talked about how specific things fill our buckets better than "you're nice" or "you're a good friend" and brainstormed some specific things.  For the most part, the kiddos are writing great, detailed notes.

Writing Sunshine Notes is one of their options when they finish work early.  We read some Friday afternoons and then just pass the rest out. The kids leave clutching their Sunshine notes like they are made of gold! It is such a great note to end the week on.   I'm keeping a close eye out for students who consistently aren't getting any, but so far no kiddo has gone more than one week without getting at least one.

I love how much classroom community this builds with such a small amount of class time used!

Birthdays!

Outside of school, I LOVE birthdays!  In my house growing up, you had a birthday month.  Birthdays were big.

In the classroom, they tend to stress me out.  I think it's because I want to do so many academic things each day with the kiddos that taking even a few minutes for birthdays stresses me.

But, because I love birthdays, we still do a bit.

First off, I'm linking up with Blog Hoppin' for their Birthday Display Link Up.

Here is my display this year:

I love how all the different fonts look together.  I also adore the cupcake border that I inherited with my room.  I cut one strip up to go above each month.

I had originally planned to do the whole pictures of students holding up their birthdays for each month (I've seen it so many places, I don't know where to give credit!). But ... I didn't do it the first week because there were kiddos absent each day ...  the second week, I kept getting told I was getting new students in two or three days, so I waited ... and then it was Back to School Night, and I needed birthdays up, so I just wrote names and dates.  I'm sure some of you deal with that each year and still manage pictures, but it is very much not normal at my school!

 Each month's spot is big enough for a 4x6 picture, so I'm hoping to do that next year.

Our Little Tiny Celebrations:

• I write Happy Birthday, ________! on the board, and it stays up all day.
• They get a "birthday balloon pencil." My two kiddos who have had birthdays so far have been so excited with them!

I pick a pencil I think the kiddo will like from the literally hundreds of pencils in my prize box.

• We have a wellness policy that says no food for birthdays (yes, you read that correctly, not no unhealthy food for birthdays, NO food for birthdays).  If a kiddo wants to bring something, I have them pass it out as the bell rings at the end of the day.
• I usually have the class sing Happy Birthday, but I just realized we haven't for the two birthdays so far this year!  Opps!  One thing I learned from my wonderful cooperating teacher when I was student teaching was to ask the birthday kiddo if they wanted "cha-cha-chas" or not.  If they say no, no one is allowed to make those sounds at the pauses.  Most kiddos say yes, though, so the class goes crazy cha-cha-chaing at each pause!
• I also do "un-birthdays" for summer birthday kids on their half-birthday (or as close as we can get ... end of June's birthdays have their half birthdays during Holiday Break).  I will teach the kiddos part of the Alice in Wonderland Unbirthday song for us to sing (if I get on that singing thing again this year) and they will get an "unbirthday balloon pencil."

How do you celebrate birthdays?

Behavior Management

Natalie and Rachelle at What The Teacher Wants are hosting a behavior management linky.  I am so excited to link up because What the Teacher Wants was the first blog I started reading.  It is what introduced me to the wonderful world of teacher blogging! 

Last year, I felt like behavior management was my weakest link.

This year, I've put lots in place to make sure that doesn't happen again!

First, foremost, and number one is my clip chart:

Do you see the black clips?  Those two kiddos have already gotten to  Excellent Effort six times, so they got to take their old clip (now covered in six stickers) home and now have a black clip.  Next time, it will be a blue clip!  They are working toward the elusive glitter clip.  I know I got the colored clip idea from someone, but I'm not sure who. Let me know if it was you!

I didn't do a clip chart last year because I thought 4th graders were too old for it.  WRONG!  They love it, and it makes such a great impact.  The third day of school was first time I had a kiddo clip down.  Later that day, I told him he could clip up.  "Even though I clipped down before?" he asked.  "Yes!  You are making better choices now.  You're showing me you're ready to learn," I responded.  He happily clipped up and we had quite a while before our next issue (which is quite a feat with this kiddo).

I also have a class raffle, so sometimes I hand out raffle tickets.  I like to do this when kiddos are going above and beyond in some way, when a kiddo is already on Excellent Effort, but deserves another clip up, and with my math class (a partially different group of kiddos, so I don't have clips for everyone).  We pull raffle tickets any day that we are ready to go home before the bell rings.  It's a great way to make our afternoon routine go smoothly.

I am also going to start a class paper chain, but I haven't yet.  We don't seem to need it yet.  The paper chain will start at the ceiling and they will get a link when the whole class deserves a reward.  When it reaches the floor, we'll have a little celebration.

What do you use for behavior management?  Link up with Natalie and Rachelle to share!

Tell Me Something Good

I'm linking up with Rowdy in First Grade for her Tell Me Something Good Linky.  What a great reminder to focus on the positives, both at school and at home!

At School:
Well, just about everything about this class!  Their behavior is fantastic and when it starts to slip, I remind them that they can do better, and they do!  I think part of this is just the group of kiddos, part of it is better management on my part, and part of it is the classroom community we're building.  We have read and talked about being a Bucket Filler and have "Sunshine Notes" they can write to each other that we read on Fridays.  We're really starting to work as a team!

At Home:
I am making time for myself to read.  I stop working at least 20 minutes before bed and spend that time reading a book or magazine that is in no way, shape, or form school related.  Even this small amount of me-time is so much more than I did last year!

What's going good for you? 
 Link up with Rowdy in First Grade to share with us all!

Heads Down and Planning Difficulties

A quick positive and struggle from yesterday:

On the positive side ...
My students' behavior started slipping yesterday.  I had the whole class put their heads down and talked about how I know how respectful and responsible they can be.  I talked for about a minute about all the great things they usually do to help us learn.  When they lifted their heads, they were great again for the rest of the day!

And a struggle:
I'm really trying to plan earlier this year so that I don't spend my whole weekend planning.  I posted earlier this week about my plan.  I've been ok about following it so far.  Then we had a grade level meeting today and I found out a BUNCH of changes for next week.  Like, to the point that I might throw away the plan pages I started and start over.  I'm really disappointed because I was ahead of things and it just turns out I wasted time making those plans.  I know it won't happen every week, but it's really discouraging during my first week of trying to get ahead!

How far ahead do you get in planning?  What do you do to deal with those changes?

One Class, Many Cultures - Freebie!

I've mentioned this project/bulletin board a few times, and now that this year's group has done it, presented it, and I've (almost) finished reading their reports, I'm going to tell you more about it!

We tweaked it this year, and I'm so happy with the results!  We tied it into our social studies curriculum by telling the kiddos (and putting it on the instructions sheet for the parents) that we will learn throughout the year how California is made up of immigrants and migrants from many places, so their first task as 4th grade social studies learners is to find out how their family got here and learn about the country/ies their families came from.  This tie-in wasn't as specific last year, and I'm really excited to be able to reference this project throughout the year!

Here are the parts:

1. Report - we give very detailed instructions about what should be in the report.  I modeled for students that if their family has come from many different places, they could start with something like "My family came from many countries, such as ___, ___, and ___.  I am going to focus on my ____, who came from _____."  So that the kiddos with many countries didn't feel overwhelmed.  Most of my students' parents moved here after they got married in another country, though, so they just had one country to write about.
2. Presentation - The students presented on their family history, one interesting fact they learned, and showed their Mini-Me.
3. Mini-Me - I give them each one of these cute little popsicle sticks.  Last year, I let them choose from the boy or girl ones ... which left me with about 25 girl sticks and 8 boy sticks.  One of my fabulous teammates suggested breaking off the skirts.  Yay for not having to buy more!  I broke off the skirts for all of the boys before handing them out and, then had any girls who wanted the skirts taken off raise their hands, and I quickly did theirs.

Click HERE to get them on Amazon
... so much cheaper than they were at the teacher supply store!

Most of the kiddos did fantastic on the presentation, though there were some who just read their report (totally not following directions)!  I did have to have a few re-write their reports for handwriting/neatness issues and a few whose parents clearly helped a bit too much, but overall the reports came out great (especially for the beginning of the year). 

This is such a great project because the kiddos love it, it gives me a great baseline of their writing (and how much their parents help) and presentation skills, and we get to know about each other better!  I'm working on planning some activities for them to compare and contrast their history or country with others.  We're definitely going to do a Venn diagram.  You could also do a lot of things with graphing and data as far as how many kiddos are from where (just look at all my kiddos whose families came from China!).  

It also makes a wonderful board that can be left up all year long!

I didn't do great at planning os the kids were spaced out.
 I'm thinking about putting some flags in the blank areas.

Now for the freebies!  

(Click on pictures to go to google docs!)

**Note: These documents are a collaboration between my grade level team and myself**

My bulletin board letters:

The letters are a bit crazy when you look at the document.  Just print, cut, (laminate), and put them in this order.  It will work, promise!  For those of you who don't want the California flag in there, the font is Oh Photo Shoot by Kevin and Amanda.  I just put it on outline (in the format font menu) and then put the flag image behind it.

Assignment Instructions:

First Week of School

Wow! Two posts in two days!  I'm on fire after 3 weeks of no blogging. :)

We started school on Wednesday, so I've had three days with my kiddos.  They are still being perfect little angels, and, boy, am I enjoying it!  Aside from the fact that I have a TON of planning left to do to be ready for tomorrow, I'm excited for school.  That was rarely heard from me last year.

Some great things from my week:  (Sorry, no pictures of most of it ... I didn't take ANY with my kiddos this week!  I'm so beyond grumpy with myself for that!)

• Teambuilding.  My new principal supports us spending time team-building/building community in our classrooms even if it isn't content related!  Yay!  We did puzzles in groups (all 8 groups with the same puzzle.  Thanks Dollar Tree!) and Saving Fred.  Then we spent time talking about what worked well and what didn't.  Thanks for these ideas,  Lorraine at Fabulous Fourth Grade Froggies!  For those of you who don't know about Saving Fred, Fred is a not-so-smart worm (of the gummy variety) who went boating even though he doesn't know how to swim.  He brought a life preserver (gummy lifesaver), but wasn't wearing it when his boat capsized.  Now the life preserver is under the capsized boat and poor Fred is on top.  The students have to work in groups to save Fred ... BUT ... they can't touch Fred, his boat, or his life preserver with their hands.  They have to use paperclips only.  I had them use toothpicks instead because I don't want them to think there can ever be a undone paper clip in my classroom (I think I'm a bit neurotic about that, but my first lesson of my first student teaching placement had a opened up paper clip poking fight interrupt it, so I'm forever scarred).  It was an awesome way to end our first week of school!
• My Classroom Library.  I reorganized my classroom library big time this year.  Moving classrooms inspired me to take the time because the books got unorganized anyway during the move.  Gotta love little helpers.  I don't have a picture of my library from last year, but imagine two tall book cases (taller than many of my kiddos) jammed in a corner between cubbies and the door.  Imagine them jam-packed with books.  All you can see is the spine, which has the AR level taped to it.  They are organized by level.  Here is my library this year:

It looks so much more friendly.  Books organized by genre, author, and series.  You can see covers.  Every kiddo can reach every book!  I was happy with it before any of my students laid eyes on it, but their excitement confirmed mine.  We spent some parts of the morning gathered near the library (it's my whole group floor area too), which I know was a tease of the library for them.  After recess, we brainstormed how we choose books, and I introduced IPICK.  We went over library rules and being respectful of books.  They were practically drooling to look at books at this point.  I gave everyone an independent activity to do and then called small groups over to choose a book.  They were so excited for their turn and were hugging the books as they walked back to their desks.  All they wanted to do was read.  It was WONDERFUL.  Almost every student asked to take a book home to read.  I love the excitement over reading!

• My rainstick.  I got a rainstick during student teaching.  One of my professors ordered them in bulk and then sold them to us.  They were cheap because of buying in bulk, but they are really high quality.  For some reason, I never used it last year.  This year, it was my first attention getting method I taught the kiddos.  They are doing FANTASTIC with it!  The look so quickly every time and are completely silent!   When my new principal came in to introduce herself, they did it just as perfect as they had before, and she was impressed.  Nothing like having your kiddos impress the new principal during the first week of school!
• Privacy screens.  For state testing last year, I had a parent laminate file folders to make privacy screens (sorry no, pics, but it's two file folders end to end).  This year, I have them where the students can get them any time they want.  About half of my class has chosen to for every independent assignment we did this week.  They were silent while using them.  I'm hoping that will last!

I hope all of your first weeks went/go well!