Saturday, October 27, 2012

Life's No Fun Without A Good Scare...

YAY I GOT A NEW CAMERA...
Sorry for the random picture at the beginning of this post... I got a new camera and haven't used it!

IT'S HALLOWEEN TIME AGAIN!  This year is going to be a fun one... I've been excited for a few reasons.
  1. Halloween is one of my top 5 holidays
  2. I get to dress up as someone else for a day!
  3. My class gets all excited about learning because it's themed.

The purpose of this post wasn't to talk all about costumes and trick or treating, but to tell you all about the cool activity my class and I did this Friday!  I said in my last post that my kids are big into reading our TFK and Scholastic News magazines... and this past week the cover story for Scholastic News was about bats.  Check out the story HERE! How appropriate for Halloween?!

My sample bat!
Student Bat
What the outside of my classroom looks like now!











The magazine came with the typical reading comprehension activities and an anticipatory worksheet.  Looking at the worksheet gave me a light bulb moment! I've been seeing lots of the teacher blogs post ideas of bat crafts and I decided to join in the fun.  The pictures are just a taste of what's in store for this week! 



Friday, October 19, 2012

Can You Find the Time To Let Your Lover Love You...


Rough weeks with behaviors but awesome week with activities.  Thank goodness for awesome teacher bloggers and Pinterest.  My kids are really holding onto what their learning due to playing/making/using awesome activities.

Math:  Double Digit Addition WITH Regrouping
Double Digit Addition With Regrouping Foldable (My sample!)
Kind of proud of my kids hard work on this!  This is our first time trying something like a foldable.  We took the idea from a very creative 2nd grade teacher and pinterest.  I gave it a Halloween twist by using black paper and colored pencils.  My kiddos loved it!






Reading:  Non-fiction Texts
Our principal was kind enough to get subscriptions from TFK and Scholastic News.  Both of these are current event magazines for kids that come with reading activities/lessons and TONS of digital resources.  With my struggling readers this is a God send!  I can pop the issue up on my Smartboard and have videos of current events flood the classroom.  It's been a great way to teach my students how to look for information in text as well as comprehension skills.  To introduce it I was able to find a scavenger hunt from TPT and we cut apart our first issue to display in the hallway.  My kids were proud!  Since then we've been reading at least 1 issue a week. 


Writing:  Biographies
As I've said before my whole class is ELL students and I'm the first year of all English instruction they receive.  That means a lot of help when it comes to writing and reading.  In order to practice writing about ourselves and discuss the purpose of biographies we used the Scholastic All About Me Poster.  Here's my undecorated poster to show you how hard my class worked.  :)






Social Studies:  Maps Skills
In social studies, which I'll admit needs more attention in my classroom... we learned about the world (from village to planet).  Learned basic map skills.  I took the idea of Me on the Map from CFC.  This was a bit difficult for my kids but they were proud with the final result. 






In Other News...
FEA (Future Educators of Alaska) is the up and coming club here.  It's also the one I took on as leader!  It's been pretty exciting to work with high school students.  Weekly they come into my room and work with students on homework and also have events planned for the school.  This weeks big project was helping create school spirit by making posters for our NYO Meet the schoool hosted.
      




Don't know what NYO is?? (see Native Youth Olympics for a better explanation than I can provide.  When a school site host any event they are supposed to house and feed students, chaperones, and coaches.  Below are the pictures from the weekend! 

We also had a haunted house.  Grades are due tomorrow and we have a Halloween Carnival scheduled for the afternoon.  No rest for the weary.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

You said, "I'll Never Leave You Alone..."

I should really be sleeping... But you can always sleep can't you?

Today I flew in from the village into Bethel, the nearest thing we have to a city around here.  It's time for the 2nd years to have their first inservice for the year. 

First and foremost... God, it is so beautiful here sometimes.  I forget it when I'm stuck running from the school to my house and back all the time.  I took this photo to remember the feeling of flying above the world and seeing the world move below me. No editing... Just me and the light shining in....

Second...  I was so happy to see my friends (the guys I'd become super close to last year during my first year of teaching).  It's like no time has past whenever we get together.  We can all joke and goof off like it's the first time we'd ever hung out.  I truly appreciate and love all of them.  :)  Thanks for everything boys.

Listening to Taylor Swift sing about love and life... here's to wondering where my life is going!