What's Love Got to Do With It?

Happy post Valentine's weekend.  Hopefully all of you are enjoying your continuous sugar high and love endorphines.  I had a great Valentine's day with my kiddos.  I even got this adorable card from another teacher's child.  :)  Made my heart smile!





Valentine's Day was quite a fun day.  I scoured the internet and found several awesome activities for our math time.  I ended up making a packet with two partner games and a final sheet with multiplication coloring.  The kids were well behaved, played well with their partners, and for the most part completed the activities.


After that we accomplished a major feat.  My class of 3rd graders completed a chapter book as a class!  Wooooo!!!!   That's a huge deal for my group of kiddos.  We read The Valentine Star, a chapter book that went with the Valentine's day theme.  We started reading as a class on Monday and finished as a class yesterday.  They were so proud of themselves and I was too!

After lunch it was PARTY TIME.  In the village the entire school roams the halls and passes out cards all day long.  It's important to remember that these kids are very related to the other kids in different grades.  Many cousins, siblings, etc.  So during writing time we finished handmaking cards and making our valentine's book.  My book is the most full... probably because I'm an awesome teacher. ;)
 
Then we made a silly valentine craft, and then began passing out the candy.  All I can say is thank goodness for Charlie Brown movies!  After the kids left it was time to get the annual Valentine's Day picture with Mr. B.  Thank goodness for good friends who like to dress up like me. :)

Don't Break My Heart... My Achy Breaky Heart

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Happy almost Valentine’s Day...

It’s a popular legend that there are 2 types of Valentine’s Day people.  There’s the sappy people who get all worked up about the holiday and then there’s the anti-Valentine’s Day people who get worked up about the day but not in a good way.  This year I find myself in the in-between party.  I am all about holidays, duh… that’s half the reason I’m an elementary teacher!  But I’m also an elementary teacher who’s significant other is practically a million miles away.  So instead of focusing on the distance I’ve decided to get more focused on the classroom. 

Since I got back from break I started a few new things in my classroom that seem to be working quite well.  There’s been a new seating plan, post lunch work, and a focus on writing. 

The beginning was a new seating plan.  Something about my new seating arrangement has made things a little bit nicer when it comes to students getting along.  I know we’re supposed to be all about groups and working together, but who says partners can’t be a good alternative.  Also I’ve noticed the pairs I created have, for the most part become quite symbiotic.  I love when the academic decisions help making things socially 10x better!

Post lunch work came next.  All last semester I was struggling getting my kids back to focusing on working once they’d gotten all riled up at lunch.  Our school doesn’t have the equipment, space, or resources to have an outdoor playground so students finish their lunch and run around the gym.  Poor dears need a lot more time and space to get out that energy, but I don’t have the funds lying around to help them build anything.  Instead I put my money into creating a grammar folder.  Grammar Minutes are a great way to do a quick lesson on the parts of speech, proper sentence structure, etc. and still have them back on track for writing.  The kids took less than a week to get into the grove of getting their folders out and ready to work on the next 2 “Minutes” (We spend 10 to complete them. :/ )

Finally, one of my goals this year was to help my kids become better writers.  If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know that my students are all ELL students and are struggling readers and writers.  But, that does not mean they can’t learn to become excellent readers and writers.  Here’s where the focus on writing comes into play.  I wanted my kids to get excited about writing, but felt miserable trying to teach it.  Thankfully I have a wonderful mentor that took the time to teach my class a lesson on creative writing.  I don’t know exactly what she did to get the kids SOOO motivated to write their little hearts out but she got several of my kiddos who wouldn’t even normally pick up their pencils to write a 4-sentence story about a snowman!  

 

Below are pictures of a pretty amazing fish that some how ended up in my classroom. My class wrote 2 whole papers about the fish. One was an expository prompt and the other was more creative.  I've never seen kids pencils move so much during writing time!