Welcome Fall!

Wow, it has been a while! September has been a busy month, and now that it is almost over, I feel like I have time to breath! I don't know about you, but I can't believe how quickly the time has flown by! We will be starting first quarter assessments in just a few weeks.

I am sitting on my couch, sipping hot cocoa, and thinking about how excited I am to start baking things with pumpkin in them. I love fall! I enjoy the leaves changing color (which only happens a little bit in San Diego), the delicious food, and the weather cooling down enough for me to wear my boots.

I decided to create this Fall Themed ABC Order Scoot to welcome in this beautiful season! I have been working on ABC order a lot with my students over the last few weeks so that soon we can move into dictionary skills and guide words. Scoot activities are a great way to get students learning and out of their seats. I am really excited about this; it turned out super cute! You could also use it as a literacy center or workstation. Click on the picture to check it out at my TPT store:

I have had to be very flexible with my classroom management this year, and after the first system didn't work, I decided to try out Class Dojo. I HIGHLY recommend it. It is free, and they even have an app for iphones. I can award students positive and negative points for specific behaviors from my phone, and class dojo keeps track of it all. It even gives me graphs of student progress. One of the things that I love most is that when parents sign up for it, it automatically sends them a progress report every Friday. No more filling out paperwork to send home every Friday! Parents can also download the app and have it send them updates throughout the day. I have only used this program for a week, but I already had a parent congratulate her son on having a better afternoon without me even having to tell her. Yay! Click on the picture if you would like to take a look at the website.

Well, that is it for tonight. Hopefully it will not be so long before I am able to blog again. Happy October!

Five For Friday

                  

Today I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching with my "Five for Friday". Here are five random things that I have done this week.

1. My wonderful husband took me out over the weekend to a beautiful restaurant in San Diego called C-Level. We got to watch a seal swim and play in the bay.

2. Back to School Night!

Back to School night was a success. I was met some of the parents for the first time, I was able to get parents to sign up for volunteering, and I presented our classroom procedures and routines. Here is a picture of my PowerPoint presentation:

This next pic is what I had laid out on the desks for the parents. I can't figure out where I got the "Thank you for popping in" signs, but they were a freebie from Teachers Pay Teachers, and I love them!

3. We did an adorable art project. I get to teach an art lesson to my class every other week. This week, we learned about lines. After practicing various types of lines on our whiteboards, we set to making our own line monsters.

This next one is my line monster. I am pretty proud of it :)

4. We practiced naming numbers on our whiteboards. I LOVE our math curriculum. It is called Everyday Mathematics, and it is so amazing that I very seldom need to add to it on my own. Today we came up with other names for numbers. Students could use tally marks, base-10 blocks, money, addition problems, subtraction problems, etc. Here are a few examples

5. I have been doing a TON of work on the smart board. We use the Open Court curriculum for language arts, so my job is to make Smart Board activities to go along with our units. Hopefully once I am done, I will be able to start making more items for Teachers Pay Teachers.

Happy Friday!

Writer's Workshop Linky

Hey everyone! I am linking up with Kelly over at Sliding into Second Grade for her very first linky! So exciting, we'll see if I ever create a linky party someday. 

Okay, so here is my first disclaimer about writing: It is not my favorite subject to teach. I am all about reading and math, but writing is a different story. I think that my dislike for writing started in middle school because I simply thought I wasn't good at it anymore.

Anyway, my goal is that my students LOVE writing because I don't want them to think like I did. I have had to spend a lot more time over the past few years figuring out how to teach writing, since it doesn't come as easily to me as other subject areas (I am more of a math and science nerd).

This year, my writer's workshop had to be moved from first thing in the morning to the afternoons at the very end of the day because of scheduling changes. I hope that it will work out at that time because it is always harder to stay focused at the end of the day.

My students have journals, and they have a few signs.

They have one week to complete the writing process for a five sentence story with a main idea, details, and a closing sentence. Once the first draft of their story is finished, they need to edit with three peers. The signs above come in handy because they are only allowed to edit if they are either finished with their story or if they are close. Students edit with a red pen on the rug. That way I can make sure that students at their desks are quietly working, and are not getting distracted. After peer editing, they conference with me. After editing and discussing with me, they get to write a final draft, which goes on the "Awesome Author's" wall. 

You can download my editing signs for free by clicking on the picture.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Kelly for hosting this linky!