First ONE DOWN!

Wow!  I just had my first evaluation of the school year! It was announced, but that doesn't take the nerves away.  I wasn't as nervous this time.  I have just decided that I do what I do everyday even when someone steps into my room.  Hey! Just a way for my kiddos and I to show off how much fun we have and how much we learn!

The hardest part about my lesson was that it was math...after lunch...for an hour! You can image that it has to be pretty high energy to keep their focus.  We started off by doing calendar math, karate counting, our Smartie Factory, and our weather graph.  The children have a math folder which has a copy of a blank 100's chart and weather graph.  Each day they color in the weather on the graph and also write in how many more days "smart"er they are (days of school). 

After calendar math, we either do a mini lesson or journal question. For my eval, it was spider web ten frames and candy corn "flies".  They got to eat them at snack! Woot woot!

Lastly, we go to math centers which right now are all spider and pumpkin themed!  They LOVE it! 

We closed our math time by checking in and what we learned and what went well and what we can work on next time.  As each child took a turn we passed around black yarn and made a spider web. 

 "Look at all the learning we caught in our webs today!"

I was VERY pleased with my scores from my lesson! 



Word Wallet

So at target last year I bought 20 of these and I knew I wanted to have the children keep words inside them, but didn't really know how to go about making it work.  So after storing them for many months, I brought them out! I gave each child one in small group time and filled it with words that we have learned and also words to challenge them.  I wanted the words to be differentiated, but it is hard to do when there are 50 words our children have to know and they are all on different levels.  So in small group we played games with our sight words and letter cards to see which ones they need to work on. 

I taught the children how to know if they have learned a word or letter and also if they need more practice on it.  On the inside of the "word wallet" there is a smiley face and a sad face.  The words that they know and can name quickly without hesitation, can go into the smiley face section; they do not have to practice those as much. 
There is also a sad face section (not meant to be negative, but children seem to associate it well with words they don't know). The sad face side holds cards they are unsure about or have to take more than 3 seconds to name.  We discussed this in detail.  I assisted the children with filling their word wallets.  They did really well with filing their words into smiley or sad face.  I use the word wallets to test them on their words and it takes two seconds to note which words they know and do not know. Teaching the children how to identify their sad or smiley face words really makes my job a little easier and gives them ownership of their learning. I don't think I've had a class who cares so much!

So the kiddos think they're are soooo cool with their new word wallets!  They know they have to take them to word work or writing stations around the room.  They also keep them in their "travel bag" that hangs on the back of their chairs.  They just pull out their words to practice identifying and writing.  They have their table buddies check to see if they know the word. 
At the end of the week at small group or individual interview time, we'll pull out the words and see which ones we can move to the smiley side!

Word wallets are also awesome to use with dry erase markers!!!