Foam City

Today, during Choosing Time, 3 of the students built Foam City. Two grade 2 boys worked with one of our grade 1 girls. I was so impressed with their great teamwork!!! They spent a good 30 minutes discussing, planning, and creating. Then they came and asked me to take pictures. We decided that their structure deserved a blog post. Just check out what they built!

There is a story about the city. And here it is, right out of the mouth of one of the creators, "A long time ago in a land far, far away there was a person who accidentally broke the city's dam and the city flooded. A few hundred years later, the people turned it into a city kind of like Venice. There is a magical, invisible portal that allows you to go from the Foam City in Rome to the Construction Worker Town in Egypt."

And what is Construction Worker Town? It is the  lego structure on the red base beside the Foam City. It was built by one of the grade 1 boys and added to the city. The creator says "It is pretty dangerous on the small platform. If it breaks the whole town will probably break. The town is in a pretty dry place in Egypt." Check it out!

This kind of collaborative, creative play is at the heart of why I believe so strongly in giving the students Choosing Time. During Choosing Time, students are able to use their imaginations and create so many wonderful things. They have chances to try a wide variety of activities or create their own! They are able to practice social skills in real life situations but with an adult easily at hand to help when needed.

It is often during Choosing Time that I get to really see a child's personality come out and when I get to have conversations that help me understand the student more. I so enjoy seeing aspects of a child's personality that don't really come out during math or science time but which shine when the child is given the freedom to be creative on their own terms. It is wonderful! The play we do at Choosing Time is quite possibly the most important learning time each week. And, lucky for me, it is also the favourite time for most of the class!!!!

Great Site for Practicing Math Facts

In my current addiction to all things pinterest, I have found a great site for quick math fact practice. It is called math magician and can be found here.

Remembering our math facts to 20 in both addition and subtraction is something about 90% of the class is still working on - regardless of grade. Of course, the grade 1's aren't expected to have this all down pat before the end of June. The grade 2's, however, should ideally already have this skill in their bank of math skills.

So, take a moment, go to the site and give it a try!

When we are 100...

One of the things that we did for our 100 day celebration back in February was to complete self-portraits of ourselves at age 100. These turned out so great! I have had pix of them on my camera forever and it is time to show them off. In the days following 100 Day, we worked on poems about when we are old. I have been trying to encourage students to use really descriptive, "juicy" words in their writing and they did not disappoint! In fact, I have been blown away by some of the poetry written over the last 4 weeks and am thinking we might need to publish them!

Classroom Economy

As many of you know I have been using a points system since just before Christmas to reward students for making appropriate behaviour choices. Students earned check marks for listening, doing their work, behaving appropriately etc. At the end of each day, we would draw names and the students with the predetermined number of points would get to go the Treasure Box for a prize.

This system is pretty basic behaviour modification. It works for short periods of time but does not work over the long haul.  I am not a big fan of behaviour modification programs in general. In the short term they can keep a teacher from losing her mind (that would be me who was going to lose my mind if the chatting at the carpet didn't stop pronto!) and help students to train themselves to a certain behaviour (in our case it was more listening, less talking!)

I was starting to find that the Treasure Box system was not working for me anymore. The behaviours that needed changing have changed for the most part (and I am happy to say that they have changed for the better!) The students still love getting to pick out a treasure (aka dollar store junk toy) but I want them to think beyond the getting of something. I want a system that will be a learning tool (and ideally meet some of the PLO's) NOT just an incentive to get stuff.

I have found a way to encourage good choices AND meet some of the PLO’s we have for Math and Social Studies. In my explorations around the web I have come across a lot of great ideas. One of them is from Beth Newingham who is a grade 3 teacher in Michigan. She does something she calls the Classroom Economy. Students earn credits for doing their classroom jobs and for making good choices during school time. They earn debits for failure to do their work or for making poor choices. Her system is fairly complex since she is dealing with grade 3 students but the concept is one that I really like.

So, we are going to be starting our own classroom economy experiment. Students will continue to earn points for their choices and work habits. We are going to create a bank (which has been named Turtlepond Bank of Kitchener by the students or TBK for short) where students can either cash in their points for Turtle Dollars OR they can put their earnings into the bank for safe keeping.

Once a week, students will have the opportunity to go to the Turtlepond Store where they can purchase things from the Treasure Box (prices range from $10-$30)OR they can buy coupons to get certain privileges or experiences. Things like being able to stay in the classroom for lunch with the teacher or get first dibs on the computer or sitting at the teacher's desk to do all seat work. 

I found a bunch of coupons at this one site called Seusstastic Classroom Inspirations where she does something similar only she uses "fuzzies" (pom poms) to pay her students and they trade them in once a week. Then I made some coupons for the other ideas the kids thought up. 

We are on week 2 of this experiment now and it is going great. Generally, students earn around 5-7 points per day if they are consistently making positive choices. I have not been taking points away for poor choices but do put an X on their box if they make a poor choice. If they get 3 X's in one day then they lose any of the points they may have earned for that day (I am happy to say that this has only happened once. Most students see that X and get their act together!)

We have assigned bank managers and tellers that rotate each week. They are using the calculator to figure out amounts and enter them into the bank ledger. At the store, students have been volunteering to work. They use the ticker tape machine to create receipts and stamp them with the PAID stamp I bought.

Probably the most interesting thing to me is watching which kids spend their points right away and which ones save them up. And a really bright spot for me was on Thursday last week when one of the students used 15 of his points to buy something at the store for our new student (who had not been with us long enough to accumulate enough points to buy something). It made my heart ache just a wee bit to see such generosity in action.

What do we do at Math Stations anyway?

We do Math Stations 3 mornings a week. I have the students in groups of 3 and they do 3 stations per day. The stations are in math tubs and each tub covers different prescribed learning outcomes (otherwise known as plo's). Some tubs involve games. I love that the students love playing the math games and don't even realize that they are practicing math skills! Others involve pencil and paper jobs. These are great because I can really differentiate activities and have a written sample of how they are doing.

Here is a sampling of what some of the tubs look like this week:

This is a game where we practice adding doubles. Being able to know that 4+5 is really only 4+4 plus 1 more is a great strategy for addition. Or that 4+3 is the same as one less than 4+4 for subtraction. It is played kind of like BINGO only there is no caller. Instead, you roll a dice, double the number rolled and try to get 5 in a row.

 Here we are playing Domino Parking Lot. Each player takes a domino from the tub and adds the two sides together. Then they place the domino in the correct "parking space" that has the sum. The objective is to fill your parking lot first.

Here is a 2-D shapes activity. Some cards come with the shapes in them and students have to rebuild the shape but other cards are more challenging with only the outline of the shape and a list of shapes needed to created the final product. Students are expected to work with the cards that challenge them. No easy, peasy, lemon squeezy choices allowed!!!!

This is a patterning job. It is not actually the one we are doing this week. It is from last week when students were making matching mittens that had to have a pattern of some sort. Other weeks this tub has different patterning and sorting activities. Students are expected to challenge themselves to create more complex patterns. For example, I expected the grade 2's to do more than just a simple ABAB pattern on their mittens. They had to have at least 3 colours and more things going on in their patterns.  

This tub has math fact practice booklets in it. Each student has a booklet for the level they are currently working on. Some only have addition. Others have addition and subtraction. One of our other paper and pencil tubs has printing practice and set making activity booklets.

Some days I work at a tub and teach each group a new game. This gives me a chance to watch each student and see where their strengths and weaknesses lie. (This helps me to form groups and activities for the next week) Other days I pull a group of students for a particular math activity like beginning addition with regrouping. The math groups change weekly. Sometimes I put 3 students together who are all working on the same skill. Sometimes I mix up the students so that they can better learn from each other. The activities and groups are always changing and evolving depending on the needs and abilities of the students.

So, there you have it. Math Stations 101! This is probably my favourite way to teach math (and, believe you me, I have tried more than a few!)  The students are independent workers, I get to work with small groups and there are a number of activities each day. In between the tubs we meet at the carpet for an Energy Blast (or 4) and then some Calendar pages on the Smartboard. I am able to introduce new concepts to the whole class through the Calendar before putting out games or activities using the concepts in the tubs.

Ms. Hughes

There are days when my job is just hard. Days when nothing seems to go right and I feel like none of the students will ever understand the concept I have tried a dozen ways to teach them. Days when their ears don't seem to work but their mouths are moving at the speed of light. Days when I have to reach deep down to pull out the last shred of patience I have within me. Days when I just want it to be 3:01 already so that I can close my classroom door and call it a day.

And then, there are days like this past Friday. Days when students do things like this:

Days when a grade 1 student who had only written 2 or 3 sentences before suddenly comes out with an entire page of writing that makes sense! It has a beginning, middle and end!!!! And it is good!!!! I am so happy that I could do cartwheels across the classroom floor! I read his story to the class, to his old kindergarten teacher, to the school secretary. I run outside at home time to tell his grandma what an awesome job he has done. The lesson on narrative writing clicked with him. Yes!

Days when a grade 2 student who often sits with her head in her hands telling me she can't think of anything to write suddenly writes a piece that has lots of juicy, descriptive words to go with the wonderful pastel drawing of her snowman at night taking pictures. Words like sparkling, crisp and glittering jump off her page and grab me. All my talk about using juicy words did sink in! And here I thought I was talking to myself. WOW!

Days when one of the grade 1 students who speaks English as a second language writes three whole sentences that I can read! With only minimal support from me in sounding out the words. How awesome is that?!

Days when a student from last year invites me to eat lunch in his new classroom and then proceeds to go down memory lane telling me about all the things we did last year that he enjoyed. He remembers things that I have forgotten I did and makes me want to do them again with my new class. Telling me how much he loved being in my classroom. My heart just melts....

Days when a student comes up to me and, out of the blue, says "Ms.Hughes, I just feel like I need to hug you" and then gives me a great big squeeze. Sigh...

This is what teaching is all about.

Seeing the light bulb go off and being able to experience the joy in a student's eyes when they do something that they have never done before.

Having a student remember what you did with them and be grateful for it.

Receiving the love of my students and being able to love them back (even when they are making choices that are not so lovable!).

These kinds of days make up for all of the times when it is just plain difficult to get through the day. These kinds of days remind me of why I became a teacher and how grateful I am that after 19 years of teaching I still love my job 99.9% of the time.

Ms. Hughes

Finally Some Photos!!!!

It seems that I promised a life time ago to post some photos of our word work activities. I finally managed to remember to bring my camera home from work to download photos.

Last week was the first full week where they had to use the tic-tac-toe word work sheets. Since we missed one day of Daily 5, I let them only do 2 jobs on the board instead of 3. Every day at the start of Daily 5 I did my little spiel about how they needed to go to word work and get two jobs done. Even with me telling them EVERY single day to get the jobs done or they wouldn't get choosing time on Friday, I still had 15 students who had not completed their work. Some of them had spent over an hour at word work during the week and gotten NOTHING done!!! Not even one job or even half of a job done! Nada! Zippo! How is that even possible?

Ohmigoodness, I am convinced that the majority of the class just heard blah, blah, blah, word work, blah, blah blah!!!!!  I could have just torn my hair out and screamed when I was marking the Daily 5 books. I mean, what were they doing all week?!?!

The shock on their faces Friday morning when they realized that I was dead serious about taking away their choosing time was priceless. And the speed at which some of them started doing their word work this week was pretty funny, too! My fingers are crossed that I will not have to take away any choosing this Friday.

So, what does word work look like these days? Well we are doing jobs that require specific words using our weekly words (this week they are all with short vowel e). The tic-tac-toe sheet looks like this:

The words on this one are the more difficult level words.

Short vowel e at the beginning or inside words.

Here is a sampling of the work sheet options:

Rainbow  Writing

Clipboard Cruising

Shopping for Words

Stamp A Word

Boggle

This week we will be learning how to do Super Sentences and Magnet Words. Students will then be able to make a tic-tac-toe in three different directions.

In other subject areas, today the grade 2's started their interviews for Social Studies. One of our learning outcomes is to learn about the roles and responsibilities of people who work in our school. To that end the grade 2's have been in project teams for a week preparing questions to ask in their interviews. Today 3 teams did interviews. We had interviews with one of our kindergarten teachers, the principal and the vice-principal. Everyone did an awesome job! I am videoing the interviews so that the class can watch themselves later. I was so proud of how they all conducted themselves while our guests were visiting.

We did some really fun art today around the story Snowmen At Night by Caralyn Buehner.

We did pictures of snowmen doing different activities at night using oil pastels then we wrote about what they were doing. They turned out great! The imaginations in our class are pretty stellar. We had snowmen golfing, racing cars, playing wii, skating and more. I will upload photos soon but, in the meantime, I am going to do a bulletin board beside the office to show them off.

Anywho, that is it for now. I am off to eat some dinner and scour pinterest for more ideas. I swear it is more addictive than caffeine!

Ms. Hughes