How do you plan? Linky Party

Hi Everyone!

I decided to take part in this fun linky party to explain how I plan my lessons! It is amazing how many aspects there are to planning.  After all, lessons have to be engaging, aligned to standards, sequential, designed to meet the needs of ALL students, and educational---wow, so much to consider.

My planning sessions take place with my amazing team. The 4 of us get together, usually at school, but sometimes at someone's house, and tackle this task together (school requirement---but amazing none-the-less). We begin by looking at the schools vertical pacing guide. Our school wants all grade levels (k-8) to teach the same basic theme at the same time (i.e. poetry in April), so our vertical teams develop a general schedule for us to follow which tells us when to teach each concept.

Next, I use this document to create our grade level pacing schedule. It breaks the year down into months and then into weeks. I fill in what we will teach in each subject each week and what standards we will cover for that week. I also map out field trips for the year and all special days (i.e Johnny Appleseed day) this allows us to plan ahead and make sure we don't have too much one week and nothing for the next few weeks.

After this is designed my team and I meet each week to decide how we will approach the topic/theme mapped out in the pacing guide. We usually try to include a book and culminating craftivity for everything we teach. We also use a lot of brainpop, bookflix, and TpT/Blog finds in our planning.  As we plan we fill out our lesson plan template with our plans, which we are required to e-mail to our administration each week. 

At our school the teachers make their own copies, so once everything is planned out someone is assigned to making copies and prints out everything needed for the next week (usually this is the person with the most time during breaks). This is often a lifesaver for me because I teach the lowest reading class and usually have LOTS of RtI meetings and conferences during my breaks.  It's nice to have a team to rely on! 

After the copies are run, I gather supplies and place everything I will need in bins for each day of the week.  Organizing it this way really helps in the event of an unexpected substitute!  It also allows me to feel prepared when I walk in the door Monday!  :) 

So there you have it!  That is how my team and I prepare our lessons!  

 

Books Galore

Hi everyone! 

My name is Olivia....and I am a children's bookaholic.   It's true.  I am!  I love garage sales, thrift stores, and former students that bring me their old books!   Today I went to my mom's school (she's been teaching for over 30 years, teaches kindergarten now) and we went through all of her books.  I was literally given an entire library.  It was like Christmas!  I brought them all to my classroom and spent several hours going through them all. It is definitely going to be quite the summer project. 

Being the very organized person I am it is driving me crazy that I now have so many of certain authors (such as Eric Carle) that even the one or two book boxes I have for each author/subject don't provide enough storage...and my bookcases are currently full....limiting my ability to expand.  Ahhh!I've only been in my room for 2 years, how can I have already outgrown three bookcases?!  Even though I will be sharing A LOT with my new team-mate, something tells me this is still going to be the summer of rearranging and getting clever! 

My 10 new boxes of books!

Anyway, my question for you is --- What are some of your favorite children's books of all time (I know---it's impossible to pick just one) 

Mine would probably have to be...
1.  The Lorax
2.  Jillian Jiggs
3. Love you forever
4. The true story of the three pigs
5.  Olivia the Pig
....and so many more!

Organizing Math Games

Hi Everyone!

As a teacher I have so much stuff that at times I feel like a hoarder (can you relate?!). My team and I always joke that the show "hoarders" needs to feature classrooms because it is amazing how much stuff we can creatively cram in our rooms!  We are teachers, we are resourceful, and we save everything!  We can come up with 1 hundreds reasons to keep 200 coffee filters, a bag of broken crayons, or even a 10 pound bag of rice! 

Anyway, one problem I kept running into my first year was that I had so many great resources scattered all over the place, that I had trouble remembering to pull them out when I needed them!  Since then I have spent a lot of time organizing and rearranging my room.  It is has really helped maximize the use of my materials, especially in math.  I had so many wonderful games I’ve made and purchased from TpT that I didn’t even use my first year!  They sat filed in a filing cabinet (my first attempt at being organized) and were rarely being used all year!  So sad!

Here’s what I did to become more organized---

I realized that our math series (Go Math!) has 9 key chapters.  So I bought an inexpensive 9 cube shelf from target and 9 cute (durable!) bins to go in it.   I put numbers (1-9) on each bin and organized all of my math games by chapter.   Now after the kids finish their worksheets in chapter 8, they choose a math game from bin 8 and this provides reinforcement of the skills featured in their worksheets that day. 

It works great.  Best of all, this system allows the previous chapters math games to stay available all year!  The kids love playing games from previous chapters, which allows them to constantly spiral down and practice skills from earlier in the year.  All of my kids scored at the highest level on their math standardized test last year and I really credit this to the fact that they were constantly revisiting all skills all year! 

Numbers are velcroed on (hence why some are crooked atm!)

Bin 8 is all comparing and ordering games! 

My math skill packs are available here.

So there is have it! That is how I organize my math games!  How do you keep track of yours??