Goals This Year

So this year I have made a few goals. One goal is that I (Kaitlin) don't get so STUCK in teaching ONE thing for a brief snapshot in time. For instance-- things like Text to Self/Text etc., the weather, graphing... you get the drift.

This year (so far) I have introduced many topics/themes that we will come in contact with in much more detail at a later time, but want to give the students tid-bits of exposure to.

Here are some examples below--It's definitely going to be a re-vamp/learning year.

Here is a text to text comparison. Both grades nailed the comparison and couldn't believe that there were so many connections between a little girl and fish under the sea! I paralleled this lesson with Fully Alive (being unique) and voila! Fun little activity-- little stress and prep.

My morning message taps in many mini-lessons. Every day we discuss upper and lowercase letters, punctuation, ordinal numbers and whatever lesson is coming soon (i.e. graphing, weather, new words).

Making Connections is usually one of the writing ideas used in September. With a combo of grade 1's and 2's I decided to make a few class books to go along with a read aloud. Each student has their own page in each classroom book, which becomes a NEW book in the classroom library. The students were very excited to be AUTHORS and ILLUSTRATORS!

At this time, I have begun to send home easy-reads home with many students inside of their Monday to Monday Homework Folder. I use a plain old binder to sign these books out, to keep track of who has what.

Here is the inside.

Assessment..... Grrrr.... So I have vowed to become better at assessing this year. Here is my attempt.

Each student has their own card holder for anecdotal notes etc.

I am not tracking their Monday to Monday reading log minutes-- Super easy to collect each Monday. I can do my part at school, but come parent/teacher time, I want parents to be able to see what work still needs to be put in at home-- (ie. reading and comprehension)