First Day Back

With my squirrelly class this year, plus their typical behavior after a long break, I was kind of scared of how this day would go... It went much better than expected! God is very good! Thank you for the prayers.

I did a lot of preventative measures like having a long morning to-do list on the board, doing more jump rope/running lap breaks, and cracking down on the blurting. I tried a new way of recording blurts that I think I'm going to keep doing. Instead of me writing names/tallies, I have a student do it. If the student abuses his/her power, he/she get sentences. I don't have to write names down while trying to keep track of what I'm saying and the students are still quiet (maybe even more so because they are concerned how strict their classmates will be in recording noises). We did it twice today and it worked decently well both times.

My Christmas break was pretty productive. I read a bunch of books, classroom management themed and some just for fun. I put off looking over my lesson plans for this week until the last minute (i.e. Sunday morning before church) and only got through half of them (the ones I needed for Monday).

Sunday night I still hadn't come up with a good plan for English this week. My original idea had been to do the free month trial of Writing City, figure out how to use it over break, and come up with a plan for the first week back. Yeah, I didn't sign up for it until today after school. I thought about winging English today, but we haven't done circular stories in a long time, plus that is something that keeps them engaged the whole time. So that's what we did! Each person writes a story for two minutes, then passes it to the next person, then that person adds on to the story for two minutes, and passes it to the next person, etc. They didn't want to stop writing!

Then, Mrs. L and I were talking after school and I got an idea for the rest of this week... She's having her class set personal goals and class goals, which is a fantastic idea, so I'm snitching it to use in my class too. She picked each student's goal for this week; next week they get to pick. And she has these clear pockets stuck in a corner of their desk (as big as a post-it note) to keep their weekly goal where they can see it. On the classroom door is a chart to keep track of how they do each day (thumbs up or thumbs down). I'm not sure how much of it I'm going to do with my class; that's part of my homework for tonight. That and figuring out bell parts for the rest of the year.

I got on a roll copying the music we need and printed it off for February, March, and April. We're having a highlighting party tomorrow!