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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Envision Common Core

This year my school has adopted the new Envision Common Core math program. Although it has been an adjustment for all parties, I am really enjoying the program and adjusting all the changes it has brought to our math program.  There are 2 third grade classrooms in my school and we have been using the pre-tests and grouping students on their knowledge of each topic.  This is a practice that is the norm at my school in the past, but grouping was not as flexable.
One thing that I am finding in teaching the new curriculum is that my higher students need more to do during class. 
I have created a series of centers that support topic 2 for our math program that I wanted to share. 

Monday, October 1, 2012

Centers

I am sorry that I have been away from the community for so long.  I got exciting news on my first day of school.  On the first day of school, I also found out I was pregnant!  I am super excited, my husband and I already have two boys but were looking at expanding our family. This is awesome for me, because my due date is exactly 6 weeks before the end of the year.  I was not able to time my other two pregnancies this well. 
So that aside, in my years of teaching I have struggled with managing centers, over the last year I have finally come up with a great way of easily managing it.  In the beginning of the year after I have done my beginning assessments I create my guided reading groups.  I change them up with each of our trimesters. 
I have our remaining centers and create a chart.  I just rotate the centers throughtout the rest of the chart.
I then create cards with the name of each center.  I have two that say book clubs.  Book clubs is what I call guided reading.   Then according to the above chart I place the 1,3,5,7,9 cards behind each other and the 2,4,6,8,10 cards behind each other. They are placed in a centers chart in two columns next to they students names.  The cards should show centers 1 and 2.  Then when we are done those centers I move those cards to the back and cards 3 and 4 are showing for the next day.  It stays organized and easy to keep track of all year long.


I promise to try and post more.  My goal was twice a week and that has not worked.