Math Project

Having a new math curriculum to use in classroom has me creating many different activities and centers along the way.  I have created sets of math games, for the first two topics of the text.  You can find them here. But with the third unit on adding and subtracting, I felt the material was a little two easy for my math students.  I had used a million dollar math project in the past and wanted to change it up a little for my students.  Our school is currently expanding into a new building, creating campus feel to our school.

Because of that I have come up with a classroom design and purchasing project that has students using all of the skills that were taught in the topic.  In the project students get to design and then purchase the materials needed to supply a classroom.  Allowing students the insight on the expense of the new project and furnishing the classroom.

We are on our third day of the project and the students are really enjoying it and practicing the skills.  It just makes me so happy when I see delight in their eyes to learn.

                                                              Download the project here

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. 

You can find this set of centers at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Addition-and-Subtraction-centers-for-Topic-2-for-EnVision-Common-Core .

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. 

Noun Adventure

  My school year started last week and I have been away from the blog for a while as well, my first day of school started off full of surprises when I found out I was PREGNANT!!! My husband I had been trying for a couple of months so we were really excited.  But can I just say, beginning the school year and first trimester pregnancy equals pure exhaustion.  I am finding myself falling asleep at 8 at night.  I have just been so busy trying to get all of my beginning of school year stuff finished, wanting to post, and my oldest turns for next Monday so his birthday is Saturday. 
  Before I got my exciting news I decided I was going to try my hands at being a super mom and creating capes for all the kiddos that are coming to party.  I finished the last one this evening and am able to sit down quickly to begin this post while my two little boys are playing in the yard.
  The beginning of the school year has gotten off to a great start.  My kiddos are a bit talkative but we are quickly learning to control the volume and when to talk. I created a Noise-O-Meter that is in the front of the room that reminds to students about their noise level.

  One of the first grammar skills we begin with in my room is common and proper nouns.  So last week in practicing how we behave outside and in the hall my students created lists of people, places and things that they saw.  We then turned their ideas into this beautiful tree, which allowed us to segway right into common and proper nouns.

  I am going to promise to post more.  So sorry guys!

Prepping for the Year!

I have finally started to slow down on designing and creating my classroom and sat down to plan.  I have until after Labor Day until I meet my new kiddos.  I sat down and started to plan.  I wanted to start doing a calendar math, daily number beginning to math class each day and do not have the wall space or bulletin board to do that.

The other night I had an epiphany and created a different way to do the same thing.  I created a sheet that I plan on putting on an overhead projector.  I wish I had more technology and could have put it on a SMARTboard.

I am so excited by this enlightenment.  I can change it as the year progresses and I get to do what I wanted to do.  I am so excited about it right now! 

Here is what I created.

And the summer fades...

This week I have spent the last two days in my classroom, getting the last things hung and organized.  The majority of my Monday was sitting in my classroom staring around the room trying to decide where to begin.  I have so many things I want to change and new things that I want to try for this year that I was unsure where to start.  I finally got a to do list together and organized all of my thoughts, so I could begin methodically going through and making all of the changes that I wanted to make. 

This brings me to today. I am almost there; the classroom is almost where I want it.  By Thursday I should be ready to go and get the school year started.  I still have plenty of time for the more important things like creating lessons for September.  I realized today that I have totally been obsessing on my classroom that I haven’t begun writing out my lesson plans.  Though through my planning I did sit down and create a lesson plan template that I think will really work for me this year.  You can check it out below.

This template is for when I teach a whole group lesson in reading.

This one is for when we do centers during reading.

Investigation is what my school calls our science and social studies.

Newbie Bloggers Blog Hop

I have been running into my classroom throughout the summer, preparing for the school year, but I haven’t been a good blogger.  My goals for blogging this year, is to blog every other day and learn more about the blogging community.  I really want to find out how to do giveaways and all the other fun stuff that many of my favorite bloggers do well.  I found this blog hop and thought it was a good way of getting back into blogging for the new year. 

The rules are to answer these questions.

1.       What state are you teaching in: Pennsylvania

2.         Your current teaching position: Third grade

3.        What is your teaching experience: 8 years

4.        When did you start blogging: I started blogging in February of this year.

5.        Share a blogging tip: Include lots of pictures and how-tos. This is a Blog Hop!

Check out all the other blogs