Calendar

As we were doing calendar today I was thinking that next year I will introduce it slightly differently. In September I will start with doing calendar on the smartboard (the kids will not use their laptops right away...) once we have walked through the tools, some of the ins and outs, then we will introduce them to the calendar.

if a student deletes a piece of the calendar I will have them redownload it from the s drive.

Also it is important to remember for me to have the kids download it from the s drive...not the website. by doing this I can add or delete pages I want and can reorder them to make sense with our routine.

it does not bother me if students use different colored pens/markers, or change the background of their screen IF they have completed what we are doing.

It should be quiet in the room unless someone is called on.

there is lots of room for discussion by doing it on the computers as well as the calendar.

I would like to do one calendar helper a day to do it up on the smartboard as the rest of the class does it on the laptops...

also at the end of the month each month I would like for kids to turn it into me so that I can see who is understanding the concepts better/who is struggling with certain concepts.

Word Wall

Alright, thinking towards next year as I continue to work away this year with the computers. The word wall is going really well. I love that the kids (most of them) are doing such an amazing job spelling and reading the new word wall words. They are tricky words but my kids really seem to be applying their knowledge of the words and are doing a better job reading them too because they are forced to type them into sentences. I have a few lower students who definitely need the assistance but most of the kids are able to type the words right in and then apply them to sentences.

This is great for my ELL students! Today one of my ELLs wrote "I am taking the long cut." The word wall word was long. She explained that it was like short cut but long cut. This opened up the dialog so that she knew and now understood we have such things as short cuts but not long cuts.

Next year I am thinking a consistent way to do them each day would be great! This year I am having students do this work in Key note which I really like so far.

Monday: introduce new word wall words-clap, chant, cheer them (students can type in the word after clap-chant-cheering it

Tuesday: students put the word into a sentence

Wednesday: Wacky Wednesday students clap, chant cheer the words in wacky ways (students underline the word wall word in their already written sentence.)

Thursday: Students make rhyming words (if the word wall word is how then I can spell now cow plow ect-give students time to find pictures as well to go with the words.

Friday: word wall game (as class-kagan style)

Today for the first time when students were finished they were able to work on word wall games or lexia. this worked great. I will definitely do this again. students who finished their work were able to do this and it was great. Not busy work but on their level and they loved it! It was quiet in the room! :)

This is definitely on all kids levels as well because the higher kids were making multiple sentences while my lower students were making short sentences.

Differentiation for ELLs...I could give them sentence frames.