Apologies!

1. I have a few posts I'll be putting together this week, but for now I want to make sure all my loyal blog followers are aware of the week long Flash Freebie I'm offering through my Facebook fan page.

2. There is a Teachers Pay Teachers  Sale this week, and all my products are included!

3. I'm hoping to have a package of Pink Shirt Day products up late tonight, so stay tuned. Here's a sample of what's in the package:

Print Friendly Slap hands in action!

One of my favourite products I have up on Teachers pay Teachers is 

My Slap hands, 

and the Print friendly edition.

This year when I went to print the hands we actually had laminate in our machine, so I printed the pre-primer on my favorite pink card stock. Each week I put the five words of the week on the door, and as they are switched out, they are put on the wall behind the door to become a sight word slap hands centre. It's a new favourite!

Healthy Eating Northern Style

So eating healthy is a trouble spot for a lot of people, and our community is no exception.

When planning my lessons on healthy eating, I stumbled upon this old poster from the Northern Store using a modified medicine wheel to show the food groups. 

I noted that the colours used for each food group were the same as those found in the Canada Food guide, so I went with that to plan this lesson.

I gave my kiddos each their own medicine wheel and had them colour the quadrants as shown on my smart board. We them brainstormed foods for each section. I was sure to include food they eat locally like our blueberries in the summer and the moose meat in the fall.

After our brainstorm I distributed old magazines and fliers to cut out one food item for each quadrant.

I'm kicking myself for not taking a photo of the finished products, but they were awesome!

More Bulletin board 2015

I'm sure most of you find my blog because you've followed a link from Pinterest of a door or bulletin board from my school.

So who am I to stop showing you the awesome ideas from around my school?

Here is our Dental Therapists Valentines Door. I love how she's sing floss for the word LOVE at the bottom. 

This one is from our school community liaison officer.

By our office doors.

The 3/4 class

Our LNC's wall.

Domino math

So a few months ago I received this AWESOME bag of Dominoes in the mail. I put it aside and kept it specifically for our addition and subtraction unit. 

I dumped a quarter of the bag on each of my tables and modeled to my class how to write the numbers from the two sides on their worksheet. They were already familiar with the idea because we'd had a page in our math book that was exactly the same, only with the dots already in place.

It kept them so quiet and engaged! I'm definitely doing this again next year.

Record of Adaptations

What do you do in your board when a kiddo in math or reading struggles with a unit of study and all your classroom adaptations don't seem to work?

In our board we make a record of everything we've done to try to help the student.

Things like providing number lines at their desks, singing songs to help remember, providing only one question at a time, changing fonts, moving to the front of the class, etc, etc, etc....

We then write it up in this fancy document below and hand it off to our LNC teacher who looks at what we tried, tries something different, and if that doesn't work, then a referral to resource is made.

Don't think you're off the hook though! We may be LONG passed our unit on numbers to 20, but at least twice a week we still sing our counting up and down to 20 songs with YouTube to help with our number recognition, and we are now doing the Chicka 1 2 3 number exchange, so every few days a new number arrives in the mail and we put it on our wall, which springs up a conversation about numbers.

Guided Reading With multiple levels

I've told you before about how my school does guided reading this year, well now I've had my turn at having kiddos from two levels in one group.

I'd done it before, last year, when each teacher was responsible their own kiddos only, and I had only one child at a level. I'd read two books on a similar theme with the whole group, and tested them only on the book at their own level.

This year though, the groups come from 3 classes (as of this week 4, since there are now Kindergartens in my group, as they've passed the ELT).

As you can see from the pictures below, I chose non-fiction books for both groups. I did this because our kiddos NEED more exposure to nonfiction, and because it's easier to match themes this way!

I chose two books studying weather. 

I figured, all the kiddos with me for this week of sessions could be learning the same Vocabulary and text features, and I wouldn't have to spend as much time going over the book with each half. They all did really well on this weeks assessment! They didn't all pass it, but they did really well.

Chicka Chicka 1 2 3

Do you remember back in the fall how my class participated in an alphabet exchange?

Well, the same blogger, Mrs De Vries who organized that exchange, has done it again with a number Exchange to go along with Chicka Chicka 1 2 3. 

Here's an affiliate Amazon link to a box set of both books so you too can be all set to participate in both exchanges next year!

My kiddos really struggle with number recognition, and so this opportunity to circle back and continue to practice our numbers as they trickle into our mail box is hopefully going to cement these numbers in their heads!

For our part we were assigned the number 19. We've done a LOT of work with ten frames so it was a no brainer to have my kiddos build the number using ten frames and coloured squares.

I opted to NOT put our tree back up in January. I took it down to put up our Christmas tree in the same space, and decided putting the numbers up in number line order may better help my students as the numbers come in. What do you think?

New Year Smells

You know that awesome autumn smell of new school supplies?

One thing to love about new students at mid year is opening up their bag of new school stuff and taking that first whiff, all first of the year hopes and dreams wrapped up in one simple canvas bag.