- I baked a loaf of banana bread with chocolate chunks ::yummy!::
- I made a batch of cookie dough to put in the freezer for a BBQ we are going to on the 29th. We are getting back from our trip just a few hours before the party, so I wanted to have the dough pre-made so I can just plop some balls on a tray and put them in the oven!
- I cut up some peppers and onions for our fajita dinner so I could clean the horrendous hot mess that was my kitchen and not have make another mess later.
- I cleaned the whole apartment, vacuumed, and am working on load of laundry #2.
- And yes, I wrote 1 page of my paper! Actually, including the chart I put in that outlines the four major curriculum theories, I wrote about a page and a half. Score!
- The list still says run & read and it should say Skype date with my bestie, but I would never forget to do that! Unfortunately when I looked out the window in the midst of my cleaning frenzy, it was pouring rain. Not such a good day for a long run.....but I do reside in Oregon (unless I am spending a fabby summer in Europe!), so I know that a little rain doesn't hurt.
More specifically...objectives.
Do you have to write out content and language objectives for your lessons?
At my school we are supposed to.
But, I don't.
::cringe::
I hate to admit that I don't because I completely believe in the important of making sure the goal of the lesson is clear, but for some reason, writing the goal out for each lesson when we are doing something different approximately every 15 minutes seems like too much.
too. much.
I have toyed with different ways to make sure that I am at least verbally stating the objective for each lesson including singing our goals to the tune of "we will rock you" each morning during our good morning circle. But, I have not yet gotten into the habit of actually writing out my daily content and language objectives.
Towards the end of the year, I started using my magnetic letters to show the kiddos what our letter and sight word of the week were and I found that helpful, so I am trying to brainstorm ways to include my lesson objectives in picture or written form this year. The good thing is that we typically study the same letter or word all week, so my fear of having to rewrite objective numerous times a day is pretty nonsensical.
I am picturing some type of dry erase board on my instructional wall where I can write our weekly objectives (at least for reading) and just keep them up all week. That would include a few sounds from Fast Track, our special letter of the week that is tied to our star of the week, and our sight word of the week. That way the kiddos could see them and know what our focus is, but I won't have to erase them in order to write other things if I use an entirely separate dry erase board. I am hoping to just buy a sheet of dry erase board from Home Depot and drill holes in it so I can just hang it on my instructional wall somewhere. Then I would use my other dry erase board that I prop on my big book stand for writing other things during my lessons.
I used to do a written morning message with my firsties and I loved it, so that is something I would of course love to incorporate with the objectives if I can somehow miraculous infuse more time into the day. There are so many things I wish I could do if only I had the time. What about choosing one sentence from a newspaper article each day and have the kids practice finding the sight word and then talking about what happened in the news.... Or, writing a sentence about something we have worked on in class or something about our daily schedule. I used to love making mistakes on purpose in my message and asking the kiddos to tell me what was wrong and how to fix it. Again, if only I had the time!
I can't wait to get back into my classroom so I can start arranging the furniture and working on my separate math and literacy walls. I am not sure what to do with math objectives because our new math program often has us doing 5 completely unrelated lessons a week, but my team did talk about rearranging some of our units so that we can kind of work on one thing at a time instead of jumping around so much. Maybe if we do that, math objectives will be easier.
In theory, writing the daily objective doesn't seem that hard, but neither does sharpening pencils and I seem to have major issues getting that done as well. It's just those little things that seem to fall through the cracks in the grand scheme of everything I need to do. Speaking of sharpening pencils, last night we had dinner with a friend of Mr. Sneaker who has a pencil sharpener company here in Germany. He gave me about 8 different kinds of little sharpeners to bring to my classroom!
Hopefully given the changes I want to make in the organization of my room and with the addition of my awesome new rug, I will be able to create special locations just for posting my daily objectives. I would love to feel that organized and I do think that it's a good thing to specifically point out to the kiddos what I want them to know or be able to show me at the end of a lesson. There is so much potential for being explicit about that and I would love to think of ways to involve the kids so they somehow interact with the written objective and get into the habit of checking for it, reading it, and making sure they get it.
Oh, how we expect so much from our little Kindies.
Do you do a morning message with your kiddos?
What kinds of things do you write?
What kinds of things do you write?
How do your kiddos interact with it?
6 comments:
Glad you had such a productive day :)
I do morning message every day with my kids and I did it during half day too. I really love it and I would never get rid of it. My typical morning message looks something like:
Dear _riends,
Good _orning! Today is _uesday. __ike is the leader. We will learn a __ew letter today _ _ _ we will also __lay a __ath __ame.
_ove,
________
At the beginning of the year I leave out beginning sounds and a couple of sight words. Later in the year I'll leave out blends, digraphs, more sight words, sometimes whole worlds etc. It's a great time to introduce new concepts to kids that I normally wouldn't- because the lower kids who aren't ready just won't pick it up but others will. Throughout the year it's a great time to reinforce beginning, middle and ending sounds- plus sight words, practice handwriting, leaving spaces, punctuation at the end of a sentence etc.
For my morning message, all my kids have small white boards and they all fill in the missing letters on their whiteboards. I also call up one kid at a time to fill it in on our big easel (that way if a child doesn't know how to write a letter/spell a word they can look up at the easel).
I had one student this year who couldn't keep up with our message later in the year so I wrote her own (same message just left out less letters). This summer I've made all my kids their own message (just 1 message and I copy it). They did have trouble figuring out where to put each letter so I've started color coding each blank space. I could never do that with a whole class though- 4 students is a different story :)
My principal likes us to post our objectives too, but I usually only do when she is there. I don't feel its really that helpful to kids unless you have pictures or some way for them to be able to read it- and I just don't have time to do that because like you said we do SO many lessons a day!
I do list my Clear Learning Goals and Essential Questions each week. I DO NOT like it but it is required by our district. I have a pocket chart from Really Good Stuff and then have a space for reading, writing, and math. I use sentence strips and change it out weekly or as needed. We only teach SS and Science to students on/above grade level in reading/math so I don't list those up there. I also have to put them in my weekly lesson plans (don't even get me started on those!) Hope that helps!
I did a morning message often during my first year, and I didn't really do one last year. As far as objectives, we aren't required to post ours, but it looks good if you do. We're really slack so we usually write up the main ones for each quarter and literally leave them up on the board for the entire quarter. It's very general, obviously. I have 4 laminated sheets of construction paper taped to the chalkboard - one for each subject, and I write on them with a Vis-a-Vis marker. The kids don't look at it at all, and I never do either. And you're right! We DO teach about a million different thing each day, so it's kind of ridiculous to have to write it all out.
We're supposed to write content and language objects for each lesson also but I don't. They gave us this stupid little chart that only holds the content/language objective for ONE subject....which means I'd have to stop teaching to write it out before each lesson. No way am I doing that!!
I use this pocket chart from Really Good Stuff. I laminated some sentence strips and used a dry erase marker so it made it super easy to change them daily. Nothing was ever said to me about not having language objectives.
I do the same thing as Kelly. I try and focus on our letter/sight word of the week or Theme.
I try to post our objective, but I'm not always on top of it. At the school I taught at in WA we spent a year talking about/implementing "Target Statements" and making sure they were written in clear, kid-friendly language ("I can read and write the word said").
✪ Miss W
Miss W Teaches
I do a morning message with my kindergarten students every day. At the beginning of the year we discuss words/letters, leaving space, and I always ask them a question at the end of the message. As the year goes on, we find hunks/chunks, popcorn words, etc. Towards the middle to end of the year I leave words out, leave beginning/ending sounds, etc. A very powerful tool to use with them!!
BusyBees
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