fastforward

I am amazed at how fast the days go by. Without specials to break up the flow of the day this year, we can just seamlessly go from one activity to the next. If I'm a little off schedule, it's no big deal and before I know it, it's time to take the kids to the bus.

Half day Kindergarten is seriously short!

The kiddos are doing really well in math. Today I did some informal assessment to see which kiddos are able to put their number tiles in order and the majority did really well. I had one child in the PM class who struggles with number recognition and counting and several in the AM. When I laid out their tiles and asked them to point to each number, however, they did fairly well (some better than others), so I am hopeful that all of the practice we are doing is helping them remember.

During our daily math routine, one of the activities is to pass out number cards (one per child) and have the kids put them in order by standing in a line in number order. I remember the kids struggling with this task last year and this year they are doing great. Even the kids who are having a harder time are doing well with it.

We also do an activity where I show a number and they have to show me that many fingers. The kids are getting creative and showing me different ways to make each number. For example, typically when we show four, we show all four on one hand, fingers up and thumb tucked away. Today I saw a few kiddos showing two fingers on each hand and a few even showed three fingers on one hand and one on the other. They are getting the concept of number partners, which is something we work on later in the year. It's nice to be able to stretch math out a little more and do some things I didn't do last year because of behavior/management/crowd control issues.

I wrote sub plans after school today since I will be out Wednesday for a training. It took a long time because I always write extensive plans. Since it's the first time writing them this year, I am getting everything down so in the future, I can cut and paste the routine and procedure parts. Writing sub plans, is one of the times teaching two sessions really has its advantages. I write for half a day and then basically just include times for the PM class and write same as AM for each activity. All of my subs are great and they always do fine, but I think I tend to leave a lot more information than necessary.

I am off to bed to read. I still haven't finished my chapters for book club, which meets tomorrow and I haven't gotten in my daily quota for work on my paper. I didn't feel well at all after school, so I got in bed and tried to relax. Mr. Sneaker made dinner, cleaned up, and emptied the dishwasher so I could just chill. Love it!