Not Your Typical First Day Back

Going back to work always fills me with excitement in a way (probably mostly for chatting with my co-workers who I haven't seen in a few months), but then the excitement quickly dies down as soon as the first staff meeting is called to order and we get down to business. There's always new goals, new acronyms, and talk of what will be different this year. Don't get me wrong, I like the freshness of the new year and the ability to start over with a new group of kiddos, but it's also daunting. As I stare at a list of kids I've never met, I always have a pretty big fear of what is yet to come. I am looking forward to meeting some kiddos on Wednesday during our supply drop and I am hopeful that by then my classroom will be looking a bit more organized and put together than it looks right now. I barely had anytime outside of our meeting to get anything done because I had to go pick Baby Sneaker up from daycare at 12:30. Thankfully tomorrow I can stay until 2 because my friend volunteered to get her and take her back to my house so I can have some time with my team.

Onto the unconventional part of the day. We received a postcard in the mail shortly after school let out indicating that the entire staff was being asked to meet in the library at 9:30 AM today and we were assigned TRIBE colors. Even support staff who were not paid to be there, were asked to come. So, what's with this tribe business? Well...we had our own little Amazing Race this morning. Families from school volunteered to take part and they had stations set up at their houses with different challenges. Each of the 8 tribes were given an envelope with an address so we had to hop in our cars, drive to a family's house, and complete the challenge. That family gave us our next address and we were off to the next challenge. Some were team challenges that required cooperation, some were word puzzles, and some were individual challenges. Some of the challenges had a set time and some were timed to see who could do them the fastest. All of the scores were tallied and once everyone was back the winner was announced.

When I first heard what we had to do, I will admit, I was not excited. But, it turned out to be really really fun. Our tribes are groups that we will remain connected with all year and we are assigned to help with one PSO event as a tribe, to plan one social event together, and to make sure that we take care of any "sunshine" during the year, which means getting gifts if babies are born, flowers for people who have surgery, cards for deaths in the family etc. I think that this whole tribe thing is a great way to get people connected and that will be a good thing for our staff.

Was today your first day back too?

What did you talk about at your meetings?

Wall Art

Tonight Mr. Sneaker and I were discussing getting some prints for the empty walls in our bedroom. We love these city posters and are thinking of getting this trio. 

 where we met

 where we live

where we spent holidays

I also want to get something like this cool artwork frame for Baby Sneakers's playroom so I can display her cute little projects from daycare and easily switch out projects from month to month. 

While I was getting all excited for some wall decorations in my home, I came across something I had pinned that I want to laminate on my classroom walls. 

Images found from this site. 

Here are some of my favorites...

I probably won't hang this one, but I love it.

(I bet Raye will too!)

I kind of want to frame some of these for Baby Sneakers room too. I heart them!

Do you have any special sayings or words of wisdom you share with your students?

Sight Words

My little project this morning was finishing up my first set of word wall sight word cards. I am not sure what comes with our new reading program, but I know I want to post sight words on my word wall, so I went ahead and made my own set. As we learn each word, I will add it to my word wall below the alphabet letters.

This is a pile of 87, yes that's right, eighty seven sight words that Kinders will learn this year. 

printed, cut, laminated and then cut again. 

Whew. 

I have to redo these because I didn't feed the sheet in straight and the sheet is all buckled and lumpy. 

Oops. 

Depending on what is provided with our curriculum materials I might make another set because I have another wall space where I plan to post words to review. 

If the kiddos have to learn 87 words, I want those words in their face 

all. the. time.

My colleague came across this post and this post on a blog called i Teach With iPads about personalized learning and helping students develop ownership of their learning. She is planning to have her full day Kinders manage their own learning portfolios where they add stickers to standards they have mastered. 

In half-day Kinder, I am curious about the idea, but I need to pare it down to something reasonable for the short time I have the kiddos. I may focus on objective skills in reading and early literacy rather than all of the standards. I am thinking about making a placemat sized (11 X 17) version of our word wall so that students can add stars or stickers next to each word they can read. I would have them bring their personal word wall with them when I assess 1:1 and then based on their assessment add stickers with them. They would then keep their personal word wall in their work bucket so they could have everyday access to the list of words they still need to practice. Possibly, I would add the letter sounds to the back so they could earn stickers for mastering sounds as well. 

At this point I am just playing with the idea and I'm not sure how it would work, but I feel like I definitely need to make some changes in order to help my kiddos be successful at learning 87 words. 

How do you help kiddos learn sight words?

If you have any great activities, I'd love to hear about them!

Productive

I had a nice little productive afternoon in my classroom since my in-laws are visiting and they were able to stay at home with Baby Sneaker. I feel like I finally got some solid organizing done and I am very thankful because certain parts of my room have been a mess since I moved in. Now that I share, I have less space of my own, yet there is tons of storage space in the room and some cabinets are still empty even with two teachers sharing the room. 

My goals today were to

finish organizing my books-check!

organize my desk-check!

organize my file cabinet-check!

move my games and activities to the cabinet where I took my books from-check!

I'm really happy with how my little library came out. All the sections are labeled and I know I will have a much easier time finding books when I need them this year and will be much more prompt and timely in putting them back where they belong! I hope that my students don't think it's fun to pull the red dividers out. 

I also organized my curriculum materials and put them on this shelf that is next to my desk. I may put labeled card stock dividers in here to separate my subjects just like I did with my picture books. 

I remembered to take photos of my display boards this time because the borders are up now, but I think I need to redo them because I didn't staple them enough and there are gaps. Boo. I also need to trim the edges still. 

My phonics and reading walls look so plain, but I am definitely waiting until we have our Journeys training to put anything up on the reading wall and the phonics wall gets built up as we learn, so I don't start the year off with much on there. 

The last major project I want to complete before school starts is sorting the math pages from our student workbooks and homework books. We never use the workbooks the way we get them, so we have the bindings cut off and them sort them so we have a class set of each page. Usually I have parent helpers do this, but we had boxes sitting around for SO long last year because it took a long time and I want all this stuff organized and put away right off the bat this year. I am not sure exactly when I will get this accomplished, but I want to make an effort. This year, we will also be sorting our pages by math strand so we can easily access pages that relate to whatever strand we are working on. I don't really feel like I can have a parent sort the pages like that because I need to think about it myself, so all the more reason to do it before school starts. 

I definitely feel like I could have stayed in my room for several more hours, but I wanted to come home and play with my baby girl. Hopefully I can get in there a few more times before we are officially back. 

Do you like organizing your classroom or do you feel like it's a chore? 

I heart organizing!

Weebly

Last year our Kindergarten program got infused with a technological blast because my team was selected to participate in the district's Digital Learning Collaborative. We are incredibly lucky to have iPads for all of our kiddos, which resulted in a lot of instructional revamping. I really wish I had posted more about teaching with iPads last year, but I think I was too engrossed in trying to figure everything out that I forgot to stop and take photos and create posts detailing our iPad adventures. (And, I was also figuring out how to do the whole working mama thing and writing my dissertation so blogging took a backseat...) This year I hope to do a lot more writing about what it looks like to have iPads in Kindergaren. I know there are other bloggers out there who focus exclusively on teaching with iPads, or even teaching with iPads specifically in Kindergarten, but my blog will always be a bit more eclectic because I like to remain open to talking about anything and everything having to do with teaching, learning, and my life. I would, however, like to make teaching with technology more prominent than it has been. Teaching with iPads is the biggest way that we have integrated technology into our program and our instruction, but I've also made some changes to other things based on what I've learned this past year through the DLC team. 

In the past, I used blogger for a classroom blog. I really like blogger as a platform, but when my district switched over to google, I had trouble moving my blog over to my new school account. What resulted was that I could make new posts, but I couldn't edit any of the pages I had linked to my tabs at the top. So, the tab that led to a meet the teacher page contained outdated information that I could no longer edit. I also had a page detailing classroom info such as birthday policy, homework routine etc, and although I had made changed to those procedures,  I couldn't change the descriptions on the blog. Now, I don't really think that my students' parents flock to my blog on the daily to get the 411 on our classroom activities, but I didn't like having outdated/incorrect information posted.

So, after hearing a lot about Weebly from various colleagues, I decided to give it a try. I created a new classroom website and I am really happy with how it's turning out. 

Using Weebly is really easy and very intuitive. You can add pages and then customize each page by simply dragging the elements from the tool bar on the left. 

You can also choose from a variety of templates or you can upgrade to Weebly Pro and customize even more (I am using the free version).

I remember really struggling to figure out how to add elements I wanted using Blogger. I had to google tutorials to add things like tabs and it was really time consuming, but Weebly automatically creates tabs at the top so you can have a variety of separate pages to provide information to parents. I have created a blog page where I will post on a weekly basis about classroom activities and there are icons on the top that allow me to easily share on facebook, twitter, and email. It's easy to add photo galleries, slideshows, and other images and that's awesome because photos mean more to parents than just reading about activities. I also have a page detailing our Kindergarten curriculum with links to the Common Core State Standards in each area. As the year goes on, I will also maintain a page with information about all of the apps that we are using so parents can download them at home as well. 

So far, I have invested very little time in building my site and I think it will be a great resource for parents. I am excited to show them at Back to School night and emphasize to them that this site is replacing classroom newsletters so they should check in often. 

If you're looking for a platform for a class website I highly recommend that you check out Weebly. 

Do you have a classroom website? 

Has email/tweeting/blogging replaced traditional newsletters?

Do you Dojo?

I've been hearing a lot about Class Dojo lately, so I decided to look into it and created an account for myself. For those of you who aren't familiar...

You can log in on a computer and see your class 

(Note: this is a sample class. I do not teach Matt Damon and Johnny Depp)

Or, you can use the Class Dojo app on your iPad or iPhone

From the data perspective, I think this looks like a great way to collect data on student behavior and have sufficient info readily available for report cards and conferences. 

However, I am not sure I really understand how this motivates kids and how functional it is to keep track of an entire class using this system. I thought I heard that the app makes different noises depending on whether you make a note of positive or negative behavior, but that's not happening when I use it on my phone. Maybe I need to change a setting or something...

Anyway, I have also run into this article on facebook a few times this week. It has got me thinking about the behavior management system I use and, honestly, has got me feeling a bit defensive due to all the educators out there arguing that a visible behavior management system (like the red, yellow, green stoplight one pictured in the article) is "publicly shaming" children. I do not at all feel that the system I use shames children or embarrasses them in front of their peers; yet, that article just makes me think because I would never want that to be the case and many educators are against such systems. 

Things that make you go hmmm....

So I looked into class Dojo as an alternative. If I managed this data on my iPad, it wouldn't be "out there" for all students to see. Yet, am I not supposed to let a student know when they are not behaving according to my expectations? Is that supposed to be a secret? If I make a verbal comment about who is getting a point or losing a point, then the kids are still aware of who is "good" and who is "not good." If I don't say anything and just plug it in, how exactly are kids getting specific feedback?

Can someone walk me through this please????

Do you Dojo?

What makes Class Dojo different from those others systems? 

Do you find it easy to manage? 

The system I currently use involves each child having three sticks that they keep/lose based on their behavior. At the beginning of the year sticks are replaced daily, then as they become competent with rules/procedures, the sticks are only replaced weekly (Once a stick is lost, it is out for the remainder of the week). Sticks are lost when students are not following expectations. Each students' sticks are in a little pocket so they can see how many they have. If all three sticks are lost, a student does not earn choice time on Friday. Instead of choice time, they sit with me and talk about why they lost sticks and I fill out a note to send home to parents that needs to be signed and returned. Students who have 1, 2, or 3 sticks on Friday get to have choice time (which lasts 15 minutes). Students who keep all 3 sticks for the whole week get a special certificate to acknowledge their good behavior on Friday and we clap for them.

Personally, I don't see anything horrible about this system. Yet, comments from other teachers on the stoplight system post made me feel uncomfortable. When teachers throw out words like "punitive behavior management" and "publicly shaming" to describe something that I am doing, I do not feel good about it. I don't agree; yet, these are knowledgable professionals who are finding huge fault with something that I am using. It's not personal, but it is. Is calling a child out for poor behavior truly "shaming" them? I don't want children to feel stress or embarrassment, but I do want them to know what is okay and what is not okay. 

Some things I am considering for this year:

• using numbers instead of names on the chart I have posted (easy)
• moving the chart closer to my desk so it is more private (easy)
• replacing lost sticks during the week for good behavior  (not sure how this would play out)
• using a new system altogether (maybe Dojo)

Please tell me your thoughts! 

I want my behavior management system to focus on the positive and I think I do that because kids are excited to keep their sticks and most kids keep their sticks most week. If a stick is lost, it comes with a reminder that whatever behavior that caused it is not okay. I'm not mean, I don't yell, and I certainly don't shame kids when they lose a stick. When three sticks are lost they don't play, but is this a consequence or punishment? What's the difference? Most of the time every child earns choice time. Most of the time, kids who lose a stick realize they don't like to lose sticks and make efforts to keep them by following expectations. When kids struggle with the system, I don't let them continuously fail, I provide them with something more tailored to their needs. 

Lots of questions in today's post because I really want your feedback and input!