Hello Mrs Sykes - Resources for Teachers: 200 Followers Giveaway!! Thank you!!:
Oh my!!! Congrats to Mrs. Sykes for 200 followers! To celebrate she is having an AWESOME 10-teacher giveaway!
I hope to one day have 200 followers, too!
5.20.2012
My First Blog Award!!
WOW!!!
I am so excited to post that I have received my first blog award... in fact, I received the Lovely Blog Award twice in one week!
First from my friend Darleen at Third Grade Love
and then again from one of my newest followers at Third Grade's a Hoot (what a super cute blog name!).
So here is how blog awards work:
1. Follow the person who gave you the award
2. Link back to the person who gave you the award
3. Pass on the award to 15 new bloggers
This is a fun and easy way to make someone's day (just as the two ladies above did for me!), but this is also a wonderful opportunity to explore around for new blogs!
Below are fifteen blogs I am following and who deserve the One Lovely Blog Award:
2. 
5.
12. 
13.
14.
15.
1. 
3. 
4. 
5.
6. 
7. 
8. 
9.
13.
14.
15.
Check out these amazing, dedicated, innovative teachers and their ideas! How lucky are the students in their classes?!
5.10.2012
Giveaway!
My very first blog friend, Darleen from Third Grade Love, invited me to be a part of her very first giveaway :) She is celebrating 40 followers and 20, 000 page views! Wow!!!
Check out her blog for more details on how to enter and win!
Mother's Day
Mother's Day landed at the end of the perfect week for my class.
This is our big MSP week for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students which evidently means our regular schedule is goofy with needed planning time shuffles, no RTI and all SPED groups being cancelled.
This prompted my team and I to decided to take this opportunity when we have all of our students all day for the entire week to do a special Nutrition Unit. I will be posting the Nutrition Journal I created for our students to keep track of everything they learned, soon!
This also gave us lots of extra time for Mother's Day crafting and preparing!
These fun and beautiful hand-print flowers I found on pinterest, too! My students LOVED making these! I wish I had bought enough pipe cleaners for each student to make more than one flower!
On Friday we are taking the small cups of grass we have been growing and trim, cut, and/or braid the grass to the desired hair styles of each student... then adding googly-eyes and foam/felt mouths for one last gift. Pictures to come!
This is our big MSP week for 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students which evidently means our regular schedule is goofy with needed planning time shuffles, no RTI and all SPED groups being cancelled.
This prompted my team and I to decided to take this opportunity when we have all of our students all day for the entire week to do a special Nutrition Unit. I will be posting the Nutrition Journal I created for our students to keep track of everything they learned, soon!
This also gave us lots of extra time for Mother's Day crafting and preparing!
We started the week with this super cute poem I found on TPT via pinterest.
Didn't they turn out super cute!? Each student turned their thumb prints into mommy and child butterflies, bugs, or little people. I laminated them and added heart ribbon.
On Friday we are taking the small cups of grass we have been growing and trim, cut, and/or braid the grass to the desired hair styles of each student... then adding googly-eyes and foam/felt mouths for one last gift. Pictures to come!
5.07.2012
Teacher Appreciation = happy heart
The simplest things make my heart happy these days...
Monday
Yellow tulips from a student, special water bottle with chocolate chip cookies from PTA.
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Cute and yummy!
Happy Teacher Appreciation Week, teacher friends!
4.23.2012
Place Value
To help us determine our next RTi focus skill, my teammates and I analyzed our MAP data. This data showed that our students were low in Place Value (Numbers and Operations) and Time, Money, and Measurement (Measurement). We started with Place Value for a few reasons.
1. Place Value is the first Core Content in our current WA State Math Standards
2. We did not feel that our current curriculum fully covers Place Value
3. We have tons of materials to pull from because three years ago when we did not have a curriculum in our district, 2nd grade teachers across the district planned, shared, and implemented engaging and meaningful lessons.
This 3-week RTi went fast. But I loved that because it was just 2nd grade working together this time we were able to focus more on 2nd grade expectations.
We have two para educators working with our RTi and because they are not at our planning meetings (schedule conflicts) it is extremely important that we plan and prepare in a way that is easy to understand and implement for our paras as well. We always give our Paras the higher groups and the regular classroom teachers work with the middle and low groups, so usually our Paras are reviewing and extending, not teaching strategies as we need to do with our middle and lower groups, but it is still important that we are all on the same page with intended outcomes and routines.
We came up with the following plan:
I loved this plan and lived by it. When I have only 30 minutes, 3 times a week for RTi, I definitely work better with a strict plan. It is so easy to lose focus or spend too much time on one thing, but a plan prevents me from doing that :)
Something we also changed in this RTi, because it was just 2nd grade working together, was we planned out the worksheets that we ended our RTi with each day. We felt this was important so we were all doing the same thing on the same day. We felt that our groups were similar enough that we could do this.
After three weeks we retested our students and I was very VERY happy.
1. Place Value is the first Core Content in our current WA State Math Standards
2. We did not feel that our current curriculum fully covers Place Value
3. We have tons of materials to pull from because three years ago when we did not have a curriculum in our district, 2nd grade teachers across the district planned, shared, and implemented engaging and meaningful lessons.
This 3-week RTi went fast. But I loved that because it was just 2nd grade working together this time we were able to focus more on 2nd grade expectations.
We have two para educators working with our RTi and because they are not at our planning meetings (schedule conflicts) it is extremely important that we plan and prepare in a way that is easy to understand and implement for our paras as well. We always give our Paras the higher groups and the regular classroom teachers work with the middle and low groups, so usually our Paras are reviewing and extending, not teaching strategies as we need to do with our middle and lower groups, but it is still important that we are all on the same page with intended outcomes and routines.
We came up with the following plan:
2nd grade RTi—Place Value/ Numbers and Operations
Feb. 23rd – March 15th
Planning Page
*Post word form of numbers 1 – 20, 30, 40, 50, 60,
70, 80, 90, 100 in classroom for accurate spelling
1. Start the RTi session with “Around the Circle”
a. Students use hundreds
chart
b. Teachers write numbers as
students say them then discuss the patterns seen
2. Use base ten blocks to make a model of a number
a. Use with whiteboards to
then write word form, expanded form
b. Make a second or third way
to model that number
3. Smart board
a. Order numbers
b. Compare numbers
4. End with a worksheet
a. If students finish early,
give them a number to start at and on the back of their worksheet they can count by 10 or 100 (forward or
backward up to 1,000)
i. 2nd graders
need to be able to count by 10 or 100 starting from numbers like 31 or 423… not
just numbers that end with a 0 or 5.
I loved this plan and lived by it. When I have only 30 minutes, 3 times a week for RTi, I definitely work better with a strict plan. It is so easy to lose focus or spend too much time on one thing, but a plan prevents me from doing that :)
Something we also changed in this RTi, because it was just 2nd grade working together, was we planned out the worksheets that we ended our RTi with each day. We felt this was important so we were all doing the same thing on the same day. We felt that our groups were similar enough that we could do this.
After three weeks we retested our students and I was very VERY happy.
Blue = Pre test
Red = Post test
Pre test--11 students in my class were not meeting standard
(50% meeting standard)
Post test 4 students in my class were not meeting standard
(82% meeting standard)
However, those 11 students went from 0/20 on their pretest to between 50 - 65% on their post test. They made wonderful growth and as we continue to talk about counting by 10s, 100s, number forms, tens and ones, and comparing numbers, I am certain to work with those four students.
Overall, this RTi was one of my favorites! I appreciated how organized my team and I were. Not only did I know what I would be doing with my RTi group, but I always knew what my students would be doing when they left my room to go to their RTi group, and I really REALLY liked that!
3.15.2012
The Big Split
Yeesh! It's been almost a whole month since I last logged in. End of trimester testing, grading, and report cards have consumed me these past few weeks. Although this time of year is extremely busy, I was really, REALLY excited to see each of my student's growth in official print form! Report cards go home tomorrow, music program next week, then conferences, then Spring Break...
...and I will be here :)
Until then, RTi remains the focus of my team's thoughts. When we started our RTi groups this year we combined our 2nd and 3rd grade students. Things ran smoothly for the most part, that is, our standards were close enough that we were able to focus on the same skill + expectations with both grade levels together. After Subtraction, however, we (2nd and 3rd grade teachers) decided to part ways.
We have come to a point in the year where our standards and expectations are diverging further and further apart. So our next RTi will be our first RTi apart.
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