Time to Try Again… Management Freebie!

I have a confession… Being a new teacher and a newlywed has been tough! There have been times when I felt as though I was doing so much, and absolutely none of it was being done right. However, I have worked over the last few months at getting some balance back in my life, and I feel like it it working! So, time to try out this whole blogging thing again…

I have had a pretty fantastic year with my first graders so far. Sometimes, I spend a whole minute just watching them all, feeling so lucky to be able to do what I do each day. These are the moments I think of when there are some less wonderful moments that come along. One thing I have found SOOO helpful this year, besides the wonderful behaviour clipchart, is my visual prompt “necklace”. I created cues for carpet behaviour, and I wear them around my neck with my classroom key. When we are sitting on the carpet an one of the cuties starts getting, *ahem* shall we say out of hand, I hold up the appropriate cue in front of me. Usually this is enough. BUT, if they are particularly unruly, it gets some “3-D” action as I get it close and closer to the offender. Luckily, this can all be done quite casually, without interrupting the flow of the lesson/discussion (usually!).

Click on the picture below to get a copy of the prompts. I laminated mine for durability, after a year of wearing wrinkled, unlaminated, coffee spotted ones (don’t judge- we have to wait for our laminating volunteer to come in, and that is once a week at best). I put them on a binder ring to make it easy to flip them. Generally, “ears listening” is the one showing!

I have to say… my first set of these had some super creepy eyes… I took a picture of an eye and just reversed it to make two. Something about it… If I were six, I might have been scared of those eyes!

Hope you find this as useful as I have. Not sure if I picked up the idea from somewhere on the web, or from another person, or if it was my own brilliant, hybrid idea! I have had them for over a year and a half. If I did get the idea from somewhere, and you know where, please let me know so I can give credit!

My Classroom Library Organization and Opening

This year, one of my focuses was creating an inviting, ORGANIZED library for my students. I think I have succeeded! I have been working towards getting my students ready for Daily 5 all year, and we are at over twenty minutes of really great Read to Self time per day. The most exciting part for me is all the wonderful sharing that happens afterwards. Each day, I hear students sharing that they made connections or predictions, that they used the pictures to figure out a word, or that they used one of the other strategies up on our Cafe board. How fantastic is that!

Our library is in a corner of the classroom that has built in shelving. I used low, open shelves to create a little nook for the students. the fiction and levelled texts can be accessed from either side, and the nonfiction is found against the wall.

In our classroom library, every book has a sticker that matches the label on the book bin, with the exception of the nonfiction texts, which are labelled with a number that indicates which cubby it belongs in. This has facilitated student-sustained organization. I can honestly say I rarely find a book out of place!

I would say the most frequently used bins are those with a selection of levelled books, sorted into four colour-coded bins:

A-C = blue

C-E = green

F-H = purple

I-K = red

I let each student know which bin would contain their Good Fit books, so that they know where to look when changing out their books in their book box. It took be several hours of "in front of the T.V." work to level my inherited books using the Scholastic Book Wizard. I like having them colour coded, because it prevents students from identifying their reading ability with a letter all the time. It drives me crazy to hear students define themselves as a letter!

The rest of the fiction bins are sorted according to book type or author. Click here to get all three pages of book bin labels.

 

Here is a picture of our library taken during the first month of school.

The built in cubbies are where the nonfiction texts are now kept. The bulletin board closest to the wall has our Cafe menu on it now.

In September, we had a VERY special ceremony to open our library. The purple ribbon is across the entrance to the library because we had a ribbon cutting ceremony to open it. Our school principal came as our guest of honour, and he (and his pirate puppet!) cut the ribbon after reading us a story. Then the students were presented with their book boxes to be filled with their “borrowed” library books. This was two weeks after school started, and we had spent a great deal of time talking about Good Fit books, how to take care of books, and what to put in our book box. It was a very special day! I WISH I could post a picture of my whole class gathered into the library… It was a very happy moment.

Below is the promise that we recited before getting our first books from the library.

How do you introduce the classroom library to your students?

Eric Carle Syllable Sort

I love using Eric Carle’s books, and my Fantastic First Graders seem to love them just as much! This past year, I planned a week long Eric Carle author study, which quickly turned into three weeks! When they are that hooked you have to capitalize on it… I had created an Eric Carle themed syllable sort for our WWW centre, and it ended up staying out as an optional activity long after we moved on to a new unit. The recording sheet is in black and white, as we have VERY limited colour copies at our school. There is an extension activity that asks students to identify compound words as well… always gotta double side copies! Click on the picture below to download a copy.