Teaching On A Time Crunch

My district's Fall Break begins tomorrow! I am not quite sure where the beginning of the year went. I blinked and it is gone! This week, we only had kids for two days because of the break and a professional development day. Personally, schedule changes are really hard for me. I know it is important to be flexible but school wide events and alternative schedules would eat my lunch if I let them. One of the things I have found to really help my children and I deal with such changes is to pack the time so full with learning that we do not have time to think twice about it.

One of my school's biggest fundraisers is our annual Jogathon.  Children collect flat pledges or pledges per lap they run. Instead of going to P.E. or Music, each class has a jogging and refreshment time.  For weeks leading up to the Jogathon, guests come to our morning assemblies to promote the event with families and excite the children.  One of the guests is a parent at our school and a patent of a former student.  Each year they come up with different characters. This year, they were pizza dudes.

Currently, my dramatic play center is set up as a pizza parlor and yesterday we made pizza (a Pinterest version) and wrote directions for our steps using transitional words.  We used croissants, turkey pepperoni, and string cheese.  They were yummy!!

Embracing the excitement and incorporating it into math is week.  A kindergarten team mate and I taught a lesson together about estimation. We read the story The Tortoise and the Hare and used our jogging tags to talk about making an educated guess.  After they ran, we recorded how many actual laps they ran.  I was impressed with how close some of them were!

I love picking books as I plan lessons! Leading up to yesterday, we had been listening to Junie B. Jones is Captain Field Day during our quiet time.  I read a chapter a day immediately following lunch and I let children lay down with our lights dimmed.  I still use the book to help them understand character and how to problem solve so I try to incorporate topics with things we are dealing with as a part of our classroom community or what is going on in our world (Jogathon).  We also talked about being a good sport after reading a new book from Scholastic, Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns About Sportmanship. We were able to talk about having goals and what makes someone a good sport all in the same conversation. They impressed me with their background knowledge!

I love the book Go Away Big Green Monster.  I have done this lesson with kindergarten and first graders.  The end product is different every single time.  This year, my learners are struggling to label their pictures so when we worked on writing, we talked through the importance of labels.  In the past, I have done a lot with encouraging descriptive words but I felt we were successful to label the parts of the monster.  We also read the book Where The Wild Things Are.  Using sentence strips I cut triangles out so it looked like a crown.  After reading the story, we made crowns using pattern block cut outs.  I told them they would only get to be crowned King or Queen of the Wold if they had a pattern.  It was a fun, engaging, easy assessment.

We have been working on our letter knowledge!  This is a graph that shows our letter knowledge for our first nine weeks.  I had the template for the graph made as well as post it notes with each child's number for letter knowledge.  We talked through why letter knowledge is important and set a class goal to know all upper and lower case letters by Winter Break!  I gave each child their post it and they wrote their name and drew a picture before we put it on.  The graph makes my heart feel happy because it shows how far we have come in such a short time. Many children knew fewer than 10 letters total at the beginning of the year. We have grown!

What's your biggest success for your class so far this school year?  How do you address goal setting for young learners in your classroom?