December 1, 2014

Look who's visiting our classroom!!

It's Garland! Our class' elf on the shelf.  Who knows what mischief she might create in our classroom each morning?! The kids know that Garland is watching to see if they should be put on the naughty or nice list.  She does get to fly home to the North Pole each night and report back to Santa!!

We also have some new additions to our math block...

This is the guided math rotation chart that we have started using.  I downloaded the pieces from teachers pay teachers (such an amazing site!).  The kids are divided into small groups based on math understanding and then are assigned to a different rotation each day.  We go through all five rotations in a 5 day period.  The rotations consist of:  teacher-led small group, number work, technology, math notebook, and math games.  I will be adjusting these based on what we need and what center activities I have.  Basically each 5 day rotation will have 4 center-type rotations with another rotation where the kids will see me in a small group.  We'll see how this goes to see if we need to adjust things.  

We didn't start on the rotations today, but we instead did a whole-group introduction to our new unit about telling time to the hour and half hour.  We learned some new songs and then completed a worksheet to see how much we understand about telling time.  

Below is my new math word wall.  It's a little crooked (I must have been half-asleep when stapling!) and these words are the vocabulary words from the previous unit.  My goal is to have all the math vocabulary on laminated cards that have pictures illustrating each concept.  I haven't been referring to this word wall with the kids and this is something that I need to do to make sure the kids are using this as a reference.  I might also think about tweaking this to try and have all the math words we know to continually stay up.  Now just to find the wall space...