Thinking in Primary

OMG!  I see so many people posting about getting ready to go back to school!  I've been teaching summer school for the month of July!  One more week.  I am having so much trouble even wrapping my head around going back to school for real!  Honestly, it's been a very interesting summer and I've learned so much, I just haven't had much time for anything else! I've recently had a request for an update for my Beach Buck Behavior Plan.  The plan now includes an option for students to clip up to purple.  If you are going to use a clip chart, I do agree that giving students a chance to move up can be very motivating. I personally no longer use any kind of behavior monitoring chart, but this is still the behavior plan I use in my classroom.  I only use the beach bucks to "catch students being good".  It has worked beautifully and I don't miss my behavior chart one bit.  I only use the coupons to reward good behavior.  Sad choices are...

Summer Sale on Camp Kindergarten!  Hope you can find something you can use.  I'm working on vamping up some of my original products so if there is something you need just let me know and I'll do my best to get it taken care of for you! Here are a few of my favorites! Thanks for stopping by! Pin It

It's been forever since I've blogged.  I don't know what is even happening.  Between the dogs, school, new house and many television shows, I've just been so busy and out of touch. I have had so much trouble finding an easy way to upload pictures to the blog!  Does anyone else have this problem?  Tonight I bought the Picasa Web Album app and it was actually not to bad. However, I just couldn't seem to rotate pictures...ugh (I'll keep working on that)! I was able to do almost everything from my phone.  So, here is the test...can you see the pictures!  These are from our Mother's Day books.  Some of them are pretty funny.  Have a great night! Pin It

Try number two!  I hope my pictures show up this time!!!! On a Saturday of course!   This week we started our insect unit!   We practiced close reading using the Fly Guy Presents Insects book.  We started with a schema chart.  As we read this and other texts we confirmed our schema and added to our new learning.  I'm surprised they only had two misconceptions!  We spent two days reading this book and creating our chart. Then we used the text to understand new vocabulary words and shared our learning with table top blogs!  As you can see, results were varied!  :)  The instructions were to explain their words using pictures and or words.  "Antennae is a thing is on the body the antennae help them hear and help them taste and help them touch and help them" If you want some more ideas I made a free close reading pack for this book! We used construction paper and ...

I've read a lot of great posts from bloggers doing a book study on Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites. This is a great book.  Marcia Tate actually came to our district for staff development day a few years back.  I truly believe this was one of the best staff development days ever!  She was very inspiring! I personally do not believe in frequent use of worksheets in the classroom.  They do have their place, but they need to be chosen very carefully.  There are a lot of great teachers who effectively use worksheets in their classroom.  I just personally believe that there are more effective, engaging ways to teach and practice skills.  I do not have a perfect solution, but I do think I have a pretty good system.   Today I want to talk about how I teach phonics, with few to no worksheets. At this point in the year, I spend between 15 and 25 minutes teaching phonics each day.   I use a lot of Heidi Songs.  We do a lot of pract...

Happy Sunday! I don't know if I'm getting old or what, but it seems to take me forever to get things done.  It's pretty last minute, but I've finally finished my Lucky Leprechaun Math Station Tubs ! I know....it super late.  But, they are half price! Thanks for checking them out! Pin It

Do you have this book?    We've been learning about teeth. While I mostly wanted the kids to learn about human teeth, this book was a great way to end our week!  First we read the book.  We talked about which teeth we would most like to have and we made an anchor chart (on the whiteboard) with the animal names and a quick picture of the teeth.  Next is was time to write.  This kind of writing was pretty hard for my kids.  They are used to only getting blank paper.  They had a hard time not writing every word.  I think it was a great lesson though.  It really helped them to focus on the words that were already on the paper.    After we wrote about our animal teeth, we made our portraits with our chosen animal teeth.    To make the portraits I just cut some multicultural paper in half.  Then we trimmed the corners until we turned them into ovals for our faces.  I gave them black rectangles for ...