Wednesday, September 5, 2012

One Tired Teacher!

Week 3 and I am beat!! How are you all managing? I have a great group of students this year! But.... I feel like I am starting to sink! We have so many new changes this year! The biggest change this year is that we have to give actual number grades for Science and Social Studies this year, which is something that I did not even have on my schedule last year. We taught some science and social studies along with our reading stories but that was about it. Now we are having to add in a time for teaching science and social studies. With that, I have not even started center rotations. I feel like I am falling behind. Here is an example of my class schedule:
I haven't done reading center rotations yet so I am not sure if that will be enough time. But I do know that there is no time for math centers in this schedule which is something I really wanted to do better at this year. What do you think? What do your schedules look like? Do you teach Science and Social Studies? If so, how do you fit it all in????

On a side note, I would like to share some of the things we have been doing in class. At the beginning of the year, we read No David! and did a whole group activity in which we listed what makes a good student. We then turned this into an anchor chart that I will use all year. We also did a David craftivity and wrote our school rules. This was a freebie on TPT and I am not sure who to give credit for it, but it was wonderful!!
 My favorite was don't be gross and distracting lol!





This week, we read Exploring Space with an Astronaut. During this story, we learn about the planets and the sun and moon. It is a really fun week! One activity we did, was to put the planets in order by distance from the sun on black bulletin board paper. The fun part comes when I tell the students to bring a pencil and their project to the carpet. once they get to the carpet, I tell them to start poking holes all over their paper. The students have no idea why they are doing this, but they have tons of fun stabbing their papers with their pencils. It literally sounded like a hail storm in my classroom! Then, when all of the students were gone, this is what I did.....




See the stars???? The kids were so excited to come back in from related arts and see these hanging from the ceiling! This is a very temporary project due to fire Marshall regulations but they are so cute and the students love seeing the stars and their work hanging from the ceiling. We use these as a reference all week when we are working with planets. Anytime the students ask me a question, I say look up :)

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jodi,

    Cute activity. That is a tough schedule! My co teachers and I teach Science and Social Studies on a rotating basis. We also each have taken a subject, so I teach Science to all 2nd grade and she teaches Social Studies. It works really well for us. But if you can't do that can you rotate Social Studies and Science or does it need to be everyday? Science is so hands on, so it's hard to fit in little windows. Good luck this year!! I teach 2nd too. :)

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