I realize that I have not updated this blog since the beginning of October..and I wish I had a good excuse.. But I don't! It's really just finding time, energy and ambition to do anything aside from make dinner, take the dogs out, work on lesson plans, laundry and cleaning at the end of the night!!
Did I mention that we only have 18 more school days till our FIRST break of the school year! Currently we have had ONE Wednesday off ( for St Kitts Independence Day) and ONE Monday off for Mid-Semester break... Other than that, its been 11 - 5 day weeks from 7:30 - 3:15 every day! I am so excited for 3 1/2 weeks off with my hubs and dogs!! And yes, Thanksgiving is Thursday of this week, and YES we WILL be at school! We have a huge Thanksgiving lunch at the school, but its STILL a normal day!
The school year is going by so quickly, and I am quite impressed with how well my kiddos are doing! They have picked up and dove into the Daily 5 so well and I LOVE the way it works and how to an outsider it may look like my kids are just all sitting around the room on the floor doing whatever they want, but they are all working and learning and doing so well! Due to my shorter amount of time, I am running 2 lessons/2 rotations one day and 3 lessons/3 rotations the next day. This is giving the students a much more thorough work time and it gives me more time to work with each group! SO glad I decided to give it a try! Wish I had more than just one year here to try it out, I have learned things I would do differently and so much I would do the same!
Our BiG focus for reading/writing/Science/S.S has been Dinosaurs over the past month - month in a half. We have read
The Enormous Egg, written some fiction stories, such as 'If I had a pet dinosaur', have done a variety of reading of fiction and non-fiction dinosaur books and are working hard on a dinosaur research project now! I have a HUGE document of all the things we have done that I am working on finishing out and will be sure to share it when I am done! We are hoping to be done and have a big Dinosaur Museum for the kids to share all their hard work! Since we live on a small island in the middle of the ocean, we were not able to visit a dinosaur museum, so we watched a variety of videos and utilized the anatomy museum on our vet school campus to look at other skeletons of dogs/cats/horses/donkeys/cows and discussed how they would be similar and different to dinosaurs! The kids loved it!
We also had Halloween over this long period of time since I last blogged. On Halloween students get to dress up and we go trick-or-treating to every semesters (7 of them) classes on campus. The kids get S O M U C H candy!! But it sure is fun. This year one of my creative students made her own centipede costume (due to living in a house on the island where I killed around 80 centipedes in 4 weeks, I HATE centipedes) and it was SO COOL!!
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| These are the SMALL portion of the centipedes we killed at our cCentipede house as we called it! |
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| The FABULOUS centipede costume! |
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And random - their cute ACORN acrostic poem and design!
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I am trying really hard to get a good understanding of the Everyday Math Program and effectively teach it to 1st and 2nd grade simultaneously, and am finding it so difficult! Does anyone else out there use the program and have any great ideas for teaching it to a multi-age classroom?!?!
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone has a great holiday off with family and friends (I'll be thinking of you while I work all day!)
