Thanksgiving already?!?!

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!!   

These are the SMALL portion of the centipedes we killed at our cCentipede house as we called it!

The FABULOUS centipede costume!  

And random - their cute ACORN acrostic poem and design!

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!)

Time? . . .

As a (new to elementary, multi-age) teacher, I feel like I am constantly looking for more time in my day, my night, my weekends and my life!  As much as I plan to be productive and get certain things accomplished each night, it NEVER seems to happen and then I am bogged down and behind again!  I know, teachers say it gets easier...but by the time I'm ready for year 3 at this job, I will be leaving St. Kitts and starting over (who knows where!) again!

Aside from that, the school year is continuing to get great!  My kiddos are getting into the routine, and are quickly getting more and more giggly comfortable with each other in our small community!  The first three weeks are almost totally past, and I feel like we have done SO much, but SO little!  Getting our routines and procedures down, introducing Daily 5 and Math Centers and throwing in as many fun crafty projects as possible has taken all our time!

Thanks to Amy's Great Back to School Unit!

Again Thanks to Amy's Great Back To School Unit!

These adorable All About Me Books are from Lindsey at The Teacher Wife!

Another great activity from Amy at Step Into Second Grade!

In regards to my Daily 5 - I am SO happy with the way it is going and how *AMAZING* my kids are doing!  They are SO proud of themselves each day for building stamina and making their teacher proud!  I deemed them experts at Read to Self today as they hit a solid 17 minutes of stamina and know the Urgency, the I-Chart, the IPICK strategy like the back of their hands!  We are still working diligently on actually implementing the IPICK strategy properly each time we choose a book, but that will take time!  They completed Day 3 of Work on Writing (or WoW as we call it!) today and made it to 7 minutes of stamina, created a list of topics to write about and were excited to start, and sad to stop each time!  WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?!

Here are some photos of what we've done, maybe I'll find spots on my walls for all of them and can get a picture of them together!

A students Topic List today!

Our Class Topic List

Hard at work during WoW!

I will admit though, I do have a major slight fear of how it will work in our TiNy classroom when everyone is not doing the SAME thing!  Training and practice!

Last week on Friday, we have an Everyday Math Inservice and learned a great deal about implementing the program into our classrooms.  I am still really a bit hesitant about teaching Math in a center format with 3 groups all at different levels, but I am hoping it works out okay!  This week we have been practicing rotating...Yes, JUST ROTATING!  Understanding that when the timer goes off we -
1) Are Silent
2) Clean up
3) Push in chairs and stand silently behind them until told to rotate
4) Rotate quickly and quietly and get RIGHT to work!

We are doing to use the acronym DING (like a timer!)
D - Don't Talk!
I - Immediately clean-up your area
N - No moving until told to rotate
G - Go to your next center and get RIGHT to work!

I only have an hour Math Block (which is actually less by the time we get in from Snack/Recess, get started and then clean up to go out to lunch!) so we have a LOT to fit in!  Luckily, I do have a few blocks where I only have one grade in my room at a time and that will be a HUGE Math re-teach time!

On a happy note...Missoula Children's Theatre is here for the next week and will be teaching the students grade K - 8 the play/musical of Robin Hood and there will be a HUGE performance next week on Thursday.  It is probably one of the most amazing things to see 2 people come in and transform a school of young children into amazing performers in such a short time!  It causes lots of turmoil to our schedule but is such an amazing experience for the kids its totally worth it!

This past week, in all my spare time, I have tried to create a fun and engaging Phonics Program for my kids.  They got really bored with the one I used last year, so I pulled the sound and word pattern outline from that program, and created my own!  I have 5 weeks worth done so far and am pretty excited about it!  This is my first BIG teacherspayteachers created unit and my first big unit I have complied in this format!  It consists of 40 words per week that students can choose from, and also a big activity to support that sound and other optional word work activities.

Check it out here:

Well, I feel like I may have a cold coming on...UGH!...so it's off to sleep for me!  I hope everyone is having a great school year thus far!  

Daily 5

As the new school year approaches and I have been working hard on getting the CAFE and Daily 5 programs up and running for my classroom, I have been busily creating posters and such for these.  Here are some of the things I have created!  

*Please note - these are all ideas from The Cafe Book and The Daily 5 book.*

*Graphics and fonts courtesy of: 

Teaching In A Small Town

BaBa Puff

Kevin and Amanda

DJ Inkers

Scrappin' Doodles

KPM Doodles*