Hi teacher friends! You may remember last year when I posted my weekly reflections with my #feetupfriday posts. I thought I’d try and start sharing these in a weekly blog series. I highly recommend writing your own weekly reflections at the end of each week. It really helps to be thoughtful in planning for the upcoming weeks and seeing what works and what doesn’t. I usually break my reflections into three categories:
What worked:
What didn’t worked:
What could be better:
- Citing evidence! We are getting so much better at writing constructed responses and correctly using evidence terms. We read an informational text about skyscrapers and practiced citing evidence. Then we added a little artwork to the assignment. It’s nice to mix in some fun when the work is challenging! Didn’t my kids do amazing?!
- I am feeling so much better about vocabulary instruction after this week. First, we took the formal definitions of our vocabulary words and wrote student friendly definitions:
We also did an activity from my favorite PD vocabulary book, Word Nerds, called Word Colors.
Word Colors will forever be one of my most favorite activities for vocabulary. I discovered this brilliant idea from the book, Word Nerds. Basically the kids determine a color for each vocabulary word and then justify why they associate that particular color with each word. The explanations are so creative! This is such a great higher order thinking activity. Love it! Have y’all read Word Nerds? If not, I highly highly recommend! One of my all time favorite PD books!
- I am still majorly struggling with independent reading. All of the things that I felt made independent reading time so special aren’t socially distanced approved. No buddy reading. No reading in comfy spots around the room. No helping friends find books. It’s just students sitting in their seats reading a book. I’ve tried to make it special by turning off the lights and doing Fireplace Reading or Rain Reading or Harry Potter reading, but something is missing. I’d love some suggestions on what you’re doing to make independent reading more engaging and creative.
- Picture books. Oh boy, am I struggling with sharing picture books. I am making it my goal next week to try and come up with a solution to this problem. For the first three weeks of school, I didn’t have a projector so I couldn’t share picture books by displaying them on the board. Now that they came and hooked the projector up, I’m having trouble getting the document camera to connect. I tried just standing at the front of the class and reading the book, but they can’t see the pictures very well and we all know how much of the story is expressed through the images. If I walk around with the book, the students have trouble hearing me with my mask. I don’t know. I’m struggling in this area. Any ideas? How are y’all sharing picture books right now?
- Organizing the daily lessons! I used to do a Daily Agenda like this:
Not only did it help keep me on track, but the kids could also see what all we had to accomplish each day. I want to start doing this again.
- Transitioning from one activity to the next. I still feel like my daily lessons are choppy and need to flow better. Time is also a factor! We are taking way too long to go from one thing to the next. I started scoreboard (part of Whole Brain Teaching) a couple of weeks ago, so I may start awarding points or taking them away if they can transition in under a certain time.
- Supplies! We started highlighting our constructed responses this week and when I gave out highlights I realized that I needed to come up with a better way to do this so that each student has their own set of three highlights instead of storing them all in one bucket and then passing them around and having to sanitize after each class. Individual bags would be SO much easier!
Okay, so those are my thoughts from the week. What worked for you? What didn’t? I love to reflect back on the week and make a thoughtful plan for going forward! 🙂
