Saturday, May 28, 2011

Summer To Do List- Part 1

It has been FAR too long since I last blogged. But with 16 days left of school, I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. This has been a long year filled with many changes, but I have learned so much about myself and teaching. I thought I would take a second to reflect on the things I have realized over the past few weeks.


    • Attitude is everything! This couldn't be more true in the world of teaching. I learned this year that my attitude had a huge effect on the cadence of the day. I understand more then ever how important starting the day off with a positive, community building activity, such as a morning meeting, can be. I found some great tools for enhancing my morning meeting that I am definitly going to be looking into this summer. Up until now my only resource has been Roxann Kriete's 
       Morning Meeting Book, but recently I found this great website: Mrs. Bainbridge's Morning Meeting. She has sets of cards for Greetings and Activities that you can print, laminate and assemble on a ring for easy reference during your morning meeting. 

    •  I need to spend some time this summer researching classroom management. I redid my behavior chart at the beginning of this past year. It worked great, but I learned how important it is to be consistent with giving rewards/consequences. I need to come up with a more concrete system on how to handle the reward for getting on blue and purple and the consequence for getting on yellow or red. Also, I am considering sending home a behavior sheet in each child's folder each night. I am wondering if communicating a child's color each night will help make the color chart a more effective tool during the school day. Any thoughts? 


    •  This job has made me understand so much about myself and my beliefs. I am excited to continue to try new things in my classroom as well as read what other's are doing. I think this is an important part of being a newer teacher and I hope that someday I can look back on these first few years and see how far I have come!

    I am excited to do lots of reflecting and creating this summer.  I can't wait to really work on my blog and stay connected with fellow bloggers this summer! 16 days!!

    1 comment:

    Kim Balek said...

    In the past I have had my students fill in a chart each day at the end of the day in order to communicate with parents a small picture of their day. It might help, it might not help. The parents who are involved have told me its helpful. And for those that parents are involved it is helpful. I don't know what your inner city school is like and how much parent involvement you have. The less involvement you have the less helpful I have found it. If this is the case what's going to probably help you the most is your consistency with rewards/consequences and building a cohesive community in your classroom. If you decide to send home something daily what I have found to be helpful is to print out a monthly calendar and have students color in the day the color that they end the day on. For me this has been the easiest to manage. I could glance around the room to make sure noone was lying - trying to get away with coloring better than they did but yet didn't have too much extra work to do each day. BTW, what city are you in?