Saturday 14 May 2011

This week...

This week, after reading Deb Weigel's blog, I was inspired and challenged my class to move from Class to Team to Winners to Champions just as Chris Biffle suggested during the live broadcast last Saturday.   I wrote all four words on the chalk board and I put a magnet beside Class.  When everyone was very focused and gave me their full attention immediately I moved the magnet down to Team, etc.  It worked really well to help and focus my class.  For the first time I felt like I had everyone's complete attention - before there was always a few stragglers who were off in their own world!!  It was so nice to see them really engaged quickly!  We never did make it to Champions but we did make it to Winners a few times.  I want to make it last as long as possible:)  Thank you Chris Biffle for the GREAT idea!!!

Also, we have been focusing on speaking and writing in complete sentences for the past two weeks.  The results are starting to make an appearance.  I had three students write amazing stories this week during Work on Writing time.  The sentences were not run-ons and for the most part started with upper case letters and ended with punctuation!!!  OH YEAH!

Today my class hosted Muffins with Mom as a thank you tea party.  It was so wonderful having parents in and being able to get the kids attention so easily.  I had the kids teach their parents about adjectives and they had to use an example popper sentence to describe their moms!  It was so cute!

One last thing - one of my students who has really shined in the last few months wanted to be in charge of the scoreboard.  I let him and he did an awesome job for me during each lesson!

P.S.  For smilies we are saying "Sweet!" and for frownies we are saying "Oh rats!!"


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