What Are You Teaching: January 3

Happy New Year! It's time to head back to school after a relaxing two weeks of blissful vacation. I've been busy planning though! Every new year I go back to school with a huge list of goals for my class, my personal organization, and this usually involves implementing new things in the classroom. This year is no different!

Here is a little run down: 

Morning Work-We are starting on Unit 4 of our morning work and well into writing sentences, learning about the naming and the action parts of sentences and starting to write our sight words in alphabetical order. Handwriting has made a huge improvement from the beginning of the year. Take a look HERE to see this unit. 

Centers- I have really been working on center organization this year because for some reason this year we really have a hard time with choice. I have narrowed down choices for now to get us focused. This week we will have a stamping center (stamping sight words), cut and glue sentences, writing station and the listening station. 4 days....4 choices....easy peasy. My stations come from Rooster's Off to See the World centers.  

Reading- I follow a reading program but do it through Daily5 and CAFE. I spend a day a week on each portion of the CAFE model (comprehension, accuracy, fluency, expand vocab) and use the scope and sequence (and materials) from our basal. My small group materials will be from my Reading Intervention Made Easy sets and this week I am starting the CVC word set with most of my kiddos. It's an exciting time! 

Also in reading we will be using Heidi Songs to practice our sight words this week. If you would like to see how we do that I wrote a post about it HERE. 

Writing- We are working on goals this week and by the end of the week we will start a little peer editing too. I wrote about that HERE.

Math- This is the BIGGIE! We are piloting math programs this year and I will be starting Envision and teaching it for the next couple of weeks. It has been a little overwhelming to look at all the materials but all in all I think it looks promising. I know whenever this subject comes up in groups on FB there are a lot of opinions out there. That being said...I've giving this a chance. It's obviously not all up to me but I want to be able to give my honest opinion when the time comes.

Here is a little freebie I put together to go with what I am teaching from my pilot.  This is perfect for a little math center! Students use stamps to count up to each number. This is an fun and easy way for students to create representations for each number. 

I also made a new set of Math Work Mats to make sure that I am hitting all of the standards that I need to in the face of trying a new curriculum. Safety net! 

Thank you for stopping by today! Here's to a new year, new goals, and making lots of progress!