Well Thanksgiving & Black Friday are officially over and it's on to planning for Christmas! Christmas is by far my favorite time of year from decorating your house with a tree in every room, buying presents for people, to decorating your classroom for your little ones; how could you not enjoy it!
Every year my second grade team and I do themed weeks the whole month of December for our reading classes so I try to continue these themes throughout my math groups since we are ability grouped! If you have not checked out Allyson Sutton's (goingstronginsecond) creativity on TPT you need too! She is amazing! My team and I use her Polar Express and Grinch units every year!
Here is Allyson's Polar Express & Grinch units and if you click on them, it will take you to her store! Our main standard this quarter is compare and contrast so we always watch the movie the first day and then talk about the different elements from the movie the next day. Once the students have a good understanding of the movie I then introduce the book and we talk about the story elements and see which aspects we can compare and contrast. Her unit has tons of activities from math to reading!!
I incorporate centers into my daily math routine and the ones in this unit are perfect and easiest enough the students can operate on their own!!
Another person I absolutely love is Alisha from Missing Tooth Grins! Her math journals have completely changed the way I teach math. I found her math journals last year during the middle of the year and I couldn't imagine my math block without them! I teach our lower block of math and some days are more challenging than others. Alisha's math journals spiral all of the standards which is an awesome review for my students all year long! Her journals are a constant in my weekly center rotation. I very rarely use our resources from Envision because there isn't enough repetition for my students. If you are looking to step outside the box from your math series click the pictures below! I promise you'll love them! The other great thing about these journals is she has them for First and Second Grade!
I'm extremely excited to begin this blogging adventure as Styling and Profiling in 2nd! This is my third year teaching 2nd grade and I have to say I'm still changing stuff daily! One of my favorite things I have implemented in my classroom is the HW Club! During my first year and half of my second year of teaching, I was noticing that the students weren't bringing back their homework. As I could have sent them to the HW table to complete it, I didn't really like doing that because I usually reviewed their homework in class, so they weren't being held accountable.
I was going over my students homework one day and it was like a light bulb went off! I had an empty bulletin board just staring me in the face, so I decided to make the HW Club right then! I teach both math and reading so I knew I needed to include both classes. I found two sets of reward sticker charts, added the students names, and explained the rules right then!
Every time the students return their homework, they receive a sticker and add it to their homework chart. This way the students are held accountable for returning their homework or not returning their homework. Once their sticker chart is full they receive a homework pass for One Night of NO Homework and a new sticker chart!
There has been a huge success rate with the return of their homework! The students get excited to put their sticker on their charts and get really disappointed when they don't receive a sticker.
Here is a picture of my current board right now!! You can see that some students have already received their 2nd chart!
