Trouble focusing...

Perhaps it's the beautiful weather we've been having, teaching summer school in the mornings for a few weeks, or other distractions that life brings, but I'm struggling to stay focused with what I plan to do with my kiddos this year.  

Last year I had guidance, or shall I say a laid out plan of what the other two 3rd grade teachers have been doing for several years.  I followed nearly everything that they did, or at least I tried to.  I know my students didn't accomplish everything, or was exposed to everything that the rest of the third grade was, but it wasn't for lack of effort on my part.  There was so much to learn about being an elementary school teacher compared to having been a middle school language arts teacher for several years.  I never had to do fluency checks,  DAZE, or have them practice multiplication facts like I did as a 3rd grade teacher.  I just started with a new novel, completed the activities I had planned to enhance their English language arts skills, then moved on to the new book when we were finished.

An important thing that's distracting me is how I plan to teach this year.  I've explored strategies such as Flipped Classroom, Whole Brain Teaching, using QR codes, and Student-Centered Classrooms (unless that's the same as Flipped Classroom, I'm still trying to figure that out.  I like some of the concepts of all of these strategies, but it's a bit overwhelming, especially as I'm trying to organize what I plan to use.  

As I mentioned before, I've been looking at beginning the year having my students investigate native and invasive species and use technology to share our data with the community as a science activity. But one of my challenges is how to guide my student so that the activity is directed by them (i.e. student-centered classroom).  

At the same time, I want to begin my social studies unit having them explore  communities and our government, beginning locally, moving on to county, state, and national.  If I plan to follow the student-centered structure, they need to develop the driving question. 

Science and social studies seem easy enough, and in language arts I'll be following a text.  As for math...the first few days, possibly the first week will be reviewing what they learned last year as 3rd graders.  This is where I won't be too lost, because I'm coming from having taught 3rd grade, but how do I use student-centered structure when dealing with math?

So much planning and organizing is involved, but I'm thankful that I love teaching and learning new strategies that I can use.  The ever-changing world of education will help keep me on my toes and hopefully keep me from becoming stagnant.  I might always feel that I'm never "there", meaning never finding that perfect teaching method, but I guess that's just the nature of the profession.

My major focus this summer has been organizing my room, now that I've moved to a new building in the district.  The major part of the organization is mostly complete, just the fine tuning needs to be done.  I've worked some on my bulletin boards, and prepared some photocopies for our morning warms-ups (which may not be following a Flipped Classroom structure).  

I created these math and language arts help boards last year because I lacked bulletin board space, so they were placed on the windowsills instead.  Plenty of Command Strips and masking tape is holding them up.

This area will be my small group station.  The board behind me is a magnetic chalk board that I might use to display information about our stations.  On my closet door is my "Classroom Jobs" poster where I'll place clothespins with my students' names on them.

This board will be the focus board for language arts, with the vocabulary words displayed where the polkadots are on the left.  The rest of the board will have our focus for our standards.

This is another magnetic chalkboard.  I was impatient and wasted some Command Strips to hang up the daily schedule and calendar, but I plan to stick colored fabric on it before it's finished.  On the right of the board is my classroom management chart.  I will have other clothespins with students' names on it to show where they are all at when it comes to their behavior.

I've allowed myself to go to my classroom a couple of afternoons a week while teaching summer school, but I'm forcing myself to stay home, at least for this next week, to focus on the curriculum and strategies I'm choosing to use.  

Until next post.....

Excited about science!

A few years back when I was teaching middle school language arts, I joined my science teacher friend at a 4-day workshop 6 hours south from my home.  Granted one of the motivators of taking the workshop was that it was an "vacation" with a friend away from home, near the ocean, free of charge, and I was getting paid a stipend from the organization giving the training after all was said and done.

Aside from the immediate and monetary benefits of attending the workshop, it was an opportunity to be trained in something science related, which appealed to me as a language arts teacher who loves science, and that uses technology.  It also is a way for my students to have an impact on their community and have a genuine purpose for their inquiry-based learning and exploring.

Now that I'm being relocated to another building in my district, I'm excited to get started.  I was so overwhelmed with my own learning last year, that I didn't get the opportunity to even consider implementing the unit in my class.   This school is located near a boat landing on a river, and has a wooded area near our playground.  These are perfect locations for my 4th graders and I to look for native and invasive species in both plants and aquatic animals.

The whole purpose of the unit is for students to identify species of plants, insects, or aquatic animals, by using species cards. They collect data, draw the species, use the species cards to determine if they have found or not found the species they were looking at, as well as include the coordinates of where the species was found.  All of this data is uploaded to the website called Vitalsignsme.org and is eventually verified whether it was found or not.  

It's a process, but after all is said and done, students have helped their community, both local and state, by identifying a species, and if it is an invasive species, then scientists in our state know where it is found and can monitored.  The unit can be kept as a small unit, or one that is on-going throughout the school year.  The thing is, in our area, we have snow for a large part of the school year, so we can't continue our investigations until the spring.

As for where it falls in the standards, it includes writing for an audience, student-driven investigations, use of technology, as well as collecting data and making graphs to represent data.  Depending on how in-depth the teacher wants to take the lessons, depends on how cross-curricular it becomes.

The training I received provided me with materials, such as cameras, GPS devices, contraptions for collecting aquatic plants and capturing aquatic animals.  The website itself provides tons of materials for teachers, citizen scientists, students, and anyone who wants to participate in any way.

I feel it's the perfect unit to begin the school year with, and one that can be my signature unit.  No one else in my new district knows about Vitalsignsme.org or how to perform the lessons.  Although it was originally designed for middle level to high school students, I can see how it can be easily adjusted for upper-level elementary grades, too.  You're welcome to check out the site.  I recently did an investigation for Cow's Parsnip, or Indian Celery, and I'm just waiting for someone to review my data and verify whether or not I've identified it properly.