Classroom Tour and Behavior Management

Hey everyone!!  I've been sooooo busy getting my classroom ready and the last details on my wedding.  I wanted to be done with my room last week, but seriously, I don't know who I was kidding thinking I could get it done in two days!  I still have a little more final touches, but I wanted to give you all a tour.  Hope you all enjoy!  

I started with a "rustic" theme and ended with "rustic, chalkboard, colorful"ish room!  (Is that really anything at all?) I don't really have a theme, I suppose. Haha.  In the front of the room, I will be adding a small stage!  I got that idea from the amazing teachers at the Ron Clark Academy :). If you all haven't checked them out, you better!!  

I also added a new whole group behavior system this year.  This idea was adapted from Hope King...basically the teacher I want to be!!!  

The sign has locks pinned to it.  I was going to use real locks, but with the burlap, it was too difficult, so I found some crafting locks and pinned them to the burlap.  The kiddos will "unlock" these locks when they demonstrate positive behavior as a whole group. They can only unlock one a day and we keep track of their behavior using smileys and frownies.  (This is a Whole Brain teaching concept). When the kids are displaying positive and appropriate behavior, they get a smiley. When they are not, they get a frownie.  If they win in smileys at the end of the day, they unlock a lock.  When all 10 locks are unlocked, they earn a key.  When they earn 3 keys, they to "unlock their perk" or a little party.  The box has 4 different parties they can earn and we choose blindly so it's a surprise as to what they get.  Now, they can get locks put back on if they have more frownies at the end of day and nothing happens if it is a tie. 

Hope King did something a little different with hers...check hers out a elementaryshenanigans.com. I changed it a bit to fit my grade level and taste.  I can't wait to use it and get this year started!!  I hope you enjoyed my classroom...I'm pretty happy with it this year :) 

Happy New Year all!! 

Kelly

Opi-MINION Writing

So how many of you are in full back-to-school mode??  I have a conference tomorrow then I finally get into my classroom on Thursday.  My first day is the 13th and my kiddos start the 17th.  This summer just FLEW by!  I'm feeling really inspired though to start a new year!

I have been working on spicing up some of the lessons this summer.  I'm trying to push myself to think out of the box a little more and step out of my comfort zone.  Y'all, it is not easy for me!!!!!  Hopefully, you find some of my new ideas fun and helpful :)

  I found this book at Walmart a couple of weeks ago and thought, "What kid doesn't love Minions?"

 

With the new movie that came out this summer, I know my kids will be buzzing about it so I knew I had to create a lesson.  This book lends itself PERFECTLY to opinion or persuasive writing!  The end just leaves the reader wondering who the Minions will find for a despicable master.  Seriously...what kid would not be excited?

After reading the book to the class, I'd have my kids think about despicable (of course go over this word) villains they know.  This could be ANYTHING that would really qualify as an evil character from a movie, a book, TV show, aggressive animal etc.  As long as they can come up with three reasons and explain them.  This is their opinion after all ; )

I created this graphic organizer to aide in the process since I created this for 2nd graders, they definitely need a place to organize their thoughts.

When I teach about the pre-writing process, I tell them that they are just writing down a few words so they know what they want to say on their rough draft.  I often have the kids write lists as their pre-writing step as this is a time to just get down ideas.  I don't want them worried about spelling and perfect sentences at this point.  This is why I don't have a ton of space for writing...it's just quick thoughts!

After they go through the whole writing process and they have their final drafts, they will put together an actual Minion.  I mean, you can't write about Minions without creating one!!!  

The final draft becomes the Minion goggle.  This example is one I quickly put together just so you could get an idea of the final product.  You can add arms, legs and even a cover for the final draft with an eyeball.  I love the fun writing crafts and creating things to match their writing is important, but I would rather my students spend more time on quality writing than crafting.  So, I try to make the crafts fun for the kids, but quick!  

I created the mouth, final draft paper and the goggle strip which you can see here.

Some modification ideas would be that instead of the final draft just having lines for writing, you can modify this for Kindergarten and 1st by having space for a picture of their villain and a few lines for a one to two sentence opinion/persuasive statement.

I can't wait to use this writing this year!  I plan on reading the book to them in Minion goggles just to make it a little more interesting and special.  

You are free to use any of these resources and I promise that I'll make these posts a little more fancy as I go along.  There's a lot learn about blogging! PHEW!  

Have a fantastic start to your year!  Be on the look out for my classroom updates this week :)

Thanks for reading,

Kelly

Nifty Math Manipulatives

So, I planned on doing my math blog yesterday, but a nasty migraine thought otherwise :/.  I've never had them before until recently.  They are not fun!

Anyway, last year, my team and I went to a math conference with Jenni Winters who is "THE" math common core representative here in Illinois.  It actually was very beneficial and it allowed my team and I to get a much better understanding of where common care is headed.  Jenni gave us a lot of resources and this was one of them.

Since I teach a primary grade, understanding place value is HUGE!  And even that is an understatement! For manipulatives, I usually use base 10 blocks, which I think is pretty standard.  However, I didn't find that it suited everyone and sometimes students were ready to move on from these into something that was a little less obvious.  I started with these....

These are basic 1 inch foam square blocks.  I was fortunate that we had a ton donated to our school and I didn't have to buy any new ones or use the ones that I already had that I do use for other things. 

I separated each tile color and wrote 1 on all of the yellow, 10 on all of the green and 100 on all of the blue.  

These then can be used to build numbers and can be expanded out to show expanded form.  So here the number above would be 426 and in expanded form, it is 400 + 20 + 6.  This is just another way to represent place value rather than using base 10 blocks.  

I put them in containers that would be easy to store and easy for students to use when they need manipulatives.

I will also be making tiles with 1,000 since I will have students who will be ready to work with     numbers that high.  

Jenni Winters showed this using bingo chips or poker chips since they stack nicely.  I felt that anything that I could color coordinate and stack, would work nicely,  You can find chips already labeled with 1s, 10s, and 100s at most teaching stores like Lakeshore and School Specialty.

WELCOME!

Hey everyone!  Welcome to my new blog!!  My name is Kelly Warner...soon to be Ruth in 54 days...yes I'm counting :)  I currently am starting my 6th year teaching 2nd grade and love, love, LOVE everything about teaching.  I'm going to keep this short and sweet, but I really just wanted a way to share my ideas and passions with fellow teachers.  I learn so much through collaboration and reading blogs of other teachers and I figured that I'd love for others to learn from me as well.  I have a great blog post coming tomorrow about something fun I did with some extra math manipulatives I had this summer which was easy, cheap and will be an EXCELLENT resource for the kiddos.  Thank you all for checking me out and I look forward to sharing some ideas with you.