Summer, school planning, and babies!

I feel like so much has happened in the last few months, none of which involved me blogging. Oh well! That's life. Now that summer break is officially here and I can settle into the groove of being at home and feeling organized I'll be back on her throughout the summer months with some revisions and new ideas to kick off the next year.

I always try to limit my school work over the summer, but I'm admittedly a little too type A for that. Once I see a great idea I have a hard time not following through with it until it's finished. My current project is making Morning Work for my students. Our daily schedule is changing this coming year and we are going from Homeroom that went from 8:10-8:40 to one that is going from 8:10-8:30. Those 10 fewer minutes really will make a difference in what I can do.

So here's my BIG idea for solving that problem, and dealing with that hectic homeroom time of day. Morning Work! It'll be great structure for the kiddos to know what to expect each day, plus I think some of these activities are pretty darn fun :) Basic template will be:

Math Monday
Writing Tuesday
Reading Wednesday
Science Thursday
Social Studies Friday

Work in progress but here are a few screenshots of what I'm working through. I'm using a lot of resources I already have, or ones gathered from Teachers Pay Teachers (love them!).

Example writing activity

Example reading activity

Example science activity

Example social studies activity

Example math activity

As I said, work in progress but I'm making myself a big binder with black lines so I can just run and copy them each week. The other main reason I'm working on this is because I want to have a structured activity for when I have to leave for maternity leave this winter. That's right folks, baby on the way! I'm due early December assuming all goes well. Another reason not to have blogged the end of the year, that first trimester nearly did me in. Thankfully I had an awesome intern who took over basically everything for me. I'm looking forward to getting the year organized early so I can enjoy the first few months with my students before leaving.

I'll be back soon with more info on Morning Work as well as how our new math planning is going. Hope you get to sit in the sun and relax today. Enjoy it, you earned it!

Meet My Class

What a first week! There were highs, there were lows, there were laughs, and a few tears, but we survived! The first week is generally the only week that I consistently assign morning work for my students to do. Once we get into our routine they like the extra time to get organized or go to the library instead of worrying with work to do. The first week it gives them something to do that is easy but keeps them from wandering. All of our morning work this week was meant so that my intern and I could get to know the students better. One of them is an All About Me questionnaire.

I always struggle with how to deal with the papers. They spend time wanting to share so I feel obligated to do something meaningful. Sometimes it is a nice message back about something they said that I connected to. Other times, like their Gazette pages, I'll put them together into a book so that they can read about each other during their free time. For the All About Me questions I decided to showcase our class as a whole. I looked at their responses and put them into a word cloud that I'll hang above their lockers. I chose to use abcya (http://www.abcya.com/word_clouds.htm) for this activity.

So, without further ado...meet my class!

Our favorite animals

Our favorite books

Our favorite candy

Our favorite food (apparently I need to feed them tacos!)

Our favorite hobbies

Our favorite season...yep, they LOVE summer!

Our favorite sports teams...(trying to ignore the OSU response, sorry, PSU fan here!)

Our favorite stores

Our favorite subjects

Our favorite school supply

I hope you enjoyed meeting my class! I already learned so much about them. And to end the week we played a great game. If you are trying to find activities for middle school kids that don't take long this is a good one. It's called Aka Baka. Happy Labor Day weekend everyone. Relax and enjoy..and read a good book.