Learning Our Routines

We've now completed 3 full days of school!  Even though we haven't really been here long, we've had enough time to learn and practice some new classroom routines.  On Friday we discussed most of them and then yesterday we began actually practicing them.  

During our Morning Routine, two students do our calendar routine for the day.  This routine is done on the Smartboard, and we take it up as a whole class after lunch.  Every other student is responsible for doing their daily Math Journal work.  Each day there is an activity that needs to be glued into their journal and completed.  Once everyone has had a chance to work independently, we take up our Math Journal question together.

Today we talked a lot about how reading and literacy activities would be done in our classroom.  The first thing we discussed was how do we know when a book is a "Good Fit Book".  We came up with three things to help us:

1) We find the book interesting

2) We can read most of the words

3) We can understand what we read

Using this as a basis for book choice, we began the process of looking through our classroom library and choosing books for our personal book bins.  Each student could choose five books for their bin, three of which had to be good fit books.  We later came up with an additional rule, no more than two chapter books at a time.  After we found our books, we had a chance to enjoy reading them.

We also practiced our independent jobs during our literacy time.  While Mrs. Deyoe is reading with students, the class will be working on improving their reading as well.  Students may choose to read independently, read with a buddy, or listen and follow along to a story at the listening center.  Once our iPads are up and running, students will have a couple of technology choices to choose from as well.

 We also spent some time today discussing what a great classmate is.  Together we made an anchor chart for our classroom detailing what a great classmate is, does, says, and is not.