February Theory in Practice Connections

February has definitely been such an eye opener for me! I've learned so much about myself and my kids in this short but sweet month (the snow days didn't help much with shortening the month even more lol) All in all, I must say this was a big month for WRITING! I want my students to engage more with pleasure writing so I allowed for them for them to have ample opportunities to write whenever they want and for whatever reason. I really wanted my students to have journals so that I could make free writing easily accessible for them, however, of course my school doesn't have the funds to provide for such a resource (yes this is sarcasm) But despite that, I had to get creative so I made notebooks for my kids using construction paper and by placing writing tablet paper on the inside. I also put my students' names and pictures on the front of them to add its own personalized flare. Students have started off by recording things they learned about in the stories we had been reading:

These writing engagements have been really remarkable to watch and are perfect ways to assess students to see for one, if they were actually interested in the story (because they want to write about it) and for two, whether or not they understood the objective that was at hand.

The Strategies that Work text has been working wonders for me so far and I'm so excited to try out and fail, succeed, and experiment with many more strategies. The ones that were really fun was my first attempts with the List/Group/Label strategy and also the Turn & Talks. At first my kids were really confused as to how to turn and talk to their neighbors but now they seem to really like it and it gives them an opportunity to get those talkative jitters out. 

This month we really talked a lot about Famous African Americans which I thought may have been a difficult concept for my students to grasp but they were so interested and engaged. They didn't know that they, too, could grow up to invent something or be famous for an awesome reason. My goal in the future is to not only talk to them about Famous African Americans during February, but make it an ongoing discussion throughout the year. 

I noticed that a lot of my lows this month were  in mathematical instruction. I'm really excited about diving deep in the Van de Walle text and finding more innovative ways to really effective instruct my students and create an excitement about math for them. 

I also really benefited from reading Conscious Discipline this month and addressing my idea of Positive Intent and what Choices mean in my classroom. In reading these chapters, I found out about a lot of great new ideas that I plan to really try to implement in my classroom to make it a better place for both my students and myself. I'm nervous about entering March mainly because I feel like it's grind time and it's so many things I still haven't covered yet that they need to know before they go to Kindergarten. I feel so much pressure on myself especially for some of my students who are still falling behind a little bit. However, I plan to make the best of this month and learn all I can about my students and ask them about the personal goals that they have for themselves and what they want to learn and try my best to meet those needs so if I am not able to do as much as I wanted to, above all else, I was able to do something that matters to my kids! :-)