Routines & Dreambox

My own personal goal is to have a blog up once a week - I've been slacking!  Since last year I didn't take many pictures of my class, I keep having to remind myself to take pictures of our activities for all you lovely people to see!  We have been moving and cruising along in 103 and are heading into our 5th week of school already.  Holy cow!  I'm loving my kiddies and their personalities.  They are hard working and so caring - however, this week we have been REALLY working on our chattiness and tattling.  We are planning to read the book "Don't Squeal Unless it's a Big Deal!" with the counselor this week to hopefully bring the tattling to a minimum.  Any teachers out there agreeing with me?  Our talking has been great during partner work while we focus, but my kids are turning into such good friends that they just want to talk all day long.  We've had to refocus on being "First Grade Fast" so that we can get everything awesome done in the day.  I think it's a problem for every first grade teacher - or any teacher for that matter so I'm aware it's just going to take time. :)

This week we got really good at "Read to Someone" in our Daily 5 literacy time.  We are up to 15 minutes of work on writing,  and our read to self time is SHOOTING out of control.  If I let them, they would do read to self our whole literacy block. Guided reading groups are up and moving in our room so 20 minutes is spectacular!  We've been working on reading to someone by sharing a book together,and I also introduced reading to someone where you sit by a friend, but read your own book and talk to each other about our reading strategy for the week.  This week, it was all about characters and setting. Setting was pretty easy for them, but describing characters is proving to be more of a challenge - we'll spend another week on it really dig into character traits and describing words. If anyone has specific resources they would recommend send them my way!
Here's a few pictures of my kiddies reading:

They are so cute together.  I just love watching them being engaged in each other's books.

In math, we've been focusing on comparing groups of numbers.  Our math curriculum does a lot of focus on games to teach concepts - my kids LOVE math workshop time and working with others.  Sometimes our days can get a little out of control so we have had to do a lot of stop and go, stop and go, the last few weeks to get our math workshop time the way I want it as a teacher.  The game they were playing required them to compare 2 numbers and decide which 2 were bigger. They busted out their math toolkits and built the numbers with cubes to help. Some of them even began writing number sentences all on their own.  They are so smart! :)

One of the things our district has put into place is "Dreambox Learning".  It's a online math program - kind of like a game that helps address "gaps" in our students math curriculum.  My kids adore it.  They think it's the coolest game and often ask to play it as a reward.  It lets me see their progress and identify needs so I can pull them into small groups for common core skills.  If there is something my kids need to work on, the site has them play games to work on it and then I can continue to pull small groups.  This also allows my gifted kids to get harder math and challenging problems to help them grow.  As a teacher, I love it.  And, it's a plus my students like it too!

One last day of my weekend before another week of learning.  Weekends always go by so fast.  In the summer I never noticed because I was in a permanent state of "weekend". But now I'm like what? It's 1:00 on a Sunday? I need to start getting ready for Monday! Eww.
So, in my last hours of weekend I'm watching some football (Go Broncos!) with some great friends, my adorable goddaughter, and my sweet sister.  Here's to eating and not counting calories! :)

Hope your weekend and week were as good as mine!