Well it's finally October and I'm happy to say that this year is going pretty good so far. With the added time I'm spending at school with co-coaching volleyball this year, I feel like I have to balance my schedule. Also, with our Indiana Teacher Evaluation - RISE evaluation, I'm becoming more and more stressed with SLOs and observations. One way I do de-stress is by working with technology. I'm becoming more and more comfortable with creating my own interactive board (mimio) lessons and other lessons to go along with reading, writing, math, science, and social studies. My favorite thing is creating lessons for students to "check-in" in the morning. So far I've made a generic one with pencils, pumpkin-themed one, and a beach ball one. I will be making many many more! My next favorite thing is finding free resources online! I love looking at pinterest, teacherspayteachers, and mimioconnect.com.
One of the big accomplishments, so far, of this year, is our AMAZING collaboration with our Kindergarten team to create an "intervention time", or like we call it, "success time", where we have arranged groups based off of what each individual student needs - uppercase letters, lowercase letters, sounds, sight words, and (as in our case) readers that are already working in guided reading groups. Last year, we had this intervention time, but, we hadn't started it until November and we only were able to meet 3 days a week. This year we started about 2 weeks ago (and have already noticed HUGE growth with our students), we are able to meet all 5 days, AND we have more instructional assistants to work with our groups!
Our school district is pushing PLC (Professional Learning Communities ) and it is making a big difference to take ownership of ALL of our students together and work as an entire school team to have successful learning on all levels!
Something else we are doing as a district is pushing our students towards their dreams and showing how our students are enriching the lives of others. Now, on a kindergarten level you might say that's not realistic because at this young of an age students either have dreams like "becoming a superstar" and "becoming a princess", or their dreams are constantly changing; but when we talk to students about their dreams - we can show them why school and learning is so important to their future. As a district-wide Kindergarten team, we decided to display, in the classroom, pictures of students with their dreams written out - so that students may see what they are working for. As for enriching the lives of others - in my classroom, we are constantly talking about how we can be "bucket-fillers" (from the book, "Have you Filled a Bucket Today?" )
That's all for now! Keep checking for future updates from my Killer Whale Kindergarten Class!
