August 2009 - Posts
I never really thought the Merrie Melodies cartoons I watched as a child would be relevant to my teaching, but I was wrong. I looked up my all time favorite cartoon the other day just to see if I could find it and there it was on YouTube! I watched it
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I'm really interested in hearing what all of you do during Meet the Teacher. Do you just meet and greet or what? I usually hand out business cards with the school information, my e-mail address and extension and find out how the student will be going
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Building a strong team feeling with your class is really important. When students feel valued by their classmates, everything seems to go much better and there are less behavior issues. I start out the year with several team building activities. One of
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Getting graded papers, school notices, forms that need to be returned, etc. passed out to my 3rd grade students can be a nightmare, but organization can really help. I use a "post office" and a folder to help with this task. I have a large mailbox that
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I work every year to help my class become supportive of each other and take responsibility for their behavior. One of the ways I do this is to have the kids work with Kindness Coins . These little plastic coins that I bought from Oriental Trading have
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I'm sorry, but WHAT!? It seems to me "merit pay" or getting paid for your students' state test scores means that people think teachers will work harder if you pay them more money. How insulting! Do members of the public and state education boards actually
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Is there a limit to what a child can achieve, even if his/her teacher has used the best first teaching strategies and provided all the support opportunities possible? According to the article below from the Wall Street Journal there is a limit to what
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NOT!! (as all teachers already know). However, while making my bed the other day, I started thinking about what I considered to be "precious" to me. Of course, my family, including 2 beautiful puppies (see extremely cute pictures below...see, I told you
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I love to take "things" and make them into something else. I love to take items that would usually get thrown away and repurpose them into some sort of functional or craft project. What I really love is when I can do this with my students! They are always
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I take a lot of time to teach my 3rd grade students about using the library and the wide variety of types of books that are available. We always have a reading activity that asks them to read a book from all of the different sections of the library. I
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Each morning, I greet the kids at the entrance to our room (I say entrance because we don't actually have any doors) with a hug (if they want one, and most of them do) and a "Good morning!". Then, when the kids enter the room they have a morning message
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Ok, I admit that previously I was a "lurker". No, not the dark alley or behind the bush kind, the blogger kind. In my 23 Things training, they taught us about "lurkers". Blogging "lurkers" are people who read post after post, but don't leave any comments.
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