Today I decided to dive in to one of the "projects" I put off until summer. A few members of my team got on board with me this year and decided to shake up our science curriculum a bit and make it more hands on and inquiry based versus reading based as it was last year. We divided up the strands among us. Today I picked apart the sound and light standard for third grade. We already had some good things in place from resources other staff put together so I took those and built on them.
While I was looking for resources to use and ideas for the unit I came across this little gem of a website www.scimathmn.org/stemtc/ . It has all the Minnesota math and science standards broken down, sample vocabulary lists, and resources.
Some other projects I worked on this summer have been:
1. Organize my Words Their Way teacher binder. Last year I worked on organizing my testing lists for my lower and on level spellers who work mostly out of the Within Words spelling pattern book. For this coming year I wanted the same type of lists for my higher Syllable and Affixes spelling group. I pulled out my sorts, put on a TV series I've been watching (Dexter-I know it's creepy but I like thrillers!) and got it done in a few short hours.
2. Level my chapter books. I've gone back and forth with this decision for two years now. I want my students to be able to find some good fit books on their own for their book box for Daily 5. I ran into the problem last year though of a few of my kiddos choosing books that were way out of their independent range. Of course I conferenced with them about their book choices and tried to steer them to books closer to their level in the same genre but it kept happening. Now I must confess I have not read most of the chapter books that are in my classroom library. There are so many and I just don't have the time to do that. I do have a good idea what most of them are about though. So this summer I decided to help myself and the kiddos who struggle to find a book at their level by leveling my chapter books. We will see how it works this year!
3. Print out my reading brag tag incentives. I started these last year and my students LOVED them. Parents of children who did not like to read outside of school were commenting on how much their child was reading at home and loving it just so they could "level up". I use these editable tags from TPT. I will try to post more about how I use them and how it works once I get my bulletin board up.
I am anxiously awaiting the go ahead from administration to get back in my classroom to start setting up. Once that happens hopefully I will have more to write about. When do you start back to school? What big projects -if any - do you work on over the summer? Leave a comment and let me know!
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