The Life of a First Grade Teacher

 As I look at this week, I am going to give it a 4. My students were still very talkative, however with the reward system that I implemented, when I reminded them, they got their selves together. I only had 2 students who did not reach the goal of 10 tickets. Hopefully, next week will be a better one for them. I had a new old student return on Tuesday. This student was in my class until January and my class and I were very excited to see him return. He has quickly settled back into the routine.  This week saw the end of our unit on compare and contrast of two characters. I gave the class a formal assessment today and from the ones that I have looked at so far, they did a great job with the Venn Diagram. I gave informal assessments in math and social studies through out the week. I was excited today during the math lesson, as several of my students who have been struggling with the concept of adding 2 digit and 1 digit numbers that carry over, finally started to really catch on...

I am going to give this week a 3.  Spring Fever has definitely hit and add to the fact that all my kiddos where together for the first time since before winter break it was a WEEK!  Very challenging to put it mildly. This challenge was felt all over the building even with veteran teachers. I am implementing a reward system for next week whereas each student gets 5 tickets and they must have 10 tickets by the end of the week (which is Thursday for us) in order to go to the prize box. I did this before the winter break and it really worked very well. Friday was a very productive day for me. I was able to get lesson plans completed and my room in order before the students return on Monday. I had a very fun Zoom meeting with my students Friday morning. We can not introduce new content and so I spend the first part of the time reviewing what we learned during the week. In math, the students learned about coins. After our review, I showed my students old coins from my son's coin col...

  This week was our district's spring break, so I do not have anything to blog about. I am already prepared for next week's return of students to in-person instruction for 4 days a week.

 I am going to give this week a 4 1/2. The week started out great and then Tuesday came. My whole schedule was off due to two visitor at separate times that morning. Wednesday was the last day I had my Cohort B students. I only had five students that day. We got through so much. I was able to work one on one with all students in literacy as well as math. Our system had a remote learning day on Thursday to allow  time for staff to get ready for the return of all students 4 days a week starting the Monday after Spring Break on April 12. That afternoon I received the great news that I along with all teachers/teacher candidates passed edTPA. Congratulations to everyone!! Today was an optional work day for staff. I opted to work because I wanted to make sure that my class room was ready for the return of students on April 12. My daughter came with me and she was a big help. She organized my class library, cleaned tables, set up Letterland and much, much more. I'm going to miss her ...