Flying Solo (and other adventures)

Hello everybody! Hope you've had a great week so far, I sure have! I got a great compliment yesterday that every morning I have a big smile on my face and am super cheerful. That was really nice to hear because I love the environment at my school and it felt good to hear that I help add to it! Snaps for loving where you work =]

Today was a big day for us- the 100th day of school! Can you BELIEVE it?! It was so cute, all the kinders and firsties dressed up as 100 year olds, so there were tiny old people all over the school today in their little bow ties and hair curlers. PRECIOUS!

Yesterday, though, was an big day for ME, as my mentor teacher had to call in with a migraine and I was flying solo! I've taught for half a day alone before and I've taught with a sub for a whole day, but this was my first full day all on my own. Oh baby. But let me tell you, it went so well!!

I had already planned a math lesson for the day so CHECK got that covered! We did a review of equivalent fractions and how to reduce. Then, we played Bingo! Each of the bingo cards had a fraction like 5/15 and then I called out the reduced fraction, like 1/3. You could have heard a pin drop in that room, the kids were focusing so hard. No complaints here ;)

I found it here

Then we did some expository writing to a prompt (a post on that later haha), some FCAT reading practice, some vocabulary, and some work on the computer. Just a basic day, but I was all alone. So weird!

In job-related news, I've been working on all my TFA: Memphis requirements lately. Some things were small, like sending in a picture, joining the social network stuff, listening in to a webinar, and taking some surveys. Yesterday, though, I spent the whole afternoon updating my resume and applying to KIPP: Memphis and TeachMemphis to find out where I'll actually be teaching next year! Basically, you apply now and then interview during Institute over the summer for your actual placement. I was really excited to see that they want us to apply to KIPP, though. I still remember watching a video in my first ProTeach class about the charter school and being in awe. The idea of being a teacher there is crazy to me! Here's a little snippet about the school:



Ok, be honest, did you cry? I'm not that emotional of a person (hah!) but the kids at the end saying "I'm going to college" just made me lose it. So that's what's been going on with me! Still lots of unknowns about next year, but isn't it kinda exciting not knowing what's gonna happen next??

Teacher Binder Revisited

Happy Thursday! We had Monday and Tuesday off this week and, ya know, I think EVERY week should start on a Wednesday- just a thought ;) This week I wanted to focus on organizing so get ready for an overload of pictures:

One of my most popular post is this one on my "ultimate teacher binder". Unfortunately, once I started my internship, I accumulated a LOT more papers and soon, my cute little binder ripped :( Instead of buying a new one, I decided over winter break to break up my one big binder into five small ones! You ready for this??

My first binder has three sections: Important Info, Weekly/Monthly Lesson Plans, and Example Lesson Plans. This is where I keep all our schedules, school maps, phone numbers, etc. I created my own weekly lesson planner, then, I used the monthly lesson calendar I found at KindergartenWorks for a big picture. I also keep all my observed lesson plans in this binder. This way, if I need to plan, I only need to bring home one binder!

You may also notice I changed the cover- different school, different binder cover!

My weekly template

Monthly planner. I go back and highlight everything at the end of the week.
Everything gets color coded!

The next binder I made is Student Info, Course Info, and Meeting Notes. This is where I keep all my records on the kids (testing, scores, growth charts), all my course info for grad school, and the meeting note template found on the Ladybug Teacher Files blog. I bring this one to meetings and conferences instead of having to bring all of my stuff.

Pretty self-explanatory

The next binder I made is my Standards and Assessments binder. Here, I have the Read Naturally assessments for 4th grade, the spelling lists for the year, the 4th Grade FCAT Specifications for language arts and math (it's all here if you want to print it out), and the 4th Grade Common Core checklist (we bought it here). This is also mainly a reference binder, so I can leave it at school if I don't need it. Score!

This is what we bought on TPT

This is an "I Can" checklist for all the standards

Finally, I have a binder of lesson plans that my mentor teacher gives me. Basically, every time we have an extra copy of something, I put it in that binder. Never hurts to have some extra stuff stored up! Especially because my mentor teacher is fabulously innovative so these are not your run-of-the-mill worksheets, but fabulous units and lessons!

Every subject has a tab!

Ok, so that's it! Hopefully all this info helps if you're trying to get organized. The pictures are also kinda fun if you just like looking at other people's organization ;) And where do I put all these binders?? In my new teacher cart I got for Christmas! Thanks daddy :) Remember, if you're curious about how I made the covers of these binders, you can see on my original post for the links.

Everyone come see how professional I look! hehe

I'm Baaaaaaack

Please tell me you read the title of this post in a sing-song voice. Because that's the way it was intended ;) Well world, I'm back! Did ya miss me? You did? Aw shucks. Well a LOT has happened in the last month. We had our two week winter break (hooray!), celebrated Christmas and New Years (double hooray!), I turned 23 (what?) and I accepted an offer to teach in Memphis for the next two years with Teach For America (hooray!). So, like I said, A LOT HAPPENED. And I'm not even mentioning Les Miserables coming out, which was, um, life changing. Picture tiiiiiiime (also in sing-song voice)

Jess, Matt, me and my mom on Christmas Eve

My dad, Matt, Jess and me on Christmas Day
(notice I'm always shoved in the front)

Sweet puppies! Sabre and Sadie on Christmas

This pretty much sums up my Christmas- lots of family time and puppy time =] And then it was Les Mis time. If you haven't seen it yet, GO SEE IT.

The key is to see it with people equally obsessed ;)

Then came my birthday, which I celebrated multiple days in a row with multiple groups of people. It's birthmonth, people, I do what I want. When we went back to school, I had a surprise for me! A giant chocolate cake and 22 precious handmade birthday cards. They are SO sweet and remind why I do what I do. Also, those kids gorged themselves on cake like they'd never seen chocolate before in their lives. It was terrifying.

If you can't read it, the top right card says:
Dear Ms. Douberly, First of all you are the best intern ever. You are very nice and kindhearted. I hope you had a great birthday with lots of cake. Have a marvelous school year. PS: Boo Gators!

And the sweet child's hope came true. I had a great birthday with lots of cake. THEN, I came home and found out I was accepted to TFA: Memphis to teach elementary school! What a whirlwind.

Eeeeeek!

After thinking about it a lot (Atlanta was the only city I imagined being accepted to), praying a lot, and talking with friends that live in Memphis and TFA staff people, I decided to take the leap! A verse that came to mind and really encouraged me was Deuteronomy 31:8 "The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged." A guaranteed job, the TFA network, perks of Americorps, and a built-in community in a brand new city sound very appealing as a new teacher! I'm so excited to start this new adventure in my life =] I'll be going up there for Induction and Institute (training) at the beginning of June and I'll have my own classroom this fall.

Ok so now you're updated. Haha hope your last month has been as wonderful as mine's been! Enjoy your long weekend =]

Thanksgiving Break and Final Observations

Can you believe it's already December?! It's still about 70 degrees outside, so it doesn't QUITE feel like December yet, but still, my calendar says it's December so it must be so.

We only went to school for two days the week of Thanksgiving and it was really nice having a little break. We had tons of family come over and we ate more food than I thought possible! But that's ok, because I ran my first 6K that morning! I was super proud of the fact that I didn't have to stop to walk, even if my time was a little slow.

Before and after pics with my mom (who runs much faster than I do)

Back at school, I had my final observation and taught a lesson on identifying the theme in a story. I was very happy with how it went- after a morning pep talk, the kids were absolute angels (thanks kiddos!) and it all went according to plan (which happens, um, never).

I wanted to share a resource that I used at the beginning of my lesson on theme. It's called Wing Clips and it's an online database of short movie clips that are all categorized and all clean for school! I showed one clip and modeled how to identify the theme of the clip, then I showed another clip and had the students identify the theme and three supporting details that helped them find the theme. So fun! You could use these to teach mood, theme, topic, anything!

Such a great resource. Check it out!!

This upcoming week is going to be very exciting. I have my interview with Teach For America on Wednesday and it's going to be all day. I've been preparing for that and making sure I have everything ready! Then I'm going to Atlanta on Friday after school for the weekend to visit with a friend. Who knows? Maybe I'll be living THERE next year!

Prefix and Suffix Flipbooks

Hey everyone! How crazy has the last week been for you? It's been really crazy for us! We had a short week (only 4 days) and SO MANY OBSERVATIONS. My mentor teacher had an observation on Tuesday and one on Thursday and then she observed me on Friday. We also had a Thanksgiving feast with our kids on Friday with vegetable soup in the crockpot, cornbread, fresh fruit and berries, and cookies. So yummy!

One lesson I did this week was about affixes- prefixes and suffixes. This is important for fourth grade to learn new words they come across in their reading. We used flipbooks to teach the affixes. Have you ever seen these?

One side of the flipbook

Reverse side of the same flipbook

These are actually two flipbooks stapled back to back. This is how you make them:
1) Get some colorful paper- we had three pieces of paper per student (all different colors).
2) Cut each piece of paper in half lengthwise.

So much paper involved

3) Fold the pieces of paper different lengths, like the picture below. We kept one as a model while folding and folded the rest to match it.

Pictures are really needed to explain this part!

4) Stack the pieces of paper, one inside another, like a Russian doll, and then staple across the top.

Booyah

5) Staple two books back to back so you can do prefixes on one side and suffixes on the other.

Once the books were made, each student wrote a prefix (or suffix) on each flap with the definition under the flap above. We did all of these together. Then they went to different spots around the room to read their independent books. As they read, they had to find one example of each in the book and write that, along with two examples they could think of, under the affix. They had a total of three examples per affix and then we went over everyone's and talked about what examples we found.

Sometimes we fit two on one flap.

The examples for mis- and non- are on the yellow.
The examples for un- are on the other side of the orange.

I love these flip books! They're great resources for the kids to keep and a lot of fun to make. I just used the list of affixes from the standard for Florida, but you can do whichever ones you need. I would recommend making them for the kids ahead of time and then having them fill them out. Also, I wrote sideways, but it would probably be easier to write normally. Live and learn, right?

This week we only have two days of school! Two days of school and five days off? Can we do this every week???

Decimal Activity

Happy Veteran's Day! We have the day off, and I've used my long weekend to recover from a cold. I had to use my first sick day this year on Friday, but I'm glad I did because Friday was the worst day of it and I was able to just sit in the bath tub and watch TV all day. Hehe, but some good news came to me Thursday night. I applied for Teach For America and was notified that I was invited to a final interview! I was just hoping to have a phone interview, but to find out that I can skip that step was so nice! So I have a final interview in December and will know the first week of January if I'm accepted. It would be really nice to know where I'm going by January- we'll just have to wait and see.

Eeeeeek! haha

Now that I'm starting to feel better, I thought I'd share a little activity I did with my kids last week. We're learning about decimals and they're expected to know through the thousandths place and how to pronounce them properly (which is something I have to be careful about, myself!) They really like using their dry-erase markers on white boards, so we came up with this:

So simple, but so much potential

Did you know you could put any worksheet in one of those protective sleeves and kids can write on them using dry-erase markers?! This changes everything. We did some practice like "Write the number one and three tenths" or "Write a number with a '4' in the hundredths place", etc.

Then we did a fun activity where everyone writes a number on their sheet, then passes it to their right. The next step is to write the number in word form, then pass to the right. The next step is to write in expanded form, then pass to the right. The fourth person has to check that everything is correct. Then you start over!

I have such great handwriting

You can mix this up in a bunch of ways. Sometimes we had the fourth step be "write an equivalent decimal", sometimes we made them stop at hundredths, sometimes they could go through thousandths. You could do this with normal place value, too! So many options. And when they're done, just erase!

Maaaaaaagic

I'm definitely going to be using these protective sheets for more activities. Hope you are enjoying your Veteran's Day weekend. We have four days this week and then two days next week before Thanksgiving break. Time is absolutely FLYING by!

Election Day 2012

Happy Monday everyone! Hope you enjoyed your extra hour of sleep this weekend- I know I did! It really threw me off this morning, though, because I kept thinking I was late with the sun being up already. No complaints here, though!

So for all of you who have been living under a rock, tomorrow is Election Day 2012. It's such a great opportunity to teach our students about democracy and how an election works and we have been doing some fun things building up to tomorrow. One really great website we've been using is actually a website made by a school. Check it out! They have a lot of really great resources and we used the quiz as a fill in the blank for the kids to do while we went through the powerpoint of how a president is elected.

Pop quiz: who are these men?

I also liked the link they had to the Scholastic website about the election. They have so many activities and lots of information! This would be a great thing for the kids to explore.

Can you SEE the potential?!

We talked a lot about the electoral college. This website is EXCELLENT to look back at previous elections. You can see all the way back to 1789- ha! It's neat though to see how close each election was. We also gave each student a couple of electoral college maps to color in for what the polls are saying now and one to color in Tuesday night as the votes roll in! I'm going to join in the fun ;)

This website is too much fun to play with!

It's so demanding: COLOR ME IN!!

Finally, a great activity to integrate reading has been doing research on the candidates. We gave each student a one page biography on President Obama and a one page biography on Governor Romney. The kids had to read each and highlight examples of the 7 Habits (being proactive, thinking win-win, putting first things first, etc) that show leadership. Don't you just love integrating subjects?!

We will be wearing red, white, and blue and anxiously awaiting the results tomorrow! I will also be showing off my "I Voted" sticker (hooray for early voting) and hope you'll do the same!! Happy Election Day, friends =]