Saturday, August 31, 2013

New School Year.......New Kiddos :)

Well fellow bloggers I just finished my first week of my fourth year of teaching and my first year of grad school. Woooooo! it was quite exhausting but I am absolutely loving my classes and the fabulous teachers I have meet. My class is also pretty great! :)

Well I'm trying some new stuff in my room this year and I'm pretty pumped about them!

One of the amazing things I am trying out this year is called "Whole Brain Teaching". If you haven't heard of this before you need head on over to their website and start reading up. https://www.wholebrainteaching.com

Here are five reasons I LOVE using WBT in my room.
1. The kids are super engaged.
2. No more trying lots of different attention getters. Class?Yes! is the best!
3. The students love teaching each other.
4. I love using all the gestures and expression when teaching!
5. The scoreboard is my new best friend!

This is a video I found on Youtube that gives a perfect example of why WBT is so AH-mazing!

The second thing I am trying this year is incorporating the Notice and Note Signposts into my Daily 5 lessons. Another teacher on my grade level and I spent the summer reading the book and adding the signposts to our curriculum map. We tried to think which reading strategies we already taught would be good to introduce with each of the signposts. We plan on introducing the "Contrasts and Contradictions" signpost with character traits and story elements. We can't wait to try this out and have our students thinking deeply about what they are reading! I'll let you know how it goes when we try it. If you haven't read this book and are looking for a professional book, I would recommend this one!

Well that's all for now. I'm going to make it a personal goal to blog at least once a week this year! So tune it for more from Adventures in 4th grade.