Busy Life!

I know what you're thinking.  Remember when I started this blog to write about all my fun classroom activities and share our daily first grade happenings and then went weeks without posting once school actually started?  I get it.  Having a teaching blog without actually blogging about teaching is a total waste.  Hopefully this post marks the beginning of routinely posting what's up in first grade.  Add that to my list of things to do! :)

I am so excited that the first couple (aka four) weeks have gone so well!  I love my new class.  They are truly such a nice, fun, and well-mannered group of kids and I can't wait for all the fun we are going to have this year!  

Though posting about the first couple days of school is past appropriate at this time, I just thought I'd share a couple of things that went really well our first few weeks!  Today I'm going to focus on reading intervention time at my school! 

Our school has an awesome thirty minute block at the start of each day as our reading intervention time.  During this time, while some kids are pulled out for interventions, I meet with a small group of kids to provide them with reading interventions.  But what do I do with the rest of the class?  My first grade team has come up with a system that works really well for us.  I group my kids into groups of 2-3 and do a very loose interpretation of workstations/centers.  I typically have a fun writing station, a sight word station, computers, iPads, a skill building station (ie: parts of speech), and so on.  This is the first year I routinely plan on having a "Read the Room" center and a "Big Book" center and so far they are going fabulously!  I created a response sheet that I can use over and over again for the big book center and took some quick snapshots of the kiddos being introduced to it!  Here they are using fun pointers and looking in their big books for three letter words with a partner!  I was so impressed! 

Oh and here's a big book hunt freebie if you want to snag it!  I just fill in what I would like the kids to search for and they go to town!

Another thing we've been practicing during our morning intervention block is reading the room!  I introduced this by showing the kids our super special magic glasses that help us read the room.  We each got clipboards and searched for things that started with "B".  You would have thought that this was the most mind-blowingly awesome thing in the world (which it was, obviously).  You could have heard a pin drop!  Their lists were so impressive and I barely had any kids ask me how to spell a word.  After just a couple reminders they tried their best and stretched them out!  Love it!

Here's another freebie!  I pretty much do the same thing with "Read the Room" and fill in what I would like them to search for (ie: words with the short a sound, things that are red, friend's names, etc...).  Anything to get them reading and writing!  Other times I will mix it up and have them search for theme words or fill in a list of words around the room that start with the letters in, for example, CAT IN THE HAT.  I'm probably making this much more confusing than it needs to be!

That's all I can post for now...I worked a 12 hour day today and have Curriculum Night tomorrow night!  I will post soon about what I do for Curriculum Night in my classroom and how I make it work best for me!

Have a great end of the week!