Read Across America Week!

I can't wait for Read across America week and Dr. Seuss' birthday! I am planning a ton of fun activities for my class next week. I was searching Pinterest (oh how I love thee) and saw these awesome journal prompt ideas for Dr. Seuss from Minds in Bloom. I also saw another idea for tic-tac-toe journal writing and thought I'd combine the two. Here is what I came up with!  You can download the template for FREE at my TPT store below!

Download Here

I'm going to have the kids do this for part of their morning work throughout the week.

Thank you to Minds In Bloom for the AWESOME prompt ideas!

Classroom Organization

I definitely am not the most organized person in the world. I'll be the first one to admit that, but since I have a combination class I had to become very organized with my reading and math workshops. Here is an example of how I run my workshops. The kids are now pros at rotating through seatwork, center, and working with the teacher. At the school I work at we use "Thinking Maps." I felt it was appropriate to use a "flow map" since the kids are familiar with them and how they work. Let me just say, since using this new rotating system, I get to ALL my small groups on a daily basis.  I also feel that the kids get A LOT more out of math by conducting it in small groups. I can focus more on each topic with my students who struggle in math and give kids a challenge who are ready to go above and beyond what we are learning. The kids absolutely love the rotating workshops because they get to go to a center every day. I can't take full credit for the idea though. I found a similar idea on Beth Newingham's 3rd grade website. A link to her site is below. She's amazing and has completely changed the way I think about reading and math.

 Beth Newingham's Website

Accelerated Reader

My kids have been bugging me like crazy lately when it came to how many more books they needed to read before they earned their A.R. T-Shirt. (At the school I work at each grade level has a certain amount of AR points the kids need to receive before they earn an AR t-shirt. For second grade, the goal is 50 points, or 100 half point books.) If your school doesn't do t-shirts, or big goals, you could do something like this for monthly goals. I have the kids keep track of how  many more books they need to read by themselves. The kids just simply color in a box after they've passed an A.R. test.  The kids were excited to see how many more books they needed to read before they met their goal, and they love coloring in the boxes! I have the kids keep the worksheet in their data notebooks.

Valentine's Day

This is my first post at attempting to blog! Yay for me! Anyways, there will be MANY more posts to come!

For Valentine's day I was going to do the usual, "graph the candy conversation hearts" activity. Since I was getting tired of that activity, I decided to spice things up a bit and do a really fun writing activity instead!

I was going to have the kids  write sentences with their conversation hearts about Valentine's day, however I felt it would be more fun to incorporate letter writing into our Valentine's activity.

The kids had a BLAST with this activity.

<3 Callen Rhoads