Special Delivery!

It was just an ordinary Tuesday morning and I was in the middle of my guided reading lesson with a student. The others were doing exactly as they should-finishing up morning word work and reading independently. Suddenly, another staff member appeared at my door, Smart Board closely behind her.

“This is for you!” she said.

“For me? Are you sure?”

“Did no one tell you that you’re getting a Smart Board?”

“Umm, no!”

Apparently someone forgot to give me the memo, but who cares because Smart Boards are awesome! However, the tinge of OCD I have quickly kicked in and I spent the rest of the day pondering where I should put it. I knew I would have to completely rearrange my classroom in order to make this work. Luckily, I had an hour prep that afternoon and I spent it redesigning the place. When the kids came back from the other class they were at they were so excited. You would have thought Christmas came early by the sounds of them.

By getting rid of the laptop cart and placing the computer and LCD projector on the desk, I was able to place students’ desks behind it and they could still see.

Yay for groups!

 I also moved the rocking chair and “carpet area” to the back of the room where it’s much more spacious.

If you can recall, I had originally had them sitting in rows of 3 or 4 and they kept asking begging me to put them in groups, but it wouldn’t work because of the board and laptop cart. Now, everybody’s happy.

As for what we’ve been up to lately, academically, I thought I’d share with you our Science Board. We have finally finished up our unit on Light and Sound and this was up the whole time. It was an easy resource where I could post definitions and the kids learned quickly how to refer to it so they could include new vocabulary in their speaking and writing.

In literacy, we finished our read aloud of James and the Giant Peach (which they loved) and due to popular demand, we watched the movie on Thursday morning. And because I’m so creative and nice, I fed them peach slices and fuzzy peaches. Yum!

To go along with our read aloud, we were learning how to use elements of a story to write our own stories. We learned how to create mood, build tension, and use literary devices like similes and alliteration. All of these things came out beautifully in their stories.

Most of them had been exposed to The Writing Process before, and they enjoyed moving their names along as their stories progressed. If you’d like a copy of the story planner we used, click HERE.

When we arrived on Wednesday morning, there happened to be little power outage.

Needless to say, the kids were a tad chaotic, so I told them we were going to go to school like the pioneers (this is what I call coming up with a genius idea at the drop of a hat) and they loved it. What I loved is when the kids started discussing how we had to learn by natural light because our artificial light was unavailable. Look at them making connections to our science unit. Smarty pants.