Managment Monday (Tuesday!) & other Randomness

Delay, delay, delay! Doing my delay dance right now! PA is super cold, so we have a 2 hour delay again tomorrow. We have state testing in about a month and we've had 6 snow days and TONS of delays. Starting to feel the PSSA push. 

Anyway....here are just a few things that we have going on...

 Since I started teaching, I've been trying to find a way to store the task cards and other games/cards that I've made. File folders didn't work, filing cabinet didn't work, etc., etc., etc. I finally found the perfect solution (for me anyway!). Sam's Club has these great 12x12 drawers. I labeled them with different skills. So far it has worked perfectly!

Third grade is the big year to start to learn the multiplication facts in our district. This is just a cup full of facts. I'll randomly pass the fact sticks out during transitions or extra free time. (Each fact is a different color so that I'm able to give more challenging ones to learners that need more of a challenge and less difficult ones to students that may struggle with multiplication. For example, all of the red sticks are 1s.)

The infamous Kiss Your Brain jar that I got from some terrific blog. (Sorry, I don't remember where... I've been to so many fantastic sites.)

I've just revamped the way I collect homework. i've always used the paper trays for homework. Typically the majority of the homework is due on Fridays. i've found that Friday morning homework collection was such a pain...so many papers, so little organization. This idea, although it is far from being a new idea, came from another teacher in my building. It has worked perfectly so far!

January Family Project - Each month I like to have the students complete a family project at home. This month was the missing mitten assignment (from ProTeacher). We used adjectives to describe mittens that were lost. The students had to then use the clues and other information in the descriptive paragraph to locate the missing mittens.

Another FAB ProTeacher idea....How to Blow a Bubble. I have to say that the students LOVED this project. They worked so hard and did a terrific job!

Every nine weeks we have a different AR incentive. Each student has an individual AR goal. Once he/she reaches his/her goal the reward is a cup of hot chocolate for breakfast. If they earn 5 points passed their goal they will get another incentive. I do the BONUS past the goal because typically the students reach their goal for the nine weeks and then stop. This encourages them to keep reading.

Each student keeps track of his/her own points. When he/she gets another whole AR point another marshmallow is added to the cup.

LOVE this.....POWER TOWER! I found this idea on another amazing blog. I made both sight word (fluency phrase) cups and multiplication cups. The students stack the cups as they read or answer the problem on the cup correctly. You can kinda make up your own rules, but I have them start over if they get a problem or word wrong. They also have to start over if they knock the tower over. This is quite a challenge and they LOVE it!

Vocab on the Move....during a unit review in reading we typically play this game. The students all have a sentence strip with a vocab word on it. They do not know what the word is though. They have to travel around the room to find a synonym, antonym, example, sentence, etc. The clues are used to determine the word on their heads. 

Hope you found an idea or two that you can use! :) 

UPDATE: Here are the links for a few of the documents that are listed on this page. I have searched my flash drive high and low for the labels that I put on the bins, but I can't find them anywhere. If I come across them I will post them.

Vocab on the Move

Power Tower Labels