Do you have helpers in your classroom? Many teachers have asked over the years about how classroom helpers work in our classes. Here are the top three questions: "Why do you have classroom helpers?" "How do you organize our helpers?" "Can you help me get mine started?" Here are our answers: 1. It helps build a community. 2. The children take on a responsibility/leadership role. 3. Helps the classroom run smoothly. 4. Reduces the teacher's workload. 5. Children LOVE taking responsibility for our room! Each Monday the children look forward to their new jobs! We rotate the jobs because more that one child usually enjoys a job. We like to give every child an opportunity to try each job. Sometimes they find they really enjoy a job that they thought they wouldn't like. Every classroom has a different plan for changing helpers and you have to find what works for you! *Alison loves to change her helpers Friday before she leaves for the day. It is just part of her routine and she feels great about getting it done early! *I love to change mine with the kids on Monday morning as part of my "Monday Morning Routine." It helps us ease back into our week! *Another friend of mine changes her helpers every two weeks because one was too fast. Once the helpers are assigned and posted on our "Helpers" chart the week starts. I never forget who has a job because the chart is there to refer to and the kids know their jobs and take pride in having them. My answer is "YES!" We have several helpers to match what you might need in your room. They are also editable and you can change the job titles & add your students names. You can even add your own cards to match on the "blank" card pages. Once you choose the theme/style that matches your classroom, putting it together is easy peasy! Here is the set I used last year: I backed my cards after I printed them with yellow cardstock to match my color scheme. There are so many ways to display your helpers, here are a few of the ideas we have used: We have attached them on ribbons and used clothespins for the names. We have placed them in a pocket chart and just tucked the children name card next to the job. We have placed them on a magnetic surface, too! These are just some of the jobs in the pack! Best thing, they are EDITABLE! You decide what the names of the jobs are. Here is our selection in a variety of themes: (You can click on any picture below to see it in our store.) Don't see what you need? Contact us at [email protected] to get your request on our list of projects now! Have other ideas for jobs, we would LOVE to hear them. Please comment below or send us an email. Happy Teaching!
Inclusive Classrooms ~ "Promote a safe and welcoming classroom school and community where individual differences are valued..."
My 18th logic game is about pets. You know the five children: Bobby, Danny, Jenny, Molly and Sally are friends. They live in the same street. From this game you can find out what kind of animals they have got, what their name is and their colour. Hope you and your ss will also enjoy it. The cliparts are from Philip Martin and there is one from Grace Lee. Have a great day. Hugs, ZsuzsapsziIf you don’t know how to solve this kind of game, you can look at the Einstein riddle on the net or have a look at my 33rd logic game, called Best friends where I wrote down the solution step by step. - ESL worksheets
Plot development is often compared to climbing a mountain or riding a roller coaster. Students relate to the roller coaster analogy. Here is how it
These 4th grade anchor charts reinforce concepts for reading, science, math, behavior management, environmentalism, and more!
Morphology walls are a great tool in 4th and 5th grade classrooms! Read more and sign up for free posters to make your own morphology wall!
Check out more similar ideas on my website! http://www.teachbeyondthedesk.com/ Holes , by Louis Sachar, is one of my favorite young adult ...
I have had a love-hate relationship with homework throughout the years. I've done weekly homework, nightly homework (which I often forgot to send), just reading, the list goes on and on. Last year I was forced to reformulate my homework yet again because our county revised their regulation. The new rule stated that third graders
K-1 POETRY UNIT I love teaching poetry to kindergarten and first grade students! Even though I have this labeled as Unit 8 in my Writing Series , I actually teach poetry throughout the entire year. We follow the same routine and students look forward to our poetry week every month.
These interactive, digital math slides are review ALL fourth grade math standards. Prepare students for end of year testing without the ink and wasted paper! Students love the interactive moveable pieces and become comfortable with online testing.★ SAVE $47 when you purchase this Complete Bundle★Ass...
Classroom ready materials for comparing poems and other texts can be found here: Comparing Texts and Comparing Texts 2 As the last part of our quick unit on figurative language and poetry, the students and I spent the last week looking at how to compare poems and write paragraphs to share our comparisons. Whew. It's a difficult process for students. On the one hand, students often spontaneous make comparisons as we move through poems--"That one reminds of me of..." or "This is just like..." However, to write successful comparison paragraphs, students need to learn how to do more thoughtful, thorough comparisons. Using a chart A chart is essential for helping students to compare poems. Sometimes people try to use Venn diagrams for this purpose. Venn diagrams are great for set theory and fun visual gags...but terrible for planning writing! A chart sets up the important criteria for what is to be compared. Because testing season is coming up, I told students that they won't be able to use a prepared chart for our state tests, but that they can make their own comparison charts. It's interesting to watch students use the chart. When I model this for struggling readers, I work with one poem at a time. This kind of careful reading and analysis takes a lot of concentration, and struggling readers often have trouble with the attentional shifts needed to go back and forth between texts. On the other hand, strong readers often prefer to work in the opposite way. They thrive on the extra challenge of going back and forth between texts and often create strong insights, seeing differences in the ways that the author developed the topics. Do we have to fill out the whole thing? That's the beauty of it--I tell students that we only need to fill in 4 or 5 blocks. We look for the criteria that are the most interesting for the poems that we have. Interestingly, kids always like to fill in the block for figurative language and sound devices! Scaffolded response frame A scaffolded response frame is useful for students who are still learning compare and contrast structure. Let's face it--this describes just about every elementary school writer! A nice middle level of scaffolding is to project the scaffolded response, but have students write their own responses. Is it formulaic? Yup. Does it lead to scripted, formulaic writing? Some of the responses on the last assessment were the best that I've seen. Helping students with the topic sentence and the transitions freed up some processing space for them to do some deeper thinking about the texts. Kids used quotation marks to show where they were quoting from poems, using specific details, coming up with similarities that I hadn't considered. These are good things! Choosing Poems This is the hardest part. It's tempting to stick with poems that have the same topic. But even poems with the same topic don't always make the best comparisons. Last week I chose two hawk poems. The whole lesson fell kind of flat--besides the same topic, the poems didn't really have anything interesting or compelling enough about them to spend a great deal of time talking about. Two poems that worked very well were "Hello, Moon!" by Patricia Hubbell (found in Hey, You!: Poems to Skyscrapers, Mosquitoes, and Other Fun Things) and "The Moon's the North Wind's Cooky" by Vachel Lindsay. These poems both explored the changes in the moon in an interesting way, with lots of differences in the use of figurative language and structure to talk about. Comparing poems was an interesting and rigorous way to end our study of poetry...but I do think that we are all ready to go on to text structure next week! News and Notes Last week I overhauled the Cause and Effect for Teaching Text Structure packet and added some new texts. Could someone please let me know if they have had success with the download? I'm working on changes to the Figurative Language pack, with some new poems, assessments, and activities to add. I added vocabulary quizzes to the Spring Reading Homework packet. I have added weekly vocabulary quizzes to my classroom this year and I really like the results.
I had previously sold items here on my site. Since I had to manually send items to people, I have just transferred everything to Teachers Pay Teacher (see link tab above). These items here are just free files I have made over the years. If you like these and want more options, please visit my TpT store. LOOKING for my only items? Check TpT! MANY of these have additional items in my TpT store. Thank you! :) SIMPLY click on the image to download the FREE FILES! Check back often! OTHER:
Teaching morphology can be a great way to help students with understanding unknown words, decoding multisyllabic words, and spelling.
Check out more similar ideas on my website! http://www.teachbeyondthedesk.com/ Holes , by Louis Sachar, is one of my favorite young adult ...
Multiple lesson plan ideas for teaching conjunctions in first grade. Post with several anchor charts you can use, resources, and fun activities!
Click through to find great ideas you can use to improve student behavior half-way through the school year in your 2nd-8th grade classroom.
There are several reasons paraphrasing is a good skill for students. It enhances vocabulary. It forces students to change ideas into their own words, which confirms understanding. It builds a stronger memory when words have been changed into your own personal version. To practice paraphrasing, we use a game that is like a written version of the old telephone game where you whisper a phrase from one person to the next. Students start with a sentence on the first row of the chart. They rewrite the sentence, fold the top row over, and pass to the next student. After filling in all rows, we open the papers to reveal all of the versions of the sentence and to see if the meaning stayed the same. CLICK HERE to download a copy of the Paraphrasing Game Handout. Happy Summer! Caitlin TheRoomMom
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