After a rainy Labor Day weekend, summer is officially over! Last week we finished putting our classroom back together again, and we are trying to think about what we will do differently this school year.
One change we are thinking about is creating more open space in
our room. We love little nooks and
learning spaces, but we also want to have plenty of open space for groups of
children to work together. We are big fans
of using centers to reinforce the skills we are learning each week, and these
require more space for everyone to spread out.
This gives the students the opportunity to move around and work with
other kids in the class.
We will also begin to incorporate The Daily Five into our
classroom. It
is a structure that helps students develop the daily habits of reading, writing,
and working independently. The goal is to enhance the students' ability to monitor their own comprehension while allowing them to
have choice and ownership over their learning.
Here are some skills we will be working on this year…
The students will learn to choose books on their level, check
for understanding as they read and begin reading independently for longer
amounts of time. In order to make sure
the students are not out of their seats 5,000 times throughout the day, they
will each have their own book bins (with books on their level) within
reach. We are thinking of allowing them
to have time on Fridays to select the books for their bins each week, this will
give them the ability to choose books based on their interest.
To
help them decide which Daily Five activity they would like to choose, we will
have their choices displayed where they can see them. Maybe something like this?
It will be interesting to see how the students handle having so
much independence in their learning as the year goes on! We will, of course, be modeling, modeling, modeling
to show them appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, reading comprehension and
writing strategies. I’m sure there will be a lot of trial and error (on both
our parts) but hopefully a lot of laughs and success stories as well!
As we continue cleaning and remodeling, I'm sure we will have
more to add! What changes do you plan to make this year? Do you have advice for
those who are just getting started?
0 comments:
Post a Comment