First Wednesday in a While

I ran morning meeting this morning and it went pretty well. Our greeting was the “friendship claw” which is a gesture I learned at an underground comedy show in Brooklyn. The only problem I had was during the activity. We played Wonderball, and the ball goes around the circle and whoever it lands on it out. The ball landed on one student who does have some behavior and anger issues, and she got very angry and upset and would not move out of the circle. I told her to take a time out but she wouldn’t budge. My CT needed to take her aside and talk to her. She basically asked her how she could have handled that better and that she can’t act like that in school. The rest of the game went very well, and we had a winner. I had the class do a cheer for her – there is a list of cheers that they do and I had her pick her favorite for the class to give her.

I did my math lesson this afternoon and the problem solving lesson went pretty well. The problems are pretty easy for them to solve. After problem solving, we had some time, so I had them get into a circle and play “Sparkle.” We counted by 2’s and had the people who said 16 and 24 sit down. The afternoon wiggles were certainly hitting them hard. I had to wait for them to quiet down a few times, so we didn’t have enough time to get out calculators like I wanted to show them how to check their work on their skip counting worksheets. We will work on that tomorrow though.

I seems like next week I will pick up my first guided reading group – the highest reading level. My CT gave me a great unit on a Magic Treehouse chapter book that I think I will use with them.

A parent came in in the afternoon with her son who is in our class. He left early, but he told him mom on the way out that he got two time outs. His mom asked why and he said he didn’t know. They came back to ask my CT and I. We explained what he was doing and came up with a plan to send home a sheet every day to celebrate the times he does not get time outs and to explain why and time outs were given. I felt a little pressure trying to explain to the parent why I gave her son a time out, but I felt it was justified at the time. He was being silly and misbehaving but nothing specific. Anyway, that wasn’t too bad and we all agreed that that behavior plan should work well. It’ll be interesting to see if his behavior is any better starting tomorrow.