Guest Teacher

My CT was in this morning before school started so I saw her along with the sub that is working with us today. My CT left right before the kids came in. I ran morning meeting again, which went ok. We played the place value game, and still, despite shuffling the cards, the answers went almost around the circle. It skipped around a little more, but not enough to keep them from predicting who would be next. It still worked out ok. I hen had them take two laps around the room and come back to their spots so the guest teacher could start Daily 5. Instead of choosing Daily 5 centers, we did read to self, then read to buddy, then word work. I talked to one student a little bit because he said he couldn’t concentrate. I asked him why and he said he couldn’t stop thinking about music. I asked him if a song was stuck in his head. He said yes – it was a Doors song “Break on through to the other side.” I told him that I noticed he has good taste in music and I sang some of the song to him. I told him he needed to read to himself, even though sometimes it’s hard with a song stuck in your head. I told him he could have the song playing in the background in his mind as he reads. He seemed to like that idea and he started reading.

After Daily 5, we did a quick activity with them finding words in their Quickword books – similar to a dictionary, to spell them correctly. They got about halfway through it before lunch/recess. After lunch, the sub worked with them for writing. They had to write, “On Valentine’s Day I enjoyed…” and then write a few sentences about the things they enjoyed on Valentine’s Day. Most of them wrote a lot of wonderful sentences. A few students needed some extra help and could barely come up with one or two. We had a few of them share their sentences as well before pit. At pit, we did a jeopardy review game on the Balance and Motion unit. The game went well and we asked a lot of questions that will be on the test. We will do the test tomorrow and then that unit is officially over. Then I’ll pick up the “Making Meaning” portion of the day, which we do when we don’t have pit. It is a reading comprehension program. I read over the next lesson and it looks like a good one. They work in partners to talk about the story together and discuss what happened, retell it, and think about how the characters feel.

Math today was fine. We did problem solving, so it was an easy lesson. They weren’t paying much attention though, even though they knew how to do it with no problem. We played the same game as yesterday after math, counting by tens. Everyone picked 10 to start with, so when we do 5’s, I will have them pick random numbers from a hat or something so that they all start at harder numbers.

After math, we just took them to music and after that it was time for dismissal. It was a pretty good day overall.