Back to the Grind

Wow! I cannot believe one week of school has almost went by. I have really enjoyed getting to know my students this year and can't wait to see what this year brings. I was excited when I saw the #blogamonth topic for this week. The topic for this month is:

How will you make the first week of school meaningful to your students?

&

What have you done with the first 5 days of school?

Let me just say I had a different feeling coming into this school year. I have never been as excited to get started! My first year I was just plain nervous and last year I wasn't really ready to get back to school. This year I completely felt different and was ready to start! I love that feeling!

Every year my school starts the school year out with an orientation night. Students and parents are invited to visit their teacher's classroom. I love this because I am able to meet the students the night before school and get to know their parents as well. I also love being able to let the parents know what my expectations are for the year. They were bombarded by me this year with technology! I introduced ClassDojo, Twitter, Remind, and Kidblog to them. A lot of the parents were very excited about using these tools to communicate with me. I have all of my parents signed up for ClassDojo and even some parents got Twitter to follow our classroom Twitter page.

On a sidenote....follow us on Twitter!!! @4timmclass 

Today is the fifth day of school! On the first day school I do a variety of activities. I first like to introduce myself using a PowerPoint. I have fun facts about where I am from, who is in my family, how I spent my summer, what I like to do in my free time, and what my favorite things are. Then I give a pop quiz!! :) There are about 9 questions that they have to answer about me. This is always fun to see if they remember what I just told them. Then I did something fun to get to know them this year. I passed around a roll of toilet paper and told them to take however much they thought they would need. I never told them what the activity was. Some students took one piece while others took lots and lots of pieces. After they passed the roll around, I told them they had to introduce themselves by telling me fun facts about themselves. However many squares of toilet paper they took was how many facts they had to tell me about themselves!

We do a lot of icebreaker activities on the first few days of school along with going over rules and procedures. We PRACTICE, PRACTICE, and PRACTICE our procedures to get them down! I also like to go over my expectations with students. We discuss the school rules and make a list of what that looks like. After we get done making the list, I write it up on a poster and every student signs the poster.

One of my absolute favorite things I have done on the first two days of school was something I tried out this year. It is called an All About Me Museum. Students were asked on the first day to bring 3 items that represents them that could fit in their backpacks. The next day of school I had them write a sentence or two about how the item represents them and they also named their museum display and wrote it on a piece of construction paper. We all walked around the room looking at the different displays (not touching). :)

I really try to get to know my students at the beginning of the year with different activities. The first few days of school are always some of my favorite days because we get to do fun icebreakers and I always enjoy learning about my students. I want to make them feel comfortable in my classroom and want to make sure they know that I care about them. It's all about relationships and how I can make an impact on their lives. They have definitely already made an impact on my life!

Gooooaaaals!!

Finally I am sitting down to make goals for this upcoming school year. It seems like this summer has flown by because I feel like I have been busy every single day. I taught summer school for two weeks in June and had an absolute blast with the students. My goal for that from my last blog was to make reading and math more exciting for the students instead of just using textbooks. I feel like I accomplished this goal because each day I tried to come up with a creative and fun math activity for students instead of what we typically do for math (Saxon Math). Students were not dreading coming to summer school and that was one of my main goals. I also started to build relationships with students who are going to be in my fourth grade class this year. It was so cute because one day a future fourth grade boy could not remember my name and wanted to tell his mom. To make sure he remembered my name, he asked me if I could write it down on a sticky note and so he could take it home and tell his mom. :)
 
This blog is all about gooooaaaal (World Cup!) setting for this school year. I could not think of a better blog topic because usually I think of a few goals, but I never sit down and write them out. I feel like if I have them written down this year, I will be more likely to stick to them and really work on meeting each goal. Without further ado, here are my gooooaaaals!

1) Be Positive!! I went to my classroom today and worked all day on getting things set up. I got really excited for the beginning of the year even though this year's fourth grade class is... you know...that class that every teacher isn't looking forward to. I have a lot of students with behavior issues and they are known for being very disrespectful towards one another and teachers. I decided that I don't want to judge these students before they enter my classroom. I want to get to know each one of them and have a positive outlook. I can't wait to start making an impact on these students. There is nothing more fulfilling as a teacher than seeing improvements in students' attitudes, behaviors, and school performance.

So my main goal is to be positive around my students, co-workers, husband, and everyone else. The school district I work at does not have the best reputation around the state because of some things that have happened within the past few years. Usually when I tell people where I work, they ask what the heck is going on with my school. It makes me so sad that people focus on all of the negativity at our school and the positive things that teachers are doing are not being displayed for the public. As a teacher of this district, I know that I am doing what is best for students and focus on how I can improve my teaching. :)

2) Volunteer more for leadership positions!! Usually I am quiet and reserved when it comes to volunteering for taking charge in leadership positions, such as committees or special programs at our school. We have committees that we are supposed to sign up for at the beginning of the year. Since I have only been a teacher for a few years,  I feel like I don't really know what I am doing. This is my third year of teaching at my school, so I know more of what is going on. I want to get involved as much as possible and be in more of a leader position this year for committees.

3) Use technology as much as possible!! We are getting an iPad cart for each floor in our school and I want to make it a priority to incorporate them into my lessons. I'm very thankful that my husband uses his iPads in class on a daily basis because he will be a great resource to go to for apps that will work well for my students. I want to make sure that I am using technology for educational and learning opportunities, however. I'm sure there are many great apps out there for me to use in my classroom for reading, math, and writing. If you have any suggestions, don't be afraid to comment or let me know! I seriously need the help and plan to start researching soon!

I also am in the process of creating a twitter wall for my students to use. I am going to make a classroom twitter page and tweet out some top tweets that students write throughout the day. I plan on teaching students how to use social media correctly. When I get my classroom twitter page, I will blog and tweet out what it is called so you can follow it. It will be a major goal of mine to keep this twitter page updated with tweets every school day so parents and others can see what we are doing in our classroom.

Summer Saw Sharpening

This is officially my first blog ever...well besides the ones I have written on my students' kidblog website. I told myself I was going to blog more about what fun things we were doing in my classroom, but I kind of dropped the ball on that. Hopefully I will be more faithful when I am blogging on here. I am totally new at this, but am really excited to try something new. My husband, @brandon_timm, has really encouraged me to try blogging. It is really nice being married to another teacher because we can inspire each other with fresh ideas. I'm going to try to do the #blogamonth. The first topic that I am going to write about is how I am going to "sharpen the saw," which means I am going to do some goal setting for ways to improve my teaching over the summer.

Goal 1- Teaching Summer School

This is the first year in awhile that my school has offered summer school to students who qualify for the extra practice. Once I heard about this, I knew it was something that I wanted to help with because I believe it is another way to impact high-need students and build positive relationships with them. It is also a way that I can improve on my teaching strategies. Instead of teaching out of a textbook, I have challenged myself to think of new and fun ways in which students can learn concepts. I am sure that students will come to school with a bad attitude because there are a million other things they think they should be doing. To this I say...challenge accepted! First off I want it to be a safe place for these students. Like I said before, I want to make learning fun for them by playing games that improve on skills and concepts. There have been many resources available on the internet to help me plan these lessons. Have you ever used teacherspayteachers? Can I just say aaamazing?!?! Also I love using Pinterest to help me think of ideas. I have made boards on Pinterest to help me organize my school ideas. You can check out my boards here. http://www.pinterest.com/jotimm02/

Goal 2- Classroom Management

Last school year I tried something new with my students towards the beginning of the year. Have you ever heard of ClassDojo? Let's just say it was such a great tool I used in my classroom. It's a website/app where you can track student behavior throughout the day. Students can get positive points awarded to them or get points taken away for a negative behavior. At first I was like...this is great...now how can I get my students to be excited about this tool? After much deliberation, I knew if I put some type of reward system with it then students would be involved and care about how they behaved. Also the fact that reports get sent home to parents had an impact on students as well. My reward system was that students had to end with 25 points or higher at the end of the week to get a reward. I used Pinterest to think of some fun reward ideas that wouldn't disrupt the flow of the class. Here are a few examples of rewards I used. There are many more if you click on the following link: Reward ideas

This point system worked well with my fourth graders, but I of course want to improve for next year's fourth graders. On ClassDojo there is also a reports section for each student where is shows their points and accuracy. Instead of having a certain number of points for each student, I want to try and base it on their accuracy. I'm still not sure how I want to go about this. I might let students set goals for themselves, but I will have to structure this somehow. Stay tuned on how I decide to accomplish this for next school year! 

Sidenote: Since I have used ClassDojo religiously for a year now, they asked me to be a Mentor teacher. I get to connect with other teachers who use it in their classroom and also share with teachers in my school how I use it with my students. I also get to try out new features before they become available to the public. One thing I am REALLY excited about is that I can share my class with the other fourth grade teachers. That way when they are teaching my homeroom, they can add or deduct points on their computer. Now I just need to teach them how to use ClassDojo!

Goal 3- Picture Taking

Develop a system for organizing my classroom pictures. If you have any great ideas please let me know! I love taking pictures of my students while they are working, but I want to have a way to share them with parents.

Goal 4- Classroom Twitter

I am planning on creating a classroom twitter bulletin board where I can model to students how to use technology in an appropriate way. One of my goals is to have a classroom twitter page where I will take top tweets from students throughout the day and tweet. I still need to think about how I am going to set this up and incorporate it into my daily routine.