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.
