Yoga Breaks

I have a new love and it is called yoga.  Most people would say I'm more than a little obsessed with yoga.  Yoga is incredible for stress relief, increasing healthy habits, and is a wonderful exercise. Personally, I have started working out regularly, drinking more water, eating healthier, lost weight, and been less stressed, all because of yoga.  Now, when most people think about yoga they think of crazy flexibility and people saying "OM."  While you will see that in different aspects of yoga, you can also make it suitable for your needs and even your students' needs.

One of my co-workers was doing research on things that would help with things like testing anxiety and getting students to focus.  She is also a yoga lover and came across a ton of information on yoga in the classroom.  She also found these amazing cards.

(picture from yogakids.com)

These cards are great because each card has a single pose with large pictures of a student doing the pose.  The poses also have kid friendly names and a detailed list of instructions you can read right off the back to help your students get into proper position.  Even if you have never done yoga, you can still use these cards in your classroom.  Another aspect I love is that they put the poses in groups depending on how they are intended to affect your children.  Do your children need to calm down? There is a whole section for that.  If you need them to focus it's another section.  Each section is color coded and marked so you can easily find the ones you want.

(picture from yogakids.com)

When do I use this?

Many teachers are already doing brain breaks and these fit right in with what you might already do.  Indoor recess?  Kids can do yoga instead of playing games, watching a movie, dancing, or any number of other things.  My favorite time I used them was during the testing season.  When we had breaks between testing sessions we would get up and move around and we did lots and lots of yoga.  This was relatively quiet which was important since we were indoors and trying not to disturb others.  It's also one of my favorite things to do when my kids have been doing a highly active task like centers, just coming back from PE or recess, or just have an extra dose of energy.  This gets kids moving, but several also require students to calm down and focus if they want to succeed in the pose.  

Why use yoga?

If you already use brain breaks, the best part about yoga, at least in my class, was that many of the poses were ones my students didn't do in our regular brain breaks or other places like PE.  If it is something different you know it is more likely to attract their attention.  

Personally, I also saw an improvement in my students after we had done our yoga breaks.  I have previously danced, done jumping jacks, run in place, and so many more active things for a brain break.  What I found was that usually my kids were more energized, but they were energized to the point they had trouble settling down and getting back to work.  I love the yoga poses because most of the time my kids got to move, but they had to focus in order to control their body.  Their brain got the break, but their behavior didn't disintegrate into craziness.  

I wish I could list all the benefits of yoga.  If you want to read a little more about it, here is an article from Parents.com.  This site gives you a list of ways kids benefit in the school setting.  Even PBS agrees!  If you want to order the cards here is the website.  I am not recommending this product because I received anything for this post.  I honestly have used the cards and they work!

School's Out for the Summer...What do Teachers do in the Summer?

At the end of May my room was boxed up, my kids were headed home, and we were all talking about how great summer was going to be.  Well, it's the end of June and school is finally out for me.  Yes, I was one of the crazy people that signed up to do summer school for a month.

I can't complain because I actually enjoy it.  For a whole month I don't have a set agenda of what HAS to be accomplished.  Instead, I get to see where some of my future students are at, what skills we need lots of work on, and what I honestly don't teach well. I use summer school to be a better teacher.

I spent the first couple weeks of summer school really focusing on grammar.  Grammar is one of those things that many people I know struggle to teach and I don't always do the best job at it.  So I taught the first few grammar skills that we would be learning next year.  I found some great resources, created some powerpoints, and came up with a list of ideas for future resources I want to create.  If I hadn't taught summer school I wouldn't have been able to try some of these out on my kids to find out what was working for me and what wasn't.  Once I've refined those resources a little more I will start sharing. :)

So now that summer is over, what in the world will I do?  Anyone else have a summer "want to" list?  Mine is pretty long.  I will be spending some togetherness time with my family this summer and later this summer I will be helping my mom set up her classroom since she is changing grade levels.  The last two years she has gone above and beyond in helping me with my classroom so I'm hoping I can be half as helpful.

I do plan on doing lots and lots of reading this summer.  I love reading, but somehow it just doesn't get done as much during the school year.  On my summer list are:

1. My Dad's book (No that isn't the name of a book.  My Dad wrote a book he hasn't published yet and I am in the middle of reading it.)
2. Lies My History Teacher Told Me
3. Yoga School Dropout
4. The Bhagavad Gita
5. Fault in Our Stars (I know I'm a little late to the show on this one. Don't ask how long it took for me to get around to the Divergent series.)
6. The other five billion and one books that are on my list that I haven't read yet.

The other big item on my summer "want to" list is to add to my TPT store.  I got started during the snow days and then didn't keep creating.  I get super excited when they send an e-mail saying I've sold something.  Now I just have to get a more somethings up to sell.  I have a list of a million resources I want to create, so it is just a matter of sitting down and creating them.  Along with creating resources I also need to create some centers.  I have lots of prepackaged games on my shelves that our district has purchased, but I usually want something a little more specific for my kids.  My goal is either to find some games or centers that target exactly what I want or to create some.  Of course that means ultimately there will be lots of laminating and cutting and folders and ziploc bags and time spent on the couch organizing and putting together.  At least I have Netflix right??

What are your summer plans?

My Journey to the Centers of the Classroom

So this blog is kind of my captain's log for my teaching journey and one of the most difficult journeys I have had is dealing with centers.  I see all the time these great blogs where teachers are rocking their centers and it makes me feel a little inadequate.  I have to keep reminding myself:

1. I just started teaching.
2. No one is a rockstar the first time they try something (ok some are but I choose not to acknowledge them because jealousy isn't nice lol).

With this in mind I figured I would share my journey with it's ups and downs for anyone else who is trying to find their way through this minefield.  This post is a little bit long, so sorry in advance.

During my year in first grade, I started out doing ten reading centers a week so students could rotate to two centers  every day.  I had some specific problems with that:

1. I never had enough time to prep the ten centers because as a new teacher half the time I was scrambling for my lessons. Center prep was overwhelming and put off until the last minute and sometimes it was Monday morning before I managed to force myself to prep centers.
2. I started with worksheets that I had to check.  Once again it was a time thing.  I didn't have time to check, I didn't check, my students figured it out, and you can guess the end of that story. No checking and we don't care.  Center time was fun time.

Despite those two big problems, I did do a pretty good job of pulling students to my table and working with small groups.  I saw the majority of my class a few times a week. My big regret though was that sometimes I didn't see my higher students as often or at all.

By the end of the year I had grown some new brain cells and cut down to five centers, most of which were self-checking and had multiple steps to keep my kids entertained. This was working better and I felt like my students were accomplishing things. I had made progress and was going to improve the next year.  Then I moved to third grade...

This last year I did both reading and math centers. My third graders weren't very focused in centers and needed lots of redirecting. This time I was smarter and did all self-checking centers and also was more familiar with the games and manipulatives in my classroom.  The five center model from first grade stayed so center prep was much easier this time around.  My big change this year was that towards the end of the year I tried letting them pick their centers. This did not go well for me for a few reasons.

1. It took forever! They couldn't remember what centers they had been to and I had the only record so they were asking where they had been or picking a center they had already chosen.  We did picked centers on the Smartboard so they were dragging and dropping their name, which can be problematic because not all of my kids were good with dragging and dropping.  If they are going to choose this year, I have to revamp how we go about tracking where we have been and I probably won't do it on the Smartboard.
2. The students almost always picked working with the same students most days.  Even though I called randomly they usually still ended up with their friends. While that was ok for management because my kids were happier, I want my students to get used to working with other people.  I need a motivator to get them to pick to work with different people.

I will say the positive of letting them pick was they were more engaged.  When students picked a center, even if it was just the last one that they hadn't done, they were more focused than they had been before.

My major problem this last year wasn't the actual centers, but pulling students to my table.  I didn't have to have students at my table to make my center system work like in first grade.  My bad habit became putting my students in centers and then work on something that I needed to or pull students to my table to complete work from a day they had missed.  I wasn't working with struggling students or expanding work for students as much as I needed to.  I did better in math than I did in reading though.

My goal for the coming year is to do a better job pulling students to my table to work in small groups.  One way I plan on doing that is to change how I do centers. I'm going to try doing 4 centers and a fifth group at my table, that way I have to pull students to make my center system work.  Since my centers are becoming pretty low-prep, I can focus on planning for small group time.  More to come on the Journey to the Centers of the Classroom!

End of the Year Brochures

Well it's the wonderful end of the year.  We've been through testing fun days, write-up free days, awards assemblies, packing, cleaning, sending things home, inventories, grades, filing, and all the other wonderful little tidbits that you have to do.  One thing I wanted to do this year was to add a fun project at the end of the year so my third graders could look back on the year and make it something my new class could benefit from.  As I looked around for ideas I saw students doing letters and similar things, but I loved the idea of doing a brochure (can't remember where I saw the idea).

My kids adore using the laptops to publish their writing so I decided the end of the year would be a great time to take that a step farther.  I created a brochure template and decided on four topics: What you love about third grade, how you felt when you came to third grade, fun things you do in third grade, and what you learned in third grade.  I went ahead and put the topics as headings on the brochure template and created textboxes for them to type in.  With this project my goals were for students to type their paragraphs, change fonts, navigate pages, edit text box borders and insert clip art.  We didn't work on the computers as much as I wanted this year, so those tasks in themselves would take a lot of time and effort.

We started by writing a paragraph for each topic.  This crew of kids aren't fans of writing so this is like pulling teeth, but this was something they could identify with, wasn't difficult, and they actually half-way enjoyed it.  When they found out they were getting to publish on the computer and do fonts and borders they were ecstatic.  Their next question was if they got to share them with the class.  They may not like writing but they definitely like talking. The kids loved this project and I can't wait to show them to next year's students.

It is easy to use one of the pre-made templates on Word or Publisher if you are doing editing on the computer.  If you want to be a little more low-tech with this assignment, you can get a free printable here.

Make Your Own Labels

So I haven't been the best blogger.  I have several in progress posts that just aren't getting done for one reason or another.  That is what summer is for right? Blogging more is on my summer to-do list, aka the List that Never Ends and Just Gets Longer and Longer.  I am making progress though!

Another thing on my to-do list is to get more organized in my home office.  Last year I pulled three large tubs out of my extra closet to find them filled with office supplies. I vowed not to buy office supplies any time soon because I obviously had plenty.  True to teacher style more post-its made their way into my cart a couple days later.  I'm a teacher. You can never have too many post-its.  My three gigantic tubs got whittled down into various areas, but most ended up in a twenty tray organizer that I had originally bought for my classroom.  Today I went through and made another box of supplies to go to my classroom and combined some trays.  I now have several empty trays which means I can go buy some new goodies!! That's what that means right??

Well I put post-its on there to show what was in each drawer, but they kept falling off and they looked horrible.

I found this tutorial on Pinterest for making backgrounds and tags. I am in love.  I can now make cute tags for my home and classroom.  You can bet I'm about to go crazy. Here is the finished product of the tags.  It is super simple.

All it took was some scissors and some packing tape and here is the much nicer looking tray (if you ignore the giant filing box on top).