First Student Blog Post, Centers by Brianna

Last year was hard for me to keep up with a blog during the school year. Not only was it my first year in a new grade at a new building, but I was pregnant with my adorable son, Henry, and going to bed around 8:30 almost every night. This year I hope to do much better. One of my ideas was to have my students help me! To do this, I created a weekly classroom job called Blog Writer. Every week one student writes about something new/interesting/fun that we did, takes a few pictures of it, and writes a blog post about it. For the first student post I picked Brianna. She already enjoys writing, and showed me stories she wrote at home "just for fun". I new she would set a great example for a well written post. Here is Brianna's post...

"In Mrs. Mathews' class, we are starting centers. If you are wondering what centers are, I will explain it to you. Centers are different areas where us kids learn while having fun. There are five centers- word search, spelling, listening, computers, and puzzles. Mrs. Mathews is teaching us great strategies to use in the classroom. When we do have a great class during centers, she gives us a treat. By the way, I will explain what we do at each center. At the word search we do a school project like a word search about school. In spelling we practice spelling words. When we do listening we listen to a book to read. When we do computers we play a learning game. When we do puzzles we see new cool pictures of stuff."

Wasn't that great? Way to go Brianna! Thank you for working hard on this post and teaching everyone about how we do centers. Here are some pictures from the centers Brianna wrote about.

Welcome Parents and Students of 2013-2014!

Our year is off to a great start! We have spent 2 weeks getting to know one another, learning procedures of the school and classroom, and digging into reading, writing, math, and a little science! Meet the Teacher night was last Thursday, and I got to meet many of the families of this year's class. My favorite part of the day has always been Reader's Workshop, but this year I'm really loving our math time. I have been finding fun math games (of course on TeachersPayTeachers!) for the kiddos to play. They get so excited and into the games that they probably don't realize they are practicing for our first assessment next week! Another important part of our day is guided reading centers. We began this week with procedures. I have been slowly walking them through each center because I am a firm believer in teaching procedures thoroughly to keep them running smoothly all year. So far they have mastered the computer and listening center. On Wednesdays we have an extra 30 minutes for math in our schedule. This is a perfect time to get some extra technology in, so I sign up for the laptop cart every Wednesday. Today was our first time trying it out, and the class did great! It helped that (almost) all of the laptops were working without much trouble. Until Acuity lessons are ready, we are getting on Education City. The kids love the interactive games and music. Today they played a game called Crazy Golf to practice even and odd numbers.

One fun addition I have this year on my class job chart is "blog writer". Each week a student will be writing about something interesting/fun/special we did in class. I will post their writing in a blog post for parents and followers to read. The kids were excited when I told them it could be read by people anywhere in the world who go to this blog! Come back soon to read what Brianna says about this week at school.

Have a great week!
Mrs. Mathews