I wish my brain was set to creative mode at the moment. The first day of school; however, wiped out all of my creative energies for blogging. I guess that's what I get for spending the majority of the day before jumping from decorating my door with a "Where in the World are the Speech Detectives" (with a giant Carmen San Diego) theme and laminating everything in sight. I made it through round one of hearing screening and just want to sleep.
On a side note--I would like to thank the wonderful individuals who gave me crime scene tape two years ago for my grad. school detective theme. I finally used it to decorate the closet doorway and my desk. Kids beware...my desk is a crime scene (and will clearly look like one after IEPs/evals start up).
I also figured out that my wonderful idea of fixing my in-service/SOAP note forms at the end of last year backfired. I lost the majority of those files somehow and have 9 still left to fix. Not my best day. I'm mostly upset because it will take me longer to get through the Common Core standards now. I did make a file for articulation, voice, & fluency after a suggestion from Shannen W. a few days ago. You can find it here or on my goal bank page for Speaking & Listening.
End of complaints.....
I found a cool game to try with my older kids soon....
The reviews on Amazon are so-so about the game. I'll take them with a grain of salt as my students loved Uno Spin last year. The reason why I have Uno in my room? I like to use the colors as a way to drill the kids. It doesn't work for all goals, but I have used it for sentence formulation.
I also tried out a different way of schedule planning this year. I took a basic piece of poster board and wrote out time slots with the days of the week. I laminated the poster and wrote all of my students' names on post-its. I've placed the post-its around the board to schedule my groups. I'm very visual when it comes to my schedule and this seems to click better than using a spreadsheet. It made my life so much easier! All I have left to do is convert it to a computer document to give to teachers/administration
Do you work with teachers to make the schedule or just give them the schedule?
ReplyDeleteThis is only my second year of making a schedule, but what I have learned so far is to work closely with the EC teachers at first. I wait until they have their schedules arranged so I can see who's going to be difficult to schedule and who will be fairly easy to see. I develop a rough sketch of what I would like to do and then I send out an email to all of the teachers with students on my caseload. I ask them to let me know if I need to switch students around due to conflicts like reading group or Core workshop times. It went over pretty well last year and I always try to be as flexible as possible. The post-its make changing students around to fit the teacher's needs during the discussion so much easier too.
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