Focus!

Focus has become my new word for my students and me. It was a short week which was even shorter for me so I had to make concessions this week. As you can probably guess, my centers took the hit. The kids didn't do so great on their reading test last week so that took high priority for me this week. They also seem to be struggling with number sense concepts and this disturbs me because they've been practicing rather successfully since week one. A connection is not being made somewhere between the white boards I let them practice on and the practice tests and clicker activities. I'm now looking forward to next week which will give me more time to actually teach.

Mentioning clickers, I came up with something on the fly today that did seem to help. After our first activity I had about half of my students who had passed. I gave them stickers (which of course didn't stick to their clothes and thus an idea was born!). I gave thm a sheet of paper for their sticker and told them I would pass out stickers to those that passed each time. When you collect ten stickers, you will be able to go to the coupon basket and draw for a reward. By the time we finished clicker activities, all but two had earned a sticker sheet, so yes, stickers do motivate!