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!

Week Two

Let me say up front that week two did not go as planned. I did not get to focus on Read to Self like I wanted, but I did introduce Word Work and it was a hit. Listen to Reading was not as impressive to my students, but I thought they did a great job listening to Boom Town each day. On Thursday I was brave enough (and prepared) to introduce my clickers - big yay and amen to that activity!!! My students begged me to use clickers everyday, all day - oh how I wish I was that prepared! So now my weekend will be used grading and creating clicker activities.
Now onto a few pics:

I wrote loose objectives on boards from Pinterest. They were more focus skills than objectives, but they reminded me to stay on track.

These adorable guys are Quiet Critters. They can be found in the Halloween section of Michaels for $2.99 of sixteen. They sit on my students' desks and remind them to be quiet. They don't like a loud talking or talking when teaching is going on, nor do they enjoy being handled. Quiet Critters leave when these behaviors go on, and no treats are given if they leave. On the other hand, Skittles, Gummi Bears, and tickets were rewarded for keeping Quiet Critters all day! Very popular and successful for most of my students, so yay me!

These are part of my Word Work center/station. I've read about them on several blogs, and downloaded an activity sheet called Shake, Read, Write from a blog (Fourth Grade Frolics I believe). I have four: weekly spelling words, weekly vocabulary words, sight words, and Teacher's Choice (words I think third graders should know - right now I have days of the week). The students sift through the pom-poms (tactile and just fun) to pull out a word, read the word, spell the word as they write. Then they repeat, but highlight vowels when they are finished writing, and finally rainbow write.
Here is my reason for using a center that is perfect for first grade in third grade: writing. In a few years the ARMT+ (or whatever it will be called by then) will be used as writing assessment. Spelling is part of writing. Our students are taught to read sight words, but not always to spell. Or sometimes they just need more practice to be successful at spelling. There are words such as days of the week, months of the year, holiday, etc., that I think kids should learn to spell, so this is the perfect place for this as well. And let us not forget, third graders are kids - they like to do things like this. Give them a pencil, tell them to write their words, and you can forget it; but give them highlights and ink pens of different colors and tell them to write their words - they love it!