My Back to School Lesson Plans

Hi friends! I have received a few messages on my Facebook page from teachers who are moving from the primary grades to intermediate and were curious about my back to school lesson plans.  

So I compiled a post for you guys of my first eight days of school.  Make sure you scroll all the way and down read the entire post for links to the products and freebies included in my back to school lesson plans! 

Our first week of school is a three day week and our second week is a five day week.  

Products featured in my plans: 

• Fabulous Back to School Fun 
• Story of My Name 
• Cooking Up a Great Year Together 
• Types of Sentences Activity Pack 
• School Year Scrapbook 

As you can see, we spend a lot of time learning and practicing procedures, building community, and getting to know each other.  I feel this is SO important, no matter what grade you teach!  You might feel the curriculum crunch, but I promise you WILL make up that time.  Especially if you are doing the Daily Five.  Model and practice those procedures again and again until your students get it right.  Time invested in that now will pay off, I promise.  The years I jumped right into curriculum have been some of my rockiest years.  I certainly teach academics those first two weeks but my main focus is on rules, routines, and community building.  

My school year scrapbook is a new product, and one that I'm SO excited about! I always did a  scrapbook with my third graders and they loved it. However, as the demands of being in a testing grade increased, I stopped doing them a few years ago.  I forgot about them until I ran into one of my former third graders, who is now going into tenth grade, and she told me that she still has her third grade scrapbook and how special it was to her.  So I spent some time this summer turning our messy and time consuming scrapbooks into something more manageable! 

The new version has NO cutting or gluing! All you need to do is select one of the included cover pages and select a monthly page for your students to complete and assemble them before school starts.  I plan on using the stapler setting on our copier that puts a staple at the top and bottom of the page, this makes the packet into a booklet.  One of my coworkers is planning on hole punching the pages and putting them into folders.  

I included multiple options for the beginning and end of the year and for each month. I have options for August-July.  All you need to do is select the pages that best fit your class.  

On the first school day of each new month, I will have my students fill out their scrapbook page for the previous month.  This literally takes twenty minutes tops.  They brainstorm their memorable moments, write about their favorite memory, and color the picture on the page to give it more of the scrapbook feel.  I let them choose memories from home and school, but you can do what works for you!  Here's an example of a completed page:

School Year Scrapbook is a yearlong memory book and makes an awesome keepsake for your students.  I can't wait to show you pictures of our scrapbooks throughout the year. :) 

I also get by with some help from some friends during Back to School!  Our first two weeks in reading are spent on reading strategies and I use Ashleigh's amazing Reading Strategies Unit.  Seriously, go check it out.  Everything you need to get your students really thinking about their reading is in one easy to use file.  It is pictured under reading in my visual plans. I plan on using this fun Finish the Picture freebie from the Thinker Builder as part of our morning work on the first day of school. 

I use the Daily Five to organize my literacy block and follow The Sisters guide for implementation pretty much step by step.  I highly encourage you to read the book if you are thinking of implementing the Daily Five with your students. There are lots of great blog posts about it out there about the Daily Five but the book made it all click for me.  You can find the Second Edition of The Daily Five {here}. 

You can also find a list of the books I use with Cooking Up a Great Year Together to promote a caring classroom environment {here}.  The Toothpaste Words activity is offered as a freebie on my blog {here}. 

Enjoy your day, friends! I hope you found my Back to School Lesson Plans helpful.  

Thinkin' About Lesson Plans and Behavior Sheets

Today I spent a little quality time with my computer drafting up my lesson plans/behavior communication sheets for next year.  

Back in my third grade days, my awesome team and I shared the same lesson plan template.  It was great because we often shared lesson plan writing duties for certain subjects and could just email the template back and forth.  This worked really well, because it was back in the days before I discovered dafont.com and downloaded a bajillion fonts on my computer that that others don't have at school and word documents could be shared easily.  Now that I hoard all kinds of fonts from all over the web, not so much.  ;) It looked like this. 

Loved seeing the week at glance.  Hated Times New Roman and the tables in Word if you need more space in one column.  Only the good Lord knows how many times I wanted to scream, yell, and throw my keyboard out the window when my table went onto the next page.  

Last year, I went through lots of different templates, but I never quite found one that worked for me. You can read more about that, here.  One of the things I really liked about using a whole page for a day template last year was that it was much easier to write sub plans, as I tended to be a little bit more detailed, and I could just leave the lesson plan page in a pinch, like a meeting, etc. 

I played around today and came up with this.  At the beginning of the week, I have this Week in a Peek sheet where I can list our overall scope and sequence for the week.  Plus spaces for my intervention focus skills/groups.  This is the first time we've done ELA intervention groups as a grade level at the same time, so I'm sure this template will change, but I really like having a rough map of the week and a place to list my centers/intervention groups for math.

 This is my actual lesson plan template draft.  What I like about it all the boxes lay out my day in sequence, I've seen a lot that don't, and the lesson break down in math.  I do a lot of group rotations in math, and I like having a place to put the structure of that day's lesson.   Plus it was created in Powerpoint, meaning formatting is a little bit easier!

I'm fortunate that we don't have to submit our plans weekly and we have the freedom to create plan templates that work best for us.  Our plans are reviewed twice a year though by our administration.  Again this is very much a draft.   I'm not sure I'm crazy about it yet, but at least it's a start.  

I also created a VERY rough draft of my grade level's daily behavior check in.  

I'm not sure how I feel about this one yet.  I like the color coding and number coding, but I'm still playing around with the words.  I've never really had success with a daily check in sheet like this, so I'm hoping the coloring and number coding makes it more manageable and hoping that fourth graders are responsible/independent enough to color their calendar on their own.  My second graders NEVER got the hang of it and I kinda just gave up! I am continuing my clip chart again, but modifying a bit to fit my needs a little more since I will be doing ED full inclusion, so I just picked colors for the color coding at the top. 

 I plan on copying this on the back for days that just need a little bit more communication than just a number code. 

Any thoughts?  Are either one of these something you be interested in seeing in my TpT store?  Friends who have used behavior calendars, any tips for me?  Behavior calendars are a tool that my grade level has found very helpful in the past for informing parents of behavior and for documentation for conferences/meetings, so I'm hoping to finally find something that works for me! :)

Lesson Plans and Anchor Charts, Oh My!

It's like Christina from Mrs. Brainbridge's Class read my find because she posted her lesson plans and invited us to do the same.  When I was pondering what to blog tonight, the first thing that came to my mind was lesson plans and then I saw her post. :)

I've been through three lesson plan templates this year.  Three.  The first one was one a colleague gave me when I changed schools/grades.  It was okay.  I didn't love it.  It serve a purpose because I just wrote on it when I did my plans but I grew to hate it.  I previously had typed my plans for four years.  I am a horrible speller and found I just couldn't fit everything in that I needed when I hand wrote them.  So, I went back to my third grade template:

 

It worked for a few weeks and I felt way more comfortable using the template I had used since I started teaching. Although the familiarity was comforting, I wanted something different. 

Then Mrs. Jump started posting her plans for her Penguin unit and I was intrigued.  Her plans were so detailed, it was like I could walk in and teach her class.  Since I'm new to my grade level, everything is new to me, and I really like having more detailed plans.  So I typed this weeks plans like the following picture, which is a screen shot of today's plans.

If it looks blurry, click on the image and hopefully the link will be a bit clearer for you.  While yes, these plans are a bit more detailed and thus take more time, I'm loving them for several reasons.
1. They forced me to get really familiar with this upcoming week's curriculum, so I wasn't running around ragged this morning trying to read it all.
2. I am out every other Thursday for the next three months for Common Core adoption work for my district.  Having detailed day to day plans will make it so much easier to plan for a sub!

I still mark all over my plans, so they aren't as need in my binder.  :)  I love using last years plans to help me refresh my memory and help guide the development of my current plans, so I mark all over them! I found this awesome freebie on First Grade Glitter and Giggles and I'm sure it will make its appearance in my lesson plan book soon.  My assistant principal is obessed with blogs and Pinterest, so I'm sure she'll get a kick out of it!

What type of lesson planner are you?  I usually take a notebook to my team planning meetings and put my notes in the tab for the subject but then go home and spread out my manuals, search blogs and Pinterest and then type away on my keyboard.  With King of Queens usually on in the background because I apparently still think it's 2004.  I used to a lot of my planning at school but that was when I taught next door to my best friend and had a desk to spread all my resources out on.  My desk at my school now barely holds my computer, barely. 

On Mondays, in this case Tuesday, we spend a lot of time making anchor charts of our new learning for the week. Although mine are not very pretty, okay they aren't, I love making them with the kids.  I tried typing out the headers for my compare and contrast anchor chart but had a surprise parent meeting today before school, so they never made it of my jump drive and sent to the printer. Sad times.  Sad times. I'm not a talented artists, nor do I have great handwriting, so they aren't pretty but they get the job done. :)  That's what matters. 

I this isn't a new concept but today I let the kids draw the strategies for our anchor start for double digit addition and subtraction.  They loved it.  Which is awesome because we're making one tomorrow for subtraction!

I'm off to roll over my grades for report cards.  I didn't have a plan today,  I am the adviser for my school's student council and we met during my plan today.  I always kinda dread not having a plan time but always enjoy working with some great leaders from classrooms around the school once it starts.

Have a great evening!