Sunday, January 12, 2014

Starting the New Year

To start the year off our staff had a number of professional development sessions to get our New Year off on the right foot. I was able to have some powerful conversations with a few of my lower elementary teammates about their teaching philosophies. It was interesting to learn more about our different approaches to planning, project-based units and assessments in our classrooms. 
Another kindergarten teacher and I were able to have a great discussion about our use of our literacy block and how we reach all of our learners. We discussed some of the changes that we are making at the start of the New Year to make sure we are accommodating all of our students. We are both going to adapt our Daily 5 model in order to make it a little more kindergarten friendly. We are going to practice read to self and read to someone in a whole group setting in order to build stamina with these difficult tasks. We also talked about different ways to have the students practice these activities. Then we thought we could build in some different choice centers during the daily 5 block that they would be really excited about. 
It was so nice to have the time to collaborate with my teammates. It makes me feel ready to start the New Year off on the right foot! 

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    I enjoyed reading this post because I also use Daily 5 in my classroom. I was thinking about how much easier it would be to implement if my students had been following the model from kindergarten. Because we don't have a literacy program at my school, reading blocks vary from class to class. As a result, Daily 5 is new to some of my students and familiar to others. I would love to hear how practicing as a class worked out - I think it is a great idea!

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