Reading Centers, Changes and Open House

Good News:  After a lot of practice and preparation Reading Centers are going GREAT in my Reading Group.  I mean REALLY GREAT!  Last week my principal and 5 other teachers and administrators came in during centers with an award, flowers and cameras.  My kids looked up from their centers for a second then got right back to work!  Talk about actively engaged.  I was secretly hoping my principal could use that as a "walk through observation" for my evaluation.  We do two 25 minute rotations a day.  My centers are Listening, Skills, Technology, Independent Work, Word Work and Reading.  Here are a couple of pics from last week.  (Sorry they are not the best but you get the idea.)

At Technology students take a practice spelling test and email me their results.  It is a great App.  You can add your own words and sentences!  They also read a story and played a sound sorting game.

Write the Room.  Last week we worked on plural!

Skills...REALLY bad pic, sorry!  This was Messed Up Monkey Sentences.  It works on sentence order, capitalization and punctuation.  Grab it for $1 HERE at my TPT store.

Bad News:  How we do centers will be changing this week.  Due to numbers our school gained half a second grade unit but in return we lost half a first grade unit.  My super awesome colleague, Kathy, volunteered to teach the 1/2 combo class.  As I have talked about before, my team groups for reading.  Since I teach the enrichment group it made most since for the second graders to join me for reading.  I will now be teaching a 1/2 reading group.  Holy logistics!  My super organized personality and OCD are coming in quite handy:-).  I am actually excited for the challenge and I will have LOVELIES in my group.  I have how it is going to work all planned out.  I will let you know if it works after next week!  Fingers crossed!

Now some pics from Open House. 

We lined our hallway with our Pete the Cats from Deanna Jump!  The kids (and teachers) LOVED Pete!!!

This was at each seat.  It was an easy way for the parents to see what we are leaning in each subject.

Leaf Math Stories

Apple Math Stories.
The tree craftivity is from A Cupcake for the Teacher.  I just made the apple math story for the bottom.

Guessing Jar--the most popular event of the evening!  Families make a guess about how many tootsie rolls are in the jar.  The next day we find the winner during Calendar Math.  We put our guesses in order from least to greatest and count them by making groups of 10.

However, I saw this on Raegan's blog and will be getting one for next year!  SO cute!!!!

Our Family Glyphs.  Idea from Shari Sloane!

This year we put the names inside the door.  That way we did not have to untape them to see if the family guesses were correct!  

Whew....that was a long post!  If you are still with me, don't forget my TPT store is on sale through midnight tonight in honor of FALL!  Click the pic below to head on over!

Meredith