Saturday, July 7, 2012
Losing my summer motivation
Uh-oh! Just 3 weeks into summer break, and I am losing my motivation to get things organized for next school year. Actually, I am sure it was the one week of painting my children's bedrooms and then 2 weeks of vacation that caused the motivation to disappear. Oh well, it has been fun! Time to start planning for next year...I will be teaching Reading/Writing/Language Arts again, so that is going to be my main focus. This past year, we "teamed" and I taught Math to two groups and my partner teacher taught the Reading/Writing/Language Arts. I am really excited to be back to a "self-contained" classroom this year. I loved working with two groups of students, and my partner teacher was great, but our schedule was so fixed and I missed being able to integrate lessons easily and to take extra time for those teachable moments.
I really want to try Daily 5/CAFE in my classroom. Does anyone have any great advice for doing this in 4th grade? It seems a lot of the resources out there are geared to the primary levels. However, I can totally see the value of Daily 5/CAFE in the upper-elementary grades as well. I figure I will adjust the "5" as needed (I have seen some 4th/5th grade teachers suggest doing 3 of the 5).
Well, just sitting down to write this blog post has given me some of my motivation back :) I need to research Daily 5/CAFE for 4th grade, then I will post any great resources I find here!
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I teach 4th and I use Daily 5 in my classroom. Are you reading the book as part of the upper grade book study? There is one going on at We Read, We Blog, We Teach - we just did Chapter 3 today. I also have been writing posts at my blog about what worked in my classroom. Hope this helps. :)
ReplyDeleteEmily
I Love My Classroom
www.ilovemyclassroom.blogspot.com
Emily, thank you so much! I was just checking out your blog and your info is WONDERFUL!!!! I read the book a few years ago, but because I was not teaching (I took 2 years off to be home with my kids while finishing my MAEd), I didn't really read it while thinking about a certain grade level...does that make sense? I will check out the book study!!
ReplyDeleteThat makes complete sense. I just learned about it last Fall, and started in November. This will be my first complete year using it. It made such a difference in my classroom last year though.
ReplyDeleteAs for motivation - all I seem to want to do is school projects lately. My husband just asked me last night if I was going to enjoy Summer break at all - he just doesn't understand... Right now I feel like if I do this stuff now, then I can relax closer to the beginning of school. Of course if I charged my Kindle then I could actually read some of those books and really relax.
Hope you have a great day!
Hi! I came across your blog on TBA and I think we have so much in common!! I love your blog and relate to so many of your comments on your summer bucket list. I just started my own blog and have really enjoyed the blogging world these past couple weeks (where have I been?!?). I nominated you for two awards too. Stop by my page to pick them up!! Hope to see you around in the blog world:)
ReplyDelete~Holly
Fourth Grade Flipper