Post-Winter Break Reset

January is the time that many teachers do a reset. After students have been away for a week or two, it is always important to review the expectations of the classroom. 

However, I also use this time to reset my classroom space as well. We are almost halfway done with the school year and I have gotten to know my students better as learners. Honestly, I like to change my space around throughout the entire year, but this is the time that I reflect and think about what my learners truly need on the walls, what learning spaces they need, and what materials they need.

I rearranged my tables and desks to give students options for learning spaces. I have two exercise balls and I have stools that students can use if they want a break from their chairs. I also allow them to sit on the carpet whenever they would like. I am wanting to move towards flexible seating in the entire room, but due to the amount of money this involves, I am slowly working on getting the needed furniture for that.

I also redid my wall space. Being in a new grade level means that it takes time to create the resources that I typically use in my classroom. Things like anchor charts, vocabulary cards, etc. When you teach the same grade level for 9 years, you accumulate items that you can reuse over and over. Luckily, moving from 5th to 4th has allowed me to reuse some items.

One thing I have been working on is redoing my math vocabulary cards that I hang on the wall as we learn about a new topic. I finally decided to sit down and update my math vocabulary for the year. All of my vocabulary cards have the vocabulary word, a definition, an image, and sometimes an example.

Vocabulary Cards:

4th Grade

5th Grade

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Cafe Board and Interesting Word Collector

The second part of The Daily Five is the Cafe. This is a set of strategies that are broken into the four components of reading. (To learn more about them, check out www.thedailycafe.com/cafe)

For my Cafe board I decided to make strips that have the strategies listed on them and then once we have gone over one of the strategies we add it to the Cafe board.  Also, I use the mini-Post-It note pads and have one for each student and put their sticky note under the exact strategy they are working on rather than at the top of each column.

Here is the Cafe board in my classroom:

Here are my resources:

• PDF of Cafe Strategies
• CAFE menu headings

The Interesting Word Collector is as a word wall. Throughout the school year we will add words to this wall that we come across in reading or writing.

Here is the Interesting Word Collector in my classroom:

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Math Word Wall

I am pretty sure I have changed the way my word wall looks almost every year I have been teaching, but this past year I was really excited about how it looked and wanted to share it with you all!

As mentioned in a previous post, we adopted a new math curriculum this school year. So I decided to create my word wall as we went through the year. Each unit I would decide which words needed to be added and that is how I grouped them on the wall. 

Each word wall card is 1/3 of a piece of paper so that it is large enough for students to see the word, definition, and an image that helps explain the meaning of each word.

You can download them for FREE from the resources page on my blog or by clicking on the image below.

Vocabulary/Word Wall Cards Done Easy

It has been a while! Even though this is my 8th year of teaching, I always forget how the first month of school is always a crazy whirlwind where I feel like I am trying to catch up!

Now that things have settled down it is time to get back into action on this blog!

First up, a super quick and easy way to make vocabulary word cards for a word wall, focus board, or flash cards for the students using Google Slides

To make these word cards:

• Create a new Google Slides document
• Decide if you want the cards to be widescreen (16:9) or standard (4:3). To do this, click on File --> Page Setup --> Choose a size.
• Choose the slide layout that has a title at the top and nothing else on the slide.
• Type your vocabulary word in the "title" section. On the first slide, format your font size and style that you want for all of your slides so that it will be easy to keep them all the same.
• Click on Insert --> Image --> Search. This will allow you to do a Google search for an image you want and the nice thing is the images that are returned are all labeled for reuse with modification!
• Click on the image you want to insert and then click on Select.
• Once you are ready to create the next vocabulary word, right click and choose Duplicate Slide or click on Slide on the menu bar and Duplicate Slide. This keeps your formatting the same for each slide. Just delete the picture and search for a new one.

I prefer to print the cards with four slides on a page as seen above so that they fit nicely on my word wall.

When printing the cards:

• Click on File --> Print settings and preview.
• Where it says 1 slide without notes, you can click to see your other options. I usually choose Handout - 4 slides per page. I also use Landscape.
• Once you have chosen the size that works for you, click on Print or Download as PDF if you want to save for later.