A Day in My (School) Life

Miss Klohn, at Adventures of a 6th Grade Teacher AND TBA are both having a great linky party....A Day in My Shoes!  So I am linking up to show you what a typical Friday is like for me.  (now, this isn't every day...just Friday.  I wish I had a set M-F schedule, but I just don't :( )


6:45am ... I wake up :)

7:30am ... get to school, so some fairly uninteresting things (copy, get my hot chocolate)

8:10am .... Meet the students on the yard.  Ask for bus notes, take a visual attendance, walk back to the room.

8:15am ... Students come in and immediately begin working on their Morning Message.  They then continue on with Independent Work Time.

 

8:20am ... After I have taken attendance (on the computer, we are so technological) and cafeteria count (the old fashioned way on paper), I begin calling my first Language Arts group.  Today, I was working on combining sentences with two groups.  My aide (I am SOOOOO lucky to have an aide) pulls another group for ELD work.

8:35am ... Welcome, announcements, morning greeting

 

 8:38am ...  Review Morning Message.  Volunteers line up at the ELMO and correct things on the message.  The other students check their messages against the corrections that are going up on the doc cam.  Then I go over it really quickly, pointing out figurative language (since that was the standard I wanted to hit today)

8:45am ... Fluency Practice.  

8:55am ... Go over comprehension homework from the night before.  Review the strategies for tackling something like this, model underlining evidence, circling key words, etc...

9:00am ... Intervention.  Here, again, I am SO SO SO lucky.  My school has set up a program where, twice a week (because I have the EL class) I get two aides in my room, as well as access to the Learning Lab.  I send out 15 kids to the Learning Lab where they are reviewing key standards and test taking skills for the CST.  I keep 15 kids and break them into 3 groups.  Each adult in the room takes 5 students, and we are going over fluency, text features, and other CST related skills (this week was figurative language).  It is a WONDERFUL time and I felt so productive today!  Oh...and I pop open my first Diet Pepsi of the day around this time.

9:40am ... Language Arts Quiz.  This is a combined comprehension/language arts skills test.  They work on it, which does take quite a while (they have to show evidence for EVERYTHING!), and when they are done, they continue with their independent work that needs to be completed for the week.  This includes writing assignments, open ended problems, thinking maps or other responses to literature.

10:15am ... Recess :)

10:35am ... Students begin to work on their Calendar for the day.  While they are doing that, I am working with a small group on math remediation.  Today, I worked on putting fractions on a numberline (with those kids who still didn't get it from the Fraction Concept lesson the day before)  For those students who finish Calendar a bit early, they begin working on Math Workshop.  I will explain that at a different time :)

11:00am ... Kids take their timed multiplication test, then we correct the math homework from last night.

11:10am ... Math Quiz time!  Again, they need to show evidence on EVERYTHING, and are not allowed to bring it up to me to look at (I check each problem for evidence, not for the right answer) unless there is something written on each problem.  I find this trains them for the CST.  By requiring evidence, and me checking it, it becomes habit so that when the CST comes...and I can't even look at the test...they do it automatically.  When students finish, they work on their Math Workshop while waiting for everyone.

12:00pm ... Recorder time!!  The students are learning how to play the recorder, and I am teaching them.  I know, there are some people rolling over with fits of laughter at the thought of me playing a musical instrument, but trust me....it isn't too difficult and the kids LOVE it!  (the picture is fro our Holiday program...not Friday ;) )

12:20pm.... LUNCH!!

1:00pm ... Equivalent Fractions.  We needed to catch up on a fraction lesson, so I had the students use fraction bars to discover equivalent fractions for some common simplified fractions (ie:  1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc...)  They then created circle maps for those fractions.







1:30pm.... Payroll and classroom store!









2:00pm... Paper pass back, table points, clean up....get ready to go home, then pull up on rug for our story, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread



2:30pm.... Walk kids out to bus lines and dismiss!

So there you have it.   Friday in a nutshell!