What Worked....and What Didn't

The beginning of the year is so full of hope.  Hope that your class will be great.  Hope that you will learn all you have to learn and more.  Hope that those ideas you seek out on Pinterest and through blogs will be the magic bullet that makes your year complete.

Well, my year was filled with a boatload of hope.  I just knew all of the great things I was going to implement were going to be fabulous.  Now.....a year later....hope has turned into reality.  Some of those amazing ideas flourished, while others...not so much.  So I thought I would take a little time to reflect on what worked and what didn't.

What Worked

Math Workshop.  It went through many changes this year, but overall, I am SO excited with how it all turned out.  It is still a work in progress, and will continue to evolve next year (and the years to come) but it really is a happy spot in my schedule.  Here is a post I did about some of the changes (and it has even changed since then!) 






Read Alouds.  This year, I got immense joy taking literary journeys with my class.  I placed reading aloud time directly into my daily schedule so I was sure we would never miss it and I am SO glad I did.  Once again, we are in the middle of a story that took a bit to "get off the ground" but now, you could hear a pin drop when I am reading.  It is the best feeling ever to look out into a group of students and know you have 100% of their attention because of a book you are reading.  It really is priceless.

Paragraph of the Week transitioning to Essay of the Month.  You know how sometimes you make something and you aren't sure just how it will work in your classroom?  That is how both POW and EOTM were.  I knew what I had been doing, but wasn't really sure that organizing it in such a manner would work.  But let me tell you...it did.  My kids' writing was AWESOME this year.  When they took the district end of the year test, they rocked the writing!  I know that is because they had the structure that POW provided broken down even further into EOTM. 

Close Reading.  I did a lot of experimenting with Close Reading this year (since we were just entering into the CCSS) and I LOVED what was happening in my room.  There were so many great lessons that involved closely reading text and I am so happy about it!  Here are all of the posts I wrote about the topic.  Just scroll through and you truly will see some of my most favorite work.









What Didn't

This was before they were destroyed.

Wipe Off Dots.  I had this awesome idea to put these wipe off dots on my small group table.  Kids could come to the table, do the work on the dots, erase, and go back to their seats.  Genius!  Yeah...not so much.  By the end of the year, they were peeling off and they looked like a hot mess.  I eventually just got rid of the entire table in favor of a rug space for my small groups.

They do look pretty...but I couldn't take the colors.

Striped Ribbon Borders.  They were beautiful.  But they were different colors.  I just couldn't handle the fact that I had 5 different boards with 5 different color borders.  It drove me bonkers...so I eventually took them down.

See that HUGE chair foot shaped hole?

Felt on the Chair Feet.  I LOVED this idea.  No more chasing down runaway tennis balls.  No more noisy chairs on the hard floor.  The problem was that the felt either 1) came off because the rubber bands broke, 2) came off some other way, or 3) wore through so there was on felt on the actual foot.  I know there has to be a solution to these problems, and I am determined to find one.



OK....so now that you know what worked for me and what didn't, I want to know what worked (and didn't) for you!   This is a link up...so get to writing a post about it to share with us all!  (and if you don't have a blog, PLEASE share in the comments!)

An InLinkz Link-up