RTI and Daily Five!

Today we started our RTI groups in first grade.  I love our RTI groups but my challenge is what to do with the rest of my students during this time.  I don't want them to just sit and do worksheets and 'useless' work, plus RTI is right in the middle of our Daily Five time.  Now, prior to today, we rotated through the Daily Five centers.  Every student went to every center both Wednesday and Thursday.  This allowed me to see every student in a small group setting both days but for only about ten minutes a group.  That wasn't going to work with RTI mixing it all up.  Today, I took a leap and LET GO!  I let the kids choose what Daily Five they wanted to complete.  Now I told them my expectations for today and tomorrow and if certain things were not completed, then they would have to complete them during Free Choice on Friday.  I totally expected craziness, but it went great.  The independence was amazing and it was nice to see them not forced at every center.  Some kids even said they can't wait to write more tomorrow!  Plus our RTI group was not interrupted at all.  Day one down in the books and I'm happy with what I am seeing.  :)

Substitute and Flipping....?????

As my two days of being gone approached....I could feel the nerves about math fill me up inside.  How in the world was math going to work with a sub?  We FINALLY have everything down.  The kids are only use to me teaching them on the screen, and NOW I'm going to have a sub come and teach traditionally.  Not only that, it was the two days that we are introducing subtraction.  Why did I have to have these doctor appointments, especially now?  I thought for awhile thinking that I would just let her, the sub who is amazing, teach it traditionally and then we will get back into the routine of things when I get back.  Then I thought of all the fun little 'tricks' I have to introduce subtraction and I just couldn't stand it.  I decided to record both of my lessons and still do the centers the way we do it every single day.  The only difference would be is the sub would only pull those students she thought were struggling and I had my intervention cards out for her to use if she felt necessary.  From the sub plans I got back today when I returned, her big comment was WOW, THANKS FOR THE GREAT PLANS!!  I am so happy that I didn't break our routine and that it was 'doable' for my sub.  Not only did my students not miss a beat, they were so excited to show me what 'I' had taught them while I was gone.  #flippingisthewaytogo

Backwards Design Unit

My planning of my backwards design unit makes the most sense to me.  I sit down and look at the unit as a whole.  Where are we starting and where do we want to end?  I think this makes the most sense when planning a unit.  For my school, we have to follow our curriculum for math and language arts.  Almost like a script.   With social studies and science though, we have more freedom.  This is where I chose to start my backwards design.  Last spring, I planned a backwards design unit on the body unit.  What I noticed the most, I took more chances with allowing the students to take hold of the instruction. In years prior, this would have made me nervous, but since I knew where we were going with the unit, it allowed me to let the students explore on their own with very little guidance.  The results were amazing.  As I begin my backwards designed unit in social studies, I look forward to see where the students are going to be most interested.  So far, I can not believe the ideas they have come up with even when it just comes to making up a song or rhyme about the oceans.  The standards are clear and the objectives are known.  The path we take to meet them are up to the students and their interests and intelligences.  I love it.

Flipped First Grade

While teaching math last year, I found that I had very little time to differentiate.  I had students of all levels.  I tried different ways to have my high students go and watch me teach on the iPad at the same time I taught my other students, but the high students would not understand the vocabulary and terms the Math Expressions curriculum uses.  I also noticed during my whole group instruction, certain students would be extremely bored with the slow process of helping the other students understand what was being taught.  The students who were low also seemed to just give up in the whole group setting.  The only students benefiting from the whole group instruction were the on-level students.  This needed to change which led to me researching different ways on how we could use our one hour of math time the most appropriately.  As I read and read, nothing seemed to fit our classroom.  I needed to have the whole group instruction to get across the different techniques and terminology that is used in our curriculum.  A lot of things I found talked about grouping and using hands on approaches.  All of these I wanted to use, but how was I going to fit it all in.  Then, I stumbled on the secondary idea of the flipped classroom.  The first thing I thought was this is not possible for a primary grade level.  The independence that is needed to flip was something that turned me away from this idea at first.  As I read other approaches, I kept going back to the flipped idea.  I finally decided to make the dive into flipping. I knew it was not going to be exactly as those I had read, but I found research supporting the flipped classroom in grades K-12.  As I have begun the flip, I have found that I have multiplied myself and allowed my students to have as many 'Miss C's' as they need.  This year in math is going to be career changing.