Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Setting up the Room for Daily 5

Panorama shot of the disaster area my room is this week!

I spent much of June preparing for using the Daily 5 this fall. I brought hundreds of books back into my classroom and sorted and numbered them. I had the students make tags for the front of the baskets and get their book bags packed for the first day of class.
Some of the book tags turned out quite cute!


I've used stickers and letters on the front of my books in the past. To easily change to a new system I  used a Sharpie to write the number on the card on the back of each book in that basket.
I'm using gallon sized Ziploc bags for storing student books. Their names on written on the front of the bag with a Sharpie and then arranged in tubs according to grade level.

Today, I started trying to figure out where I am going to put all these books, I have over 100 categories! I have a nice little room but at the moment I'm challenged as to where I'll put everything. I'm sure I'll be hitting up garage sales this weekend looking for another bookshelf. I have confidence that with some weeding of stuff I won't need this year and rearranging materials I'll find room for the books. Wish me luck!

Monday, August 5, 2013

Out of Memory

I have an 16gb iPad2 compliments of our PTA. When I tried to load some new apps this week I discovered I was out of memory! I knew it was getting low so I had already moved pictures/videos off the device. Now what? Well, my mantra the past few months has been I'm not teaching to the test. No more worksheets and packets that cause the kids to groan and roll their eyes. We will be reading and writing with choices and working skills in through that. Do I want technology to be a choice? Of course. Do I want the kids doing cute apps that are really nothing more than glorified worksheets? Nope. So, that is where I will begin in deleting apps. I want apps that allow reading, recording, listening to good models of reading, writing, story telling, and word work. No matter how cute an app looks if it's just a fancy worksheet out it goes.