Differentiating Sight Word Instruction with COLOR!

I have been looking for a way to keep track of my students Sight Words for a long time, and I am proud to announce that I have found a way to solve all of my Sight Words Problems with my very first TPT product! Check it out on my TPT store.

I printed all 220 Dolch Words on colored paper and taped it to my classroom ceiling. It not only looks beautiful, but it also helps my students learn to their level!

Each color is for a grade level.

orange: pre-primer

pink: primer

blue: first grade

purple: second grade

green: third grade

I then have my students go around the room "stargazing" and trying to find the sight words they are working on!

ClassDojo! Classroom Management Made Easy!

ClassDojo has changed the way I look at positive reinforcement! During my first year of teaching, I learned pretty fast that praising the behaviors you want will make them happen more often. I love the power of praising all students that are doing something right so that all others will want to be doing the same. Last year, I would go around the classroom multiple times a day giving out tickets. Every time a student got 10 tickets, they could trade it for a prize, or save it for bigger prizes. 

For my second year, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a bunch of red tickets to give out. However, my students this year were not getting any motivation from those tickets! I noticed that most of the time I would pull tickets out and try to go around the room silently praising students, most students would be oblivious to the cue.

As I thought about the different learners I have this year, I realized that what worked from my group of students last year would not work for my students this year. I then started looking for other classroom management ideas. I found many good ideas, but I was having a hard time finding something that would be visual enough for my students to notice when I was praising someone. I then came across this awesome video by Joshua Dumas, which showed how ClassDojo can be hooked up to the projector, giving a huge display of students' points for my visual leaners. As I started looking into it, I found more and more good things about ClassDojo. I loved the idea that you can be very specific with your positive praises as mentioned by Flapjack Education Resources on "Fifteen Ways to Give Positive ClassDojo".

I also wanted my students to be setting behavior goals and achieving them. I decided that each day that my students got 10 or more points, they would get a check on their tracker (you can get a Dojo Points Tracker here).

Get your free Belts Posters!

Once they had a few checks, they would earn a karate belt to put on their ClassDojo monsters.

We have had a lot of fun with these and my students have been working really hard to become Dojo ninjas! 

More next time!

Amanda Maliwauki

Addition Facts Practice! Freebie

Math Facts, gotta love them, right? They are not the most fun thing to teach, and they take a long time to stick, but once students can come up with answers without having to use their fingers, it makes a HUGE difference.

My students last year were a lot faster with their math facts, which made me so comfortable that I never even thought about the fact that I should be teaching and working on it with them all the time. However, during my first Math lesson this year, as I tried to start our Math program, I noticed that my students weren't remembering their facts. That's when I decided that we would take about half an hour a day to practice our addition facts.

During Math, I have 4 centers going around. One comes to me to go over the day's lesson. Another group goes with a Math Fluency parents, who times them and helps them with writing their math facts. Then we have an independent work center and a game center. For now, we have an addition Bingo game and also some addition flash cards. You can get a copy of the flash cards HERE!

More next time! =D