Final day: Linky Party and FB hop

Just a quick reminder that today is the final day of our 2nd grade Winter Wonderland Facebook Hop. 

Here's a link to my Facebook page where you can find my freebie.  You'll also need to head over to Tori's Facebook page to get the links to all of the other (OVER 30) bloggers who are participating!

Today is also the last day of Blog Hoppin's Welcome 2014 linky party!

I'll be talking about Days 4 & 5: Professional and Organization.

There are so many professional changes that I want to make.  I'm waiting on some things to work themselves out and am hoping for some clarity soon.  My OLW for 2014 is faith and I'm leaning on it right now.  

Back to my goals.  I want to fully implement more strategies from whole brain teaching.  I started reading the book Whole Brain Teaching for Challenging Kids over the summer (you can read my reflections here).  I've been good implementing some of the basics, but as with anything management related, I need to be consistent with it.

Another area I want to focus on is interactive notebooking.  I'll be sharing some of what I've done recently in this area, because I love it and my kids have a blast with it.  I've been good using it in social studies and science and implementing basic foldables in math and language arts.  I really want to make this a mainstay in my classroom.

Similarly, I love using task cards in my classroom.  We use them to review whole class, as a check for understanding, an early finisher activity, or an exit slip.  Like foldables and interactive notebooking, I want this to be a routine part of my classroom.

Finally, I want to integrate more literature into math.  I love Stuart J. Murphy's books and want to get back to using them when I introduce concepts.  For me, these books lend themselves to creating meaningful math lessons that have real world connections for my students.

A few days ago I read THIS post from Clutter-Free Classroom where she talked about the direction of her blog and decided to focus on certain areas for her posts.  I LOVE this idea and want to use the goals that I just laid out to be the focus of this blog.  I know that I will grow as a professional by committing myself to implementing these strategies and instructional methods and I can't wait to start!

 

I love organization!  Labeling things, color coding and sorting...all these things make my heart happy.

One of the biggest organizational obstacles for me has been paper clutter.  I've been known to hide stacks of papers in file cabinets just so my kidney table is clean....don't tell my colleagues!  A tool that my grade level purchased this summer was this paper sorter:

We picked them up from Amazon for less than $20.  I know the picture is blurry, but it has 31 flaps.  Students lift the flap and put their paper under it.  Since my students are numbered alphabetically, once they put their assignment/homework/test in the sorter and I slide the papers out, they are ready to grade!  It eliminates the step of having to put papers in alphabetical order before entering them into my gradebook or even just returning them to students' pick up folder.

I swear as teachers it's the little things that make us happy and this is one of those things that makes my heart happy!

I also want to get better at making lunches for me and my daughter at night, as well as laying out my clothes for the next day.  Doing these simple things will save me time as well as keep me sane in the morning.

What are your professional and organizational goals?