Friday, September 6, 2013

Observations

I am not very good at blogging. Or keeping notes. I should work on that. :)

In the past two weeks, I've been working primarily with my mentor. Today, though, I went around to observe other teachers and see their instructional strategies. Although my mentor uses interactive notebooks, the foldables are not very interesting. I saw an amazing one today that used the square base fold from origami. I was blown away, and could not conceal my excitement. Seriously, fun stuff.

I also saw some classroom management techniques that I think might be useful. They seem a bit too strict for me, though. :(

Never mentioned this before, but we have a groupwork norm in our classroom using cup management... but in a different way than others may have used. Instead of the colors indicating their noise level, we have the students use the cups as tools for communicating with us if they need help or not.
Green - Everything is sunshine and butterflies. AKA They're doing great.
Yellow - Ehhh they're surviving... but a little help would be appreciated.
Red - They're dying. Come ASAP. (not phrased like this on the poster :P)

If, for some reason, most of the groups have their cups on red, then we would stop the groupwork to clarify things... but that hasn't happened yet! (knock on wood)

And nowwww... happy weekend!