Wow!

Okay, so I know that I'm taking you on a journey in my classroom during the 2010-2011 school year, but I have to take a short break to tell you how excited I am about the upcoming school year.  I just returned home from the WBT National Conference, and I have to say what an amazing time I had!  I picked up some new ideas that I'm pumped to use in my classroom this year.  The sentence ladder is going to totally transform my students' writing.  Super Speed Spelling...can't wait!!!!  Thanks for all the great tools to use in my classroom to help my students learn and be more successful!

Okay, back to my 2010-2011 school year.  I felt that my students had a good foundation with the classroom rules and the scoreboard.  Of course, I had used "Teach-Okay" to teach the rules!  This was huge.  From the beginning I had students telling me that they were loving 3rd grade, because they got to talk to each other and move during class time.  Our building only has one recess a day, so it is extremely important for me to incorporate movement into my lessons.  Let me think about this for a minute...students move in WBT!  What a perfect tool for a teacher to use in their classroom when their students have very little opportunity to get out of the classroom and move!  At our first parent/teacher conference, I had parents telling me that their children loved school, and that this was the first year that it wasn't like pulling teeth to get them to school in the mornings.  Again, I have to give props to WBT for this.  My kids were talking and moving, but they were moving and talking about stuff I wanted them to talk about!  Ooooh, what a great year this was going to be!