Lessons With Coffee

I actually made this quite a while ago...>But never got around to blogging about it. I wanted to make hall passes because I HATE WRITING OUT PASSES.  We have a no pass policy at our school "unless it is an emergency."  I am a believer that if it is your time (ie, I am not teaching and you are not taking a test...) and you need to go to the bathroom, who am I to stop you? So I decided to make some uber cute passes. I got my supplies...You might recognize some of them from my birthday sign.  A plank, three (actually 4 but I knew I only wanted three) small planks for the passes, paint, brushes, wood cut outs, three pegs. I painted the main plank blue when I was painting my birthday sign.   I used the Martha Stewart Spray Paint Kit to make it blue in a jiffy. THen I painted my hooks. These were actually a pain in the ass to paint.  Then I glued them on.  I just used good old fashioned ELMERS GLUE ALL since I knew ...

Summer seems to be the time that I am actually able to get some blogs in.  I have this grand idea of being this amazing teacher, girlfriend, doggie momma, AND blogger.  Yeah right. So here I sit in the sun shining through my living room window, Lorde is on my radio and coffee is in my hands.  I am blogging.  I found this link up that I really liked to get into the groove of blogging.  The link up is from Laura at Where the Magic Happens .  She has a great little blog and I LOVE her thoughts on behavior management.  So here we go. Today, I am digging into behavioral management.   Last year was a special year.  It marked my (technically) 2nd year teaching.  I had my own classroom this year (my first year I was on a cart and in 7 different rooms)-mind you it was the smallest in the school and I had classes of upwards to 35 students in each one. .  I had 5 preps (I was supposed to only have 2- the three...

Ok.  It is the first day of spring break and I am sitting here thinking about what I am going to differently about next year.  Yes...Already. HOMEWORK  This year I was wishy washy.  About January (ok yes I was gone for about 2 months) I noticed that the only students that I had that were getting an A were the ones that were turning in all of their homework.  So I started making EVERYTHING count.  I mean do nows, homework, daily-work, exit tickets.  They were all worth 4 points meaning that each day you had the possibility of getting 16 points.  Worked amazing for student buy in....sucked to be me.  I have 156 students.  I am going to go little MATHY on you....that is 624 assignments that I was grading per day, or 2,496 points per day. I tried rewarding students...but then I would forget. <---bad teacher. I tried a sticker chart...I tried a stamping thing.  Problem is....I WAS TRYING IT. NEXT YEAR: a student will have ...

As I stated in my last post I have some unruly children in my 7th grade boys.  We were told that we are not allowed to have children take breaks in the hallway any more and that we had to find a "safe environment" for them in our classroom. Seriously Mr. Assistant Superintendent.  You give me a classroom that is built for 24 and put 34 kids in it and expect me to SOMEHOW also find an "environment" for them to calm the EFF down? Fine. I went to Mecca Target the other day and scored this table for 11$. Do not judge my manipulatives on the shelf.  PS. When is Google/Word/Excel/Powerpoint going to figure out that manipulative not just a verb but is also a noun and therefore can be pluralized? It is perfect because it is only about 18 inches deep and maybe 24 inches across.  One person table. I also got the tiny clip board and the pencil box in the Dollar Spot.  Target is really starting to love teachers.  I have found so many good things in ...