Surviving Until Summer!!!

Happy Friday! This week I'm combining the Surviving until Summer and Five Three for Friday linky parties. I'm short on my Five for Friday because of my horrible picture taking skills.

It's THAT time of year. The time of year when a teacher has to work extra, extra hard to keep students engaged (i.e. to keep them from going craaaazy). We've got a case of  the Talking-More-Focusing-Less-Not-Following-Directions-As-Quickly-Volume-Of-A-Rock-Concert-Blues in first grade. Here are a few things I'm tried out this week to get us through to summer!

This week I flipped our schedule to create some novelty. For the first 140+ days of school we followed this basic schedule:

Reading

Recess

Lunch

Math

Specials

Science/Social Studies

So this week, we did it all in reverse to add a little novelty:

Science/Social Studies

Math

Recess

Lunch

Reading Part 1

Specials

Reading Part 2

The kids think math in the morning is great and so do I. But I figured out that I like any subject in the morning better, because I do NOT prefer reading in the afternoon. I think school should be 8-12. Ha!

This is my second year in first grade, so my math class as been ever evolving. I'm still trying to find a "style" I like. My district got a new math curriculum this year. It is comprised of three main parts:

Short Interactive Video for Whole Group Time

Workbook for Guided Practice, Independent Practice, and Problem Solving

Math Games for extension

Anyway, I've been saying over and over, "I just think this would work so much better IF I interwined this curriculum with guided math and math tub rotations. I think I'll do that next year." On Wednesday I decided not to wait. After all, I've got twenty little scientists/mathemeticians ready and willing to try something new. They were very happy to be part of an "experiment" to see if they liked math this new way:

Short Interactive Video for Whole Group

Five rotations: teacher table, math journal, and three tubs with related games/activities

For now we are working on the workbook at the teacher table instead of as a large group. I like it more. The kids like it more. It's a win-win!

I busted out some "old" math tub games. These have Christmas lights on them, but it saved me some prep time (and sanity). These come from Reagan Tunstall's Big Bundle of Math Centers.

And, I found these old overhead projector place value tens and ones. Recently we've worked with Base Ten blocks A LOT, so this was a change. And the kids thought these flat, neon manipulatives were cool colors. Remember overhead projectors??? 

That's how I survived this week at school. Seven more weeks to go!