How to Start Teaching As Soon As Students Enter the Classroom

How can you begin the learning as soon as students enter the classroom?  This post shares my best tips for continuing the learning from one class to another and using every possible minute to its fullest.

Build Relationships First, Even if It’s not the Beginning of the Year

The beginning of the year is a great time to do this, but so is the return from a holiday break or anytime you need to reconnect with your class. 

Each day's warm-up should have something to do with relationship-building at first.  For example:

Monday: a deep breathing exercise/strategy.

Tuesday: students share a place they would travel to and explain why.  Bonus points if it's a place you will be learning about this year.

Wednesday:  Share what's going well and what needs improvement.  It could come in the form of "Two Successes and an Improvement".  Have students start with two things that are going well and give one thing that needs improvement.

Thursday:  What are you curious about?  Let students research and learn more about whatever they are curious about.  Bonus points if it's related to the subject in your classroom.

Friday:  Break out all of those get-to-know-you worksheets from the beginning of the year and start playing games with them.

Here's some things I like to do/revisit those get-to-know-you information you've already gathered:

Get-to-Know-You Name Tags

How to Use Get-to-Know-You Activities Later in the Year

If the traditional get-to-know-you activities aren't what you're looking for:

Fresh Alternatives to Get-to-Know-You Activities

After Relationship-Building, Focus on Directions

Have the Directions Clearly Displayed for Students as They Enter the Room

Use your Smart Board, projector, doc cam, or simply write the directions on your board.  I like to have them written in a numbered list so students know what to do first, second, and so on.  
This ensures that you are able to do the executive tasks, such as take attendance and get out materials for the next lesson, while students are preparing for learning themselves.

Write/Type These Directions on the Board Before You Leave Each Day

It's the last thing I do each day to prepare for the next day.  If you can't hand write the directions, try typing them and projecting them.  This might actually make it easier and quicker for you and your students.  You can blow up the font and edit it without losing much time.

Make Prep Work Part of the Opening Activity

There are administrative things that need to be done on almost a daily basis.  Getting students to do this on their own at the start of class makes everything go more smoothly and quickly for the rest of the lesson.  Some things I often have students do:

• Write homework in their agenda
• Get out papers that I will collect/grade so they are ready to turn in
• Get papers/materials they will need during the class

After Directions, Decide How You Will Encourage Good Behavior

Incentivize It

Teach them to get to work on it even before the bell rings and give them participation points for doing so.  You can award individual or team points if you have them sitting in teams.  You'd be amazed at how positive peer pressure can make things happen!

Make It Cumulative for the Week

Sometimes the warm-up will be a question on what we learned the day before. Then I have them turn in the whole thing on Friday. This way if a student is absent or needs more time to complete a particular assignment, they do not feel stressed to try to get it done all in one class. 

Go Digital 

If you have to ability to use Google Forms, you can both  assign and instantly assess your warm-up questions and activities.  Here’s is a detailed explanation of how to use Forms to create and assess. 

Finally, Make It Easier for Students to Continue the Learning on Their Own 

Give Students a Sneak Peak at What They Will Learn That Day 

Having a warm-up activity each day will establish what students are going to be learning and/or extend previous learning through a question, political cartoon, quote, etc.  

Have Students Review Previously Taught Material

This could be material you taught this year, or it could be material that should have been taught last year in your subject area. I will sometimes have students quiz each other on previous test material or study guides during this time.

Vocabulary 

I go through and find the most difficult words from the state test and assign a few at a time.  These are from the unit I’m ABOUT to teach. I only have them do the definition and draw a picture and we go over examples and non-examples as a class. It front-loads the information so students can participate in class discussions in the future.  If you're interested in learning more, check out my Vocabulary Instruction and Assessment packet.

How do you get students to begin learning as soon as they enter the classroom?  I'd love to hear your thoughts and tips!

Gingerbread House Essential Oil Diffuser Blend

One of my students specifically requested that I make and diffuse this blend to set the holiday theme in my classroom. Even if you're not a teacher, this blend really has that holiday spirit!

Check out my video for the full details:  Gingerbread House Essential Oil Blend

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

How to Find the Time to Lesson Plan

Do you ever find it difficult to find the time to get everything done at school?  Do you have to take work home just to keep up?  This post has some ways you can manage the work each day and make more time for yourself!

Use Your Prep Time As Efficiently As Possible

I know, I know. Planning periods are often taken up by things like meetings and conferences, but when you do get those few unencumbered moments, use them to your advantage. 

Do the Things at School That Can’t be Done at Home: 

Copying 

I try to get all my copies done on Fridays for the upcoming week if I haven't had time during the week to get it done.  The copier is ALWAYS breaking, so I don't want to wait and take the chance the following week that I won't be able to get it done.

Parent phone calls 

Please don't EVER make these from your home or cell phone.  For one thing, it's important to keep those healthy boundaries between work and home.  For another, this is one of those things that really is best done at school for several reasons.


"Batch" the Tasks

What I mean by "batching" is to focus on one thing/subject at a time and finish that before moving on.  For example:

• Make the lesson plans
• Gather the materials
• Make the copies
• Grade the assessments
• Decide if any of these things can or should go home for completion (with the exception of copying)

Plan With Your Grade Level When Possible

Try to collaborate with anyone who teaches the same thing so you can work together on units.


Don't Reinvent the Wheel
If lessons or units don't need to be changed from previous years, don't bother with them. Focus on  making your lessons work smarter, not harder.

• Make sure you have accommodations/modifications written into your lessons for students with special needs. 
• Fluff (worksheets, filler notes) should get tossed aside quickly for learning driven by the students, such as projects where they have to actually find the answers instead of you preparing the information for them.
• Have a set number of assignments that repeat and use the same template. So the form doesn't change, but the content does. That way you don't have to create everything over and over.

Use An Online Planbook

I have the app on my phone, which means I can change or view lessons ANYTIME, ANYWHERE.

• PlanbookEdu :  This website has practically saved my life this year.  Yes, it's not free, but it's worth every penny.  You can input your state standards above your lessons and it keeps track of how many you've covered in your lessons.  You can attach files that you need.  You can print and email the whole plan book or a selection.  In a word, priceless.

When You Can't Get It All Done During Your Planning Period:

Have set “late nights” like Tuesdays and Thursdays (or whatever works with your schedule). 
That way you can get what you need to get done when there aren't so many people around to break your concentration. You're sacrificing a bit of time for work so that your don’t have to be stressed when you’re hanging out with your family. That way you can have the energy you need to give them.

Get To Work Early Instead of Staying Late or Taking Work Home

You will be so much fresher and not have the same interruptions you do by staying later in the afternoon. Of course if you're like me, I'm still groggy in the morning so I actually prefer staying later in the afternoon.

Be Very Selective About The Work You Do Take Home

Whether you have a family or not, your time in the evenings is short and you NEED downtime to recharge your batteries. Sure, you can power through some nights without much sleep, but if you do it too often, you are setting yourself up for teacher burnout.

You can read more about this in my "Avoiding Teacher Burnout" post.

Go to Your "Happy Place" to Grade Papers

Sometimes I have to leave the house to grade so concentrate at a Starbucks and knock out papers that way.

Join An Online Support Network

There are many Facebook and online teacher communities designed to support your effort to get more work done at school and bring less home. 

Many teachers have highly recommended the 40 hour teacher work week club. 

https://40htw.com/join/

How do you balance it all?  I can always use more tips on how to do this!

Do You Really Need to be Teaching The Scientific Method?

Have you ever questioned the need to teach the Scientific Method because it isn't part of your county's or school's pacing guide or the NGSS standards?  Then read this post to help you decide!

From a Standards Perspective, No

It's not a Performance Expectation in the NGSS, but it is in the Science and Engineering Practices. With NGSS, it's meant to be woven through your curriculum as opposed to it being taught by itself.

NGSS is more correlated to the CER (Claim Evidence Reasoning), as opposed to the scientific method. 

From A Life Skills Perspective, Yes

You might think of it like the Scientific Method, or inquiry, is now referred to as "engineering practices", so it means that you should still teach it.

It will be helpful as science requires investigations and labs. It may not be assessed but it is still imperative to teach to hone their skills in doing investigations and writing lab reports.  If you think about it from a procedural perspective (outside of standards alone), they need it to successfully complete labs. You might not need to spend a ton of time on it, but I’d at least expose them to it.

So how do you teach it without spending too much time on it since it’s not standards-based?

Have Students Generate Their Own Labs

This is the blank lab report sheet I have students use when they are creating their own labs.  

Give Students an Example Lab and Have Them Identify the Steps of the Scientific Method

I use this Scientific Method Foldable to do just that.

Get Students Moving to Review the Scientific Method

We have a lot of fun reviewing with my Scientific Method Human Bingo Board. 

What else would you add to the activities that you use to review the Scientific Method or teach it in context?  I'd love to hear your ideas!

Should Teachers Dress up for Halloween?

Does your school allow or encourage teachers to dress up for Halloween?  Do you need a school-appropriate costume?  Then this post is for you!

First, figure out if you’re going solo or a group theme. 

Solo Costumes

Emojis 

This one could be solo or group. It comes from this website. 

Group Costumes

Shark Week

With “Baby Shark” being so popular everywhere, why not do a “Shark Week” theme?  It doesn’t need to be elaborate. The picture below comes from this website. 

Turtle Power

How about an easy DIY from this website?

Science Humor

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to encourage you to get some science in your life. 

Table of Elements

This is demonstrated on children, but it’d be easy to duplicate on adults. The idea came from this website. 

Put measurements on a T-shirt and a graduation cap. A graduated cylinder!

Humorous Costumes 

Tape Smarties candy to your pants and go as a smarty pants. 

Make a piece of foam board look like graph paper and put fake snakes on it (Snakes on a Plane)

Get a funky colored wig and pull it into a troll-do.  Then put on the most brightly colored clothes you can find, use some blusher to do circles on your cheeks, and go as a troll.

Report card: Placard on the front and on the back. Could easily turn it into a lab report.

Keep It Simple

Wear all black and put dots on you...YOU'RE A DOMINO!

Scrubs...be a nurse  or doctor..

What would you add to this list?  I'm a "Keep It Simple" kind of gal myself!

Decreasing Grading Time Series: General Strategies to Engage and Assess Students

Are you struggling to keep up with grading? Do you spend hours upon hours grading?  Do you struggle with creating and grading assignments?  Then this post is for you!

Don't Grade an Entire Assessment

Instead, choose the top questions that represent the concepts you want to assess.  For example, if you have a worksheet with 20 questions, grade four of the best questions and multiply by five.

Why it works:  You may be asking yourself why you would create extra questions and have students complete them if you will only be using part of them for assessment and grading.  The answer to that is that it is extremely useful for practice, particularly for classwork.  So the students get extra practice and you get an assessment that doesn't take ages to grade.

Give "Completion Points"

Students get a set amount of points that represent the quality of their effort and output.  For example, if you present the student with a 20-question assessment and they work diligently for an hour to accurately complete ten of those questions, they might receive full points, such as 10 out of 10.  If you were strictly going on percentage, that same student would receive only a 50%.  Is that really an accurate representation of their knowledge?

Why it works:  This works well for classwork that is being used for practice and formative assessments.  As you walk around to help students, you instinctively know which of them truly understands and which students are not quite there yet.  Awarding points on a sliding scale based on this is often better than a straight percentage.  So you are using your observations and knowledge of your students to accurately and quickly grade them daily.

Use Rubrics

Create rubrics with a certain focus for each assignment.  Many teachers like to save time by creating online rubrics using RubiStar.

Why it works: This is great for lengthy assignments like the Science Fair, essays, or labs.  When I was grading essays, for example, I picked writing traits that needed to be graded and only focused on them.  I ALWAYS graded for capitalization and punctuation, but I picked a few other writing traits  for each essay to grade as they were explicitly taught in class, such as adverbs or figurative language.  That way, I wasn't grading for EVERY little detail, which would take HOURS.  

Use the Open-Ended Strategy 

It starts with giving an open-ended assignment where students can use notes, etc to look up answers.  They can then use just the assignment to take the multiple choice version. I would make the multiple choice higher level or multi step questions, so there is still a level of recall and differentiation to the assessment.

  

Why it works:  Sometimes this is just as valuable for assessment as asking students to recall the information on their own. It takes longer, but it assesses multiple levels of understanding and levels the playing field for all students.  You can combine this strategy with the ones listed above, such as using a rubric or only grading part of the assessment, to make everyone's life easier.

Sometimes you Just Have to Grade the Whole Assignment

I know this doesn't go very well with the theme of this post.  However, if it's a state assessment or school-mandated assessment, you probably don't have a choice.  Ask your grade-level cohorts if you're ever in doubt.  If you aren't required to grade the entire assessment though, use the strategies above!

Decreasing Grading Time Series: Using Apps to Engage and Assess Students

Are you struggling to keep up with grading? Do you spend hours upon hours grading?  Do you struggle with creating and grading assignments?  Then this post is for you!

ZipGrade

What is it?  Here's an in-depth summary of ZipGrade, but it's basically a Google app that uses an Android device's camera as a grading scanner for multiple-choice tests.  

How does it help with grading?  You can use it in addition to the ZipGrade website for additional options once you create a free user profile.  It's a great option for IEP students who have modifications for a paper test.

Google Forms

What is it?  Here's the full explanation of what Google Forms does.  It's a Google app in which you can create quizzes, exit tickets and various assessment tools.  You then give the sharable link to your students via email or online classroom website.

How does it help with grading?  There are options you can select while you are creating the assessment that allows it to be immediately graded once you provide the app with the answer key you will also create.  You can add feedback for correct and incorrect answers so students know how to approach that question in the future.  By setting up the answer key, the results will be tallied and available to you with the click of a button.  If you use it to create exit tickets, it grades itself, and from that, you can make groups for practice the next day. It makes differentiation so easy!

Socrative

What is it?  This app uses devices to assess knowledge with exit tickets or questions (multiple-choice, true/false, short answer).

How does it help with grading?  You create and save your assessments to your Socrative account.  It tallies the results and allows you to view them by class, student, or question results.  These results can be downloaded and sent to email or Google Drive.

Quizizz

What is it?  Here's a comprehensive explanation of Quizizz.  I've heard it described as Kahoot, only quiet.  There's still competition, but less noise.

How does it help with grading?  You use a bank of quizzes that are already created and modify them to best assess your students.  Theses questions are presented to students at their own pace and the results can be sorted by class-level and student-level and downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet.

Plickers

What is it?  If you're worried about engagement with Kahoot and not being 1:1 with your technology, try using Plickers instead!  The device is used scan paper cards for student responses.

How does it help with grading?  All you need to do is print out the game cards, and have either an iPad or a cell phone for you to scan the cards when students answer a question.  You also can download reports if you choose to give the students grades.

Come back next week to see the next part of the Decreasing Grading Time Series: General Strategies to Engage and Assess Students.  See you soon!