3 Easy Tips to Fit It All In (Day 3 in Vegas!)

There are a few questions that teachers are constantly seeking to answer? How can we keep them quiet in the lunchroom? What is the best way to dismiss kids in the afternoon? And, how do we fit it all in? I'm still waiting on the answers to lunchroom behavior and dismissal, but I do have some ideas on how to fit it all in.

1. Think Science or Social Studies First.

One of the Social Studies units that we teach is "Community". As part of our standards, the children have to be  able to identify the helpers and things they use.

In this Label a Firefighter activity the children are learning about the clothing a firefighter wears to protect themselves.  In language arts, we are learning about labels. We are learning that authors use labels to help the reader! Now we are covering social studies and language arts at the same time! Time saver!

2. Plan Activities That Can Be Used More Than Once.

During our Thanksgiving Unit we read our recipe to make Turkey Soup. Recipes are a great way to teach procedural text-part of nonfiction text.  As we were reading the recipe, we counted the vegetables to make the soup.

The next day, during math, we revisited our soup pots.  I divided the children into small groups, depending on their number sense. As I called each group, we counted or added the vegetables. This saves tons of prep time. If you are spending more time prepping than the children are doing.....

3. Teach Games and Activities that Can Be Recycled.

Plan activities that can easily be adjusted by changing the clip art and the standard.  Our kids love the spin a graph activity. They simply spin the spinner, tally the results, make a graph and analyze the data.  I can repeat this same idea throughout the year, changing the clip art and the number of columns. No time is wasted teaching the children a new activity! All the time is spent learning the new standard. 

This race game is another idea that can be used over and over. To play, the children roll a dice. They move the firetrucks towards the house. They can move one firetruck the whole number, or split the number between two firetrucks. You can race children to school, squirrels to trees, etc.  If you want to make it more challenging as the year progresses, invite the children to write the number sentences to show how they split the number between the firetrucks. Here are the resources I used to plan this session.

I am doing two other sessions in Vegas today. Here is a little about those sessions.

For the Love of Reading

Retelling

This post shares some of the retelling ideas that I shared during the session. Be sure and scroll to the bottom to grab the retelling activity for Snake Supper.

First, I made a puppet from a sock--keeping it old school right here!!!  I cut a slit in the sock to make the mouth. I found clip art animals to match the characters in the story. After laminating the animals, I taped them to a piece of fishing line.  As I tell the story, I feed the animals inside the snake.

Now, it's the kids turn. They made a snake from a craft stick. They colored their animals and glued them to clothespins.

As the children retell the story, they clip the animals to the craft stick! Grab the color and black and white animals at the bottom of this post! Here are the resources I used to plan this session.

Centers Bundle

How Did You Get That?

Thinking and Writing About Math

Glyphs

In this session, I shared how we use glyphs. You can read all about it in this blog post. Here are the resources I used to plan this session.