One Teacher's Adventures

Let me tell you about the past few weeks... My job has changed since my last post.  I've been teaching Grade 4 this year full time, but I knew it would be ending, as I was covering a maternity leave.  I knew the other teacher was returning after our winter break and I'd have to find something new, but in a happy turn of events, she decided to only come back part time.  As she now has two small children at home, she decided to come back for Thursdays and Fridays, which means I get to keep my Grade 4's until the end of the school year for the beginning of each week!  I was so happy to keep my kids, and now I have an amazing partner teacher who I can learn from as well. As for the rest of the week, I have picked up a part time Grade 1 class on Fridays.  As a teacher who feels the most comfortable with Middle School students, I was terrified to go down to primary! I completed a practicum in Grade 1 while I was a student teacher (it was actually at the school where I am now

When I was in University, my reading professor gave us the idea of a one-page basic book report for young readers.  She called it the Bare Bones Book Report.  Basically, she folded a piece of paper into quarters and had us fill in each quarter with a different aspect of the book (character, plot, setting, and conflict).  She only wanted the bare bones of the book. I've used versions of this idea for so many assignments, with elementary, middle, and high school students.  Last year, I used it as a note-taking strategy in Grade 8 Social Studies.  As my students watched a film about the crisis in the Middle East, they took notes in the four section of the paper with these headings: Important People, Important Places, Vocabulary to Know, Questions I Have.  With a Grade 4/5 class, I used it when I was teaching connections in reading.  My students made notes about the connections they made in their free choice books. The four headings were: Text-to-Text Connections, Text-to-World