Tell Me Something Good...

I am linking up with Jennifer for her Tell Me Something Good Linky! 

 

Something Good At School: I am finally in a nice routine at school and so are my 101 6th graders. It only took us about 9 weeks. :) Only having my students for 55 minutes has been a huge adjustment, but I am loving how much more productive they are since I do not have them for two hours. Now I am just hoping that we can keep this up! 

Something Good At Home: My grandparents came to visit us this weekend. It is always so nice when I get to see them, and Meme even treated us girls to dinner. 

I am also in love with my new whiteboard that I got with this year's budget. I really wanted to create something where I could post our daily learning objective, our agenda, and homework all in one place for my students. My campus requires us to post our learning objectives, but I wanted my students to be able to measure them.

 The "Today I will" portion is where our actual learning objective is posted. The next part, "I'll Know I've Got it When" is something new that I added this school year. A big push on my campus has been how will our students know they've got it, so I added this part to my board. I also like to post an essential question that my students should be able to answer by the end of the class. 

In the center of the board you can find the date, our agenda, and my students can also see what items they need to pick up. The material cards are from Ashley Hughes. You can find them in her TpT store.

Here is a view of the entire board. 

How do you organize this information in your classroom?

Management Minute- Linky is up!

So sorry for the delay in getting this up today, but it has been a crazy two days full of volleyball. 

April's Management Minute Focus is: Student Restroom Use

If you want to share with us how you monitor this within your classroom, all you have to do if follow a few simple rules. 

1. Right click the picture above and post it in your post.

2. Link back to Adventures of a 6th Grade Teacher.

3. Link up your actual Management Minute post in the linky widget. 

In 6th grade, the restroom is a little different than in the elementary classroom. My students have a 5 minute passing period between each class, but they are not always great about taking care of their business during the break. I have a rule in class that no one is allowed to leave during the first or last 15 minutes. Essentially, that leaves them with at most 30 minutes of class that they could possibly need to use the restroom. What I have done this school year is give my students 2 hall passes that they can use when they choose to leave the classroom for things like the restroom, water, their locker, etc. During the first week of school, we discussed appropriate times to ask me if they could use their hall pass and that has made a big difference in my opinion. If my students do not use their passes, they can redeem them for extra credit on a daily grade at the end of the 6 weeks. 

I am excited to hear how others manage this in their own classrooms too! 

A New Linky: Management Minute

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to do another linky party about Classroom Management. At first I was thinking that I would do something on a weekly basis, but I think I am going to do one once a month. Be sure to grab the button and share it on your blog if you are interested in playing along. All I ask is that you link my blog to the image because I am not tech savvy enough to do it.

Right now the plan is for the post to go up on April 1st, and then you can link up to share your management tip on whatever the topic is for the month. You will simply write your post about the topic and then come back and link up. 

Our topic for the month of April will be about managing student use of the restroom. What sort of things to do you do to make this as small of a distraction as possible in your own classroom? This is a big problem that I have to deal with on a daily basis in my own classroom. 

I hope you will link up and share your knowledge!

Classroom Management

Classroom management is by far the thing that I struggle the most with. One of my classes really tests me on a daily basis with their behavior and I just feel worn out every time that they leave. I have done lots of reading and found some really great ideas to help me through blogs and Pinterest. 

To help not only myself, but also other teachers who struggle with classroom management, I am thinking about doing a weekly link up called Management Monday where each week we would have a different classroom management topic and then you would link up and share some tips that work in your classroom.

What do you think about it? Would you play along and link up?

Benchmark Rant

Today we took our district benchmarks. I have been really frustrated with them because the Language Arts ones have been Released TAKS tests which are reflective of what students have learned by testing time. I was dreading looking at the scores for this test and I was right about that. Not a single kid in my inclusion class passed it. Now, it is not modified appropriately for them because the SPED kids should be taking a TAKS-M version. It is just so frustrating. Luckily, my other two classes did much better, but I was still very upset about this. You can bet we will be going over the benchmarks together as a class tomorrow. 

I was so excited to finally get my kidney table on Monday and the kids are loving it too. If only I could find some chairs for it now. I personally like my step stool chair that I have been using. :)

Here are the poster/contracts that we created yesterday that I mentioned in my post. I remembered to snap a picture of them today. :)

Here is hoping that you have a wonderful Friday!

Spring Break...Where Are You?

Oh my goodness, my fourth grade friends were crazy today! I love them to death, but they were bursting with energy today. It is beyond time for them to be on Spring Break, I really think the week is going to do them good. It seems that my friends are having a really hard time with blurting this week. What do you do with your students when they are blurting or talking out of turn? I really would love some new ideas to try with them.