Reflect and Refresh: Looking Forward

Good Morning Friends!
Today I am joining Mrs D's Corner and Terrific Teaching and Learning for a Reflect and Refresh Post. I'm excited to share with you some of my goals for this upcoming year as well as something I have been doing all summer long! As the school year approaches, I am getting so excited to meet my new first graders! I am sad that summer is coming to a close, however, I always love designing and decorating my classroom each year as well as all of the back to school festivities!

 

Communication: 

  This Summer, I attended Capturing Kids Hearts. It was a very encouraging training from the Flippen group. I had heard good things about this training and it has been around for quite awhile. One idea that they mentioned to develop a strong sense of communication between teacher and parent was to make positive phone calls to parents. 

I had always loved the idea of making "good" phone calls to parents that focus on the positive things that students do. I tried this a couple of times last year, but let's be honest. It was definitely not a priority and did not happen as much as I would have liked it to.

We are quick to call parents if there is something not working well in the classroom with their child, but how often to we take the time to call parents to say how proud we are of their child? This is something I have marked in my planner to do once a week until I have at least made a positive phone call about each student in my class. I'm excited to try this out!

I'm also going to send home positive post cards! These may be for birthdays, positive behaviors, holidays, or whatever! I still haven't decided yet. My goal with this is simply to work on building relationships with my students and for them to physically keep. I know that if my teacher did this when I was younger, I probably would still have them lying around somewhere!

Organization:


One of the areas I have slowly been working towards is organizing all of my subjects and topics into resource binders. I drew inspiration from Miss DeCarbo's picture! Since the beginning of my teaching career, I have been slowly working on this goal. It has definitely been slow and steady and will be way worth it in the end! I only teach first grade ELA and Social studies so my goal is to organize by topic binders. For example, in first grade ELA we cover compound words, nouns, verbs, sight words, etc. I've been accumulating resources and activities for each unit of study that I will place in each binder. This way, when we cover each thing, it will be easily on hand and VERY convenient!

Content:

My goal on focusing on content is to establish more hands on literacy centers and activities. I've learned about how much students learn with Action Based Learning (Learning while moving) and how much more meaningful their learning will become. As I mentioned before, I teach only first grade reading and social studies to my home room class. I'm focusing on ELA activities that will allow my students to move while receiving important content. I look forward to collaborating with many of you first grade teachers so share ideas this year!


Summer Project:

I'll be honest. I honestly have done ZERO Summer projects this year. I guess what I have been focusing on is buying essentials for my classroom! Each week, I have gone to Office Depot to snatch their Summer deals! It has been my "project" to get essentials for my classroom for as cheap as I can get them! It's almost a game for me sometimes, yet, sometimes I do splurge as well!


Thank you for stopping by! I look forward to trying these things out! If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment! If these ideas work well in my classroom, I will blog about them soon! Stay tuned! :)


What are some goals and projects you have? Come and link up with us!