Case-of-the-Mondays? Not this week!

Thank goodness for a three day weekend! This past week was crazy. Middle of the year assessing is still throwing off our schedule. DRA testing, Papi's, CogAT, BLAH! On top of all of that, we had a thunderstorm/snowstorm on Tuesday! Snow, or really any precipitation, causes Texans to lose it. Honestly, I'm surprised school didn't get cancelled or at least started late. Our city usually shuts down when we get any kind of winter weather. But no, school started on time and it made everyone's mornings a little more interesting. It made my 40 mile commute much longer than it normally is but I didn't run into any problems on the roads that I took so I was thankful for that. This is the only picture I managed to take of it that day - looking out of the window in the hallway outside of my classroom towards our playground. It further illustrates my classroom's placement between the kinder/first grade and the second/third grade pods.


My goal for tomorrow is to be productive. I'd really love to sleep, work out, shop, etc. but when you're a first year teacher, you can't waste a free day. There is ALWAYS something to do. For example, I have about a million pictures of fish to cut out. (Anybody else out there use Investigations as part of their math instruction?) We're starting our measurement unit in  next week and I need lots of things cut out for my kiddos to measure. I also need to plan our review day for our third Math CBA. That's Curriculum Based Assessment, for the non-teacher-readers out there. I don't feel all that confident going into this CBA. I should since we have worked on word problems so much that my dreams are about different ways to teach them or different problems and wordings to use. It's been rough, though. It is really difficult for sweet little firsties to decide when to add or subtract and where to put the given numbers in a math fact. One of my team members made the anchor chart below, that I will try to reproduce tomorrow as well. With my own little bit of flair, of course. (Side note: I hope to one day create anchor charts as adorable as Mrs. Carroll @TheFirstGradeParade.) I am also hoping that this added visual will help my students decide when to add and when to subtract. (Please ignore the misspelled word. It happens.)

Does anybody have any tips for word problems? Have any non-school oriented plans for tomorrow??
Wish us luck next week! It'll be another long one with a whole day devoted to me administering the CBA to small groups. Yippee!