Wednesday, ...What?!

I can't believe how fast the days are flying by! It's August!  I have 14 days left of vacation, before the staff meetings begin. Students will start school in 21 days. I need to stop looking at new projects and get the necessary lesson plans, standard checklists, morning work, and homework calendars prepared and ready to print. This is the scary part of changing rooms and grade levels, I'm not super familar with the material and standards! I'm also trying to figure out my schedule for the day and I think I have it down for the first few weeks. I usually make a schedule and try it out for a couple of weeks before I make a permament schedule. I try to get my reading, language arts, and math covered in the morning before lunch. After lunch, my students usually shut down, so I like to work on the skills that they tend to be lacking in. So after lunch, we do science, social studies, a program called Circles- which teaches students about boundaries and personal space. I also will have a behavior specialist come in everyday to teach coping and social skills for 30 minutes, which might have to be in the afternoon. I'm trying to keep the Daily 5, or 3, completed in one block of time, but that might have to change. Then there's the morning meeting and afternoon wrap up times to schedule, plus gym, art, music, and sensory! I will probably change my schedule 30 more times before school starts! My husband laughs, because I'll be watching television and all of a sudden I will grab my notebook and scribble out a new schedule!

My rules and procedures don't change from year to year. I write my classroom rules so that they state what the students should be doing, instead of what they shouldn't be doing. For example, my students do tend to be physically and verbally aggressive to each other and staff, so my rule is Keep your body and words safe, instead of Don't hit, kick, pinch, bite, spit on, yell at, swear at,....well you get the picture. There's no way that I could list everything that the students shouldn't do, and then they would probably think they could do the one thing that I left off the list! Also, research has shown that the brain hears the action part of the request. So if I tell a student "Don't run in the hallway!" That student will hear the word run, and then will run in the hall. This year, I do want to make visual posters to go with the rules. I'm going to have my students act out the rules and procedures, showing the appropriate way- they all know too well how to not follow the rules, so we have to practice (a lot) on how to follow the rules!

I had planned on linking up with Tara for the Monday Made It party, but I didn't finish my projects, so I'll keep working on them for next week. I've seen a lot of great linky parties out there in blogland, so I'm trying to get all of them in a post, or two. So I'm off to finish up my projects and keep printing, laminating, and planning! I think I'll need a nap after all of that!