Thursday, September 20, 2012

Star of the Day and New Products

When I first started teaching, 12 years ago, I had a job chart. I started off so great!

 I would put the chart up and everyone would have a classroom job.
Then I would change the job chart and everyone would have a different job.
I would put the chart up and everyone would have a classroom job.
Next I would change the job chart and everyone would have a different job.
Then I would forget to change the job chart until the last minute and frantically change the job chart.
After that I would forget to change the job chart until a kiddo reminded me and I would frantically change the job chart.
And so on.
And so on.
And so on.

Grrrrrrr!
The job chart became the bane of my existence!

I COULD NOT seem to be on top of changing that doggone job chart all the time.
Lucky for me my good friend and coworker told me about her Star of the Day.  CHANGED my LIFE!!!

I chucked the job chart and started with the Star of the Day.  Coworkers have come and gone, but every new coworker has adopted the Star of the Day and loved it!  Katie and I both do Star of the Day in our classrooms and it is the easiest thing in the world!

Here is the gist:
We write every kiddo's name on a star and put them on a ring.
(These are from one of my favorite places to shop!  Creative Teaching Press)
This year we have an Ocean/Beach theme and so we made our own cards.
(Please excuse my not so great handwriting.  I usually have my sister label all of my things at the beginning of the year for me, but for some crazy reason she decided to stay in Nashville and work this year!  What??!!)

Then we change the card each day.  That is right, one flip, and you are done!
That kiddo is in charge of everything for the day!  They take attendance to the office, pass out papers, lead the line, take out the recess equipment, basically anything I need them to do!  You basically have a mini assistant! If there is anything that requires more than one helper then the Star of the Day gets to pick the other helpers.

I did worry that my kiddos would not be happy having to wait so long in between being the Star of the Day.  So I always really talk it up. We talk about how exciting it is to be in charge of helping with everything and to get to pick friends to help if needed. Luckily they seem to get it!  At the end of each day I flip the card and tell the kiddos who the Star is for the next day.  The kiddos actually get excited for the student who is the Star!
This has been one of the best time management tools I have ever learned for school!  If you try it out I would LOVE to hear what you think about it!

On another note, here is what we have been up to!  In between school, our own kiddos, husbands who for some crazy reason still think they need clean clothes or dinner :) , we have been able to complete a few projects from our to do list!
One of our favorites is our Common Core Math and Language Arts Homework.  We completely redid our homework this year to align with Common Core and we LOVE our new format!  Our parents have been really happy with this format and so are we!

We have this for sale as just the language art, just the math, or a bundle.  We also have 1st and 2nd quarter available.  We are working on finishing up 3rd and 4th quarter right now!

Common Core State Standards and Essential Questions. We have our original set and then had requests for Pirate and Owl themed.  So of course we did those too!  All three versions are available in our TPT store.





We just finished up our 2nd Grade Common Core Math Vocabulary Cards.


Standards of Mathmatical Practices

There are even more products we have posted lately that we are very excited about.  However, we figured you might be tired of seeing all of them!!!  If you want to check out what else we have just visit our TPT store!


Glitter Words
[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]
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1 comment:

  1. Wow! You've been busy. Your products look great! I'm checking them out right now. :)

    Heather at TeachItToday

    ReplyDelete