Getting Started
I started my preparation by reviewing my First Days of School slides from last year. I spruced them up and edited them to add new procedures/protocols. I changed a few of my social-emotional and getting to you know activities around.
Writing
As I have shared before, my goal this summer into this school year was to improve my writing instruction. I started by creating an outline for writing using The Writing Strategies Book. I started my outline by focusing on my lessons for introducing writing workshop, brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing. I started with the narrative unit then I worked on the informational and opinion units. I have a hard time figuring out how to teach drafting lessons when I feel that my scholars always need support in the components of a body paragraph for each type of writing. Through my research, I found this research on immersion from Immersion Phase: Creating A Vision for Writing. This document helped me see that students get the foundation for the components of a body paragraph through the immersion lessons. I changed my outlines around to accommodate these immersion lessons.
Reading
For reading, I created the same outlines by combining the standards, the units my school completed last year, and The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading. Through this book I was able to see how to structure my guided reading lessons for third grade. This year, I will make sure that my mini lessons are the same as my teach in the guided reading groups. This will 1) provide extra practice with the skill and 2) help manage the time constraints. Last year, it was really hard for me to get through 2 groups every day and I think this will help.
Math
I have been more hesitant to get started on my math outlines. I feel that I need to give my students a 2nd grade diagnostic and see what they have mastered and what they didn’t. I feel this will really frame the year especially since there are some skills they haven’t even been taught yet. My school will also be focusing on priority standards for each grade since we won’t get through teaching a whole curriculum. It would be important to start with the skills missed from 2nd grade. Reading always starts off with a review of mastered 2nd grade skills (retelling/summarizing), writing builds off what skills they have. For math, it will be really hard to move on to multiplication and division, if they don’t have a strong mastery of addition and subtraction.
Classroom Setup
In terms of classroom set up, I’m also hesitant to buy too much or prepare too much for the classroom. Luckily, my class still has some boards up from last year. It will make getting ready easier. I would usually have a bunch of boxes, books, and amazon orders at home but not this year. I’m also waiting to hear more guidelines about how we can set up our classrooms.
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