I wanted to share my busy schedule. With the 90 minute reading blocks for all the older classes, we were given all morning specials! Talk about a busy morning! The hardest part is we have some students leave at 11 as well as some only come three days a week; therefore, we have 3 main days of learning and the rest review days. Below is what my schedule looks like:
As you can see my schedule is crazy this year! Not much I can do about it except ask for a more consistent specials schedule next year! Most things I can't get in every day. There is just no way possible to go to every special and fit in all that we have to every day, so this year I had to be real creative in planning my daily schedule. Calendar I add in literacy and of course we do math so that the students are receiving a lesson in those areas every day. Of course with calendar, the students are learning numbers, patterns, days of the weeks, months,etc. but we also added in a daily message for the students to practice letters, sight words, and even some writing during that time. I work in a Christian school; therefore, we try to have some form of Bible story, praying, Bible craft or activity every day. Eventually we will start going to church every Wednesday with the rest of the school, and that will take the place of Bible on that day which is our busy day already! We also had to add in library on Wednesdays during our small groups time. Our small groups are our Literacy and Writing groups. The students rotate between four groups during this time: some form of writing (journals, practice writing letters in the alphabet, describing a story or something to go with our science theme to get science in more), reading (picture reading, retelling, sight word and letter books, etc.), listening (listening to story on headphones), and some form of art, game or activity to go with the letter or sight word we are learning depending on student and what level they are. Math and science groups work almost just like literacy groups except there are only three groups (You can see on my schedule, we only have time for this three times a week.) and they only go to one a day and rotate to a different group the next day we meet in science and math groups. We usually do one science group and two math groups. In math we start out the year doing shapes and colors and then switch to numbers. Eventually we get to patterns, sorting, adding, etc. Science we usually stick to the Scholastic Clifford themes.
This is our afternoon schedule. There isn't much to it except the Daily Five. We usually do four groups instead of five and two of the groups are led by the teacher each day. The students' alone groups are listening center and reading center. (They can read alone or together with a buddy.) The teacher leads working on writing and working with words or letters most days; however, there are those days that the students will play a game, write the room, etc. by themselves while the teacher assesses students or works one on one with a student.
