Oh my! It has been a long time since I have had any time to work on my blog or my classroom website. Seriously I don't know how all you bloggers do it. Between teaching full time and being a wife and mom I don't know how you find the time to do this regularly. But I'm going to try really, really hard to get on here more often. I thought I would start by getting a lot of the things I have already created for myself uploaded here and on TPT. To start I am going to post about the Telling Time Anchor Chart I created. I like to do a lot of activities where my students "coach" each other through problems. They work in partners and take turns being the "coach" or "teacher" while the other partner is the student. When it is there turn to be the "coach", they ask the questions that are posted on the board, or for this activity the anchor chart to guide their student through the problem they have been given. I have a lot of Evan Moore Take it to Your Seat Centers that I like to use for these coaching activities but hope to create my own task cards to go with them in the future. For now, I just take the cards out of the center I want to use and spread them around my classroom. Partners are sent to a task card and have to coach each other through the process to solve the problem. When they are finished solving the problem they put their thumb in the air to signal that they are ready to rotate. Then when they are all finished we rotate clockwise to the next task card. I of course have to model for them how to help their partner when they have difficulty with a task instead of just telling them the correct answer but they usually get the hang of it and I walk around the room helping them as they go too. To go with my Telling Time Anchor Chart I used a telling time center I had. Each card had 4 clocks on it, 3 already had the hands on the clocks and the students had to read the time and 1 was missing the hands and the students had to draw the hands to match the digital time. So for each card they each got to be the teacher and student two times. I really like this activity because it is very student centered and because it helps the students practice explaining how to do something which helps deepen their understanding so both the coach and teacher are improving their skills at the same time. Click the link below to grab this for free for today only! After that it will only be $1.50 so don't worry if you didn't find it in time. I hope you find it useful. **Free for one more day (4/11/14) I just found and fixed a typo on the chart itself so I am going to extend the freebie period until the end of today. If you downloaded it yesterday please re-download it**
