Back to teaching!

After a month of holiday, I am finally back in the classroom. I finished the first week back at school and was absolutely exhausted. Part of my holiday break was spent writing assignments in the students books. I have 44 students so it kept me busy. My class periods are only 40 minutes long so I don't have to time for the kids to copy stuff from the board and the one copy machine is broken so I have to write the lessons in their notebooks or pay to have copies made which is a bit expensive. So, Linda and I share a classroom and we just recieved it this week. We are both super stoked, now we have light and I can actually see my students! The kids were excited as well. So, this week was a bit of review and some new stuff. My class 5C worked on fractions but it was new so we have a lot of work to do. To practice counting to 100, which many of the kids can't do well, we stood in a circle and threw a bean bag around the circle counting when you caught it. We also played UNO this week to help with number recognition and matching. We also did our weekly timed addition tests and three of the students got 100%. The grade 6 has 2 min. to do 30 addition problems under 20; the grade 5 has 3 min. to do 20 addition problems under 20. I still have kids who only get three or four problems done and not always correct. I have a couple kids who will put 65 as the answer for 9+7! It is definately a challenge and frusterating to be going over the same stuff for three or four weeks but I see little improvements here and there and I get super excited!

(first picture) - Class 5C doing a timed addition test.

(second picture) - No workbooks, no textbooks, no copy machine means a lot of me writing work on the board. Here we are working on fractions.

(third picture) - Class 5A counting. They are working on going from 209 to 210 and from

199 to 200. Counting after nine in any way is difficult. I think we are just going to focus on numbers 1-100 for now.

(fourth picture) - Class time with Ms. Jessica. This not the style of teaching I am used to or that I prefer but I have to work in the context the kids are used to. My arm does get tired after four classes of having to write on the board!