Check Out Our Classroom Door

I have been wanting to show off my students' Personal Responsibility Awards for awhile, but I kept forgetting to take the photo. Today I finally remembered!

It's not the best photo, but I think you can see we have a lot of them. Actually, there are some more on the wall outside the door as well. They were starting to get a little too low to be able to read the names on them.

How does one get such an award? Well, by doing something that shows personal responsibility. Yesterday, two of my girls got awards because they came to me and asked for help with writing decimals in expanded notation. Two days ago, two other girls got awards because they were writing summaries of what they read during I May Time in reading. They weren't required to do that, but they both took the initiative to do that. Over the last two weeks nine students got awards for signing up to be part of main idea strategy groups. 

What else? Picking a seat away from friends in order to get work done has been awarded. Deciding to review math videos and take notes when everyone else chose to play online math games has resulted in an award. Getting up and moving away from a distraction so that work is getting accomplished has been noticed and an award has been posted. Really the list of awards given out is much more extensive and the possible ways that they can show responsibility could go on and on. 

I look forward to adding more and more awards, even if they do eat up my ink. :)

Shaking Things Up and Seeing Change

There are certain students in each of my classes that always pick the same group of seats or people to sit by. Once a week or so, I ask them to pick a new seat that they have never sat at, or I ask them to pick a new person to sit with. It is getting harder for them to accomplish this because there are only so many options. So, I decided to shake things up.

After school today, I moved the desks around. I still have individual desks, groups of two, three, and four desks, but they are in different places and configurations that before. I am looking forward to seeing how the students take the new seating options.

I wrote previously that I liked the carefully arranged groups of desks, and I am shocked at how quickly I have come to love the loose arrangement of desks in various group sizes. I see students making the best choices for themselves. One of my favorite things to see, on an almost daily basis, is students who are quite social picking a seat away from friends so they can focus.

Yesterday, one of my math students asked if he could move because another student was talking to him. Now, this student would be described by many a former teacher of his, as a talker, and I would have agreed a week or two ago. This student, however has embraced the idea that he is responsible for how he does in math class. Sure, he still talks, the point isn't to make a class full of mutes, but he controls it so he can do his work. I look forward to seeing which seat he picks tomorrow, with the new arrangement.