Fin's Friends

I attended the FIN's Friends launch at Rogers Arena on Thursday evening.  FIN's Friends is a character education program, geared toward Kindergarten to Grade 3 students in British Columbia.  The program is directly aligned with the BC Performance Standards for Social Responsibility and funding is provided by the Canucks for Kids Fund. For those of you who are not from BC, Fin is the mascot for our NHL team, the Vancouver Canucks.

Each grade level has its own strand:

Kindergarten -- compassion and fairness

Grade 1 --  kindness, perseverance, and peacefulness

Grade 2 -- respect and responsibility

Grade 3 --  courage and citizenship

When I arrived, I was provided with a bag of goodies, including bookmarks and certificates for my students, a puck, a Fin puppet, a Fin stuffy, and four hardcover picture books to go along with the lessons that could be downloaded online.  

I have been using the Second Step program for the past few years, but I am excited to incorporate some of the ideas from FIN's Friends into my social responsibility training.  Many of the goals are the same but FIN's Friends simplifies the terminology to make it easier for students to solve problems.  Plus, the students can relate more to Fin than they can to the children on the Second Step cards.  Best of all, FIN's Friends is free to teachers in the Lower Mainland.

Although it's too late to register for this school year, you might want to keep FIN's Friends in mind for next year.

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Scholastic Dollar Deals

In case you haven't heard yet, Scholastic School Express is having a Dollar Sale.  You can purchase ten downloadable teaching resources for free if you use the code 10thanks for $10 off your order.  The site is slow to load, but it's worth the wait.  I bought all kinds of goodies!

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Math Musings

I have a confession to make.  I don't *love* math.  Okay, that's not much of a confession to those who know me.  But, the funny thing is, I actually quite enjoy teaching it.  I guess it's true what they say about teachers teaching best the skills and concepts they struggle(d) with the most.  I think I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to make math engaging.  When I first started out, math was the subject I dreaded the most.  The textbooks were boring and I hated the constant worksheets and marking. It wasn't long before I broke up with my textbook and began creating my own program. Three years later, I am very comfortable with the learning outcomes for the grade 2 program. Now, I look forward to introducing new concepts because I get to search the internet for ways to make my lessons interesting and interactive.  My lessons are more hands-on than they used to be.  Differentiation no longer scares me.  I have all kinds of at-home practice materials, as well as in-class review and enrichment work available.

This year I am using:

1. XtraMath & Rocket Math (in place of traditional math drills)
2. Mathletics (2X per week for 20 minutes + at-home practice)
3. Teacher-created booklets compiled from worksheets from the Mathletics website, SuperTeacher Worksheets, Education Creations, and various teacher blogs
4. Math Centre activities downloaded from various teacher blogs and assembled by yours truly.

I'd like to thank Erica at Erica Bohrer's First Grade , Cara at The First Grade Parade, and Abby at The Inspired Apple for renewing my interest in centre activities.  Be sure to check out their blogs for tonnes of free printables!

I tend to use my projector a lot when presenting concepts to the students. You can check out my class blog for interactive games and tutorials, organized by topic (on the left-hand side).  Although my links are always a work in progress, there are many great gems I have discovered online:

Ms. Chatz's Class

What did teachers do before the internet?  They must have wasted lots of time reinventing the wheel!

What works for you? Do you use a textbook or math program?

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Teacher Day Plan Template

I've been using the same day plan template for the past few years, a MS Word file that was shared with me by another teacher.  Although it works just fine, it's not very "pretty".  For the past month or so, I've been on a mission to find something better.  I even resorted to spending $1.99 to purchase something online. It still didn't meet my needs.  So, I spent way too much time fiddling with tables in MS Word trying to come up with something.  The end result just didn't satisfy me.  Then, I had the brilliant (to me) idea of using Keynote and exporting the file as a PDF.  I found it way easier to manipulate shapes and text boxes with Keynote!

I wanted to share it as an editable Keynote file, in case anyone else wanted to use it, but unfortunately Scribd will not upload .key files. Here it is as a PDF (with lots of info removed so that hopefully it will be useful to someone):

Please leave me a comment to let me know if you downloaded my file!

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