Goals

>> Another blogger I know over at Scooping it up wrote a post about goals. It got me thinking. I have many goals for myself as a teacher. Why not share?

First of all I want to plan more lessons.
My class is based on schedules, and doing the same things weekly. Wednesdays are writing day. Thursday and friday are fluency reading. Monday and Tuesdays are phonics/workbooks. (These schedule needs to be extended into math too, but L.A. is pretty steady now.) I have to clear my credential, so I am required to write up lesson plans, create goals and this year I have focused on writing because it is not my strong area. In fact in the beginning of the year we NEVER did it. Anyways, this past few months I have been focusing A LOT on writing rubrics and my students initiating their own learning through using rubrics. Wednesday I did a lesson where students had to create their own rubrics using past writing examples of their own as well as ones i made. my students LOVED IT. They requested we leave the examples up all year so they could look at them and use them while they are writing. They were excited. They explained their reasoning and why they graded certain things certain ways. I LOVED IT. It did not take me long to plan. But, if I could try and do something exciting like this once a week. A fantastic different kind of learning experience. I would be proud of myself.

2: develop a good way to track students goals.
Currently I have a huge binder in which each student has a divider. Their goals are divided in, and usually a week before goal checks are due, I go through and find work that meets each goal and I check their progress. (we work on goals all the time, but i dont specifically test) I would like to develop a way to test monthly, if not every other week. I would love to be able to send home nicely corrected evidence with every goal, or at least have less estimations, and more analyzing of data.

3. Do not be late on any IEPS.
I will say it is usually not my fault that I am late on IEPs. usually it's scheduling, parents, and my waiting until the last minute. I would like to be EARLY more often then right on time.

4. Have more fun.
A lot of time in my classroom we spend on academics because my students are so far behind academically. I would like to incorporate some more fun learning activities. Art projects. Fun history lessons. Fun science lessons. This goes into my first goal. but I think if I take time to research and work on new exciting lessons, we could have a lot of fun.

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>>I took my students on a reward field trip to a local fast food restaurant today. We had to walk there in the rain. Which wasnt awful. My students did VERY well. I was actually impressed. The worst part was coming back to school and trying to get them back on track for the rest of the day. We survived but, I was also checked out ,and that is never good for anyone. I was being silly and immature, and it is not always the best when I get like that.


>>Next week is the ski trip. Do we remember that from last year? I hope it goes okay.