7 Habits of Happy Kids

One of the books I read this summer was the book called, The Leader In Me, by Stephen and Sean Covey.  This book was very inspiring as I think about this upcoming school year! I highly recommend this book to anyone in the teaching profession who wishes to make long-lasting impressions on the kids in their care.  There are so many things I took away from the book that I will be implementing into my classroom this school year.  One of those ideas was inspirational quotes and the other idea is having a data binder that the students are responsible for so they are aware of their progress in Reading and Math, especially.  I have created several pages for a data binder that I plan to use this school year.  It will be available at my TpT store soon!  I am very excited to use it this year.

 

 Click the image above to be directed to their website.

The book tells of so many schools that have really turned their school around by looking for the leader in each child who enters the doors of the school.  He also talks about how to teach leadership to the students.

As I was reading this book, I was amazed at how many things I was already doing, just not in a "leadership" way!  How easy is it going to be to implement the leadership aspect to what I already do!  One such thing is my Data Wall.  Last year, I used the Data we gathered as a class and put it on a wall in our classroom.  The kids loved seeing their progress over the year.  I also kept a data folder for each child.  However, they were not tracking the data, I was.  This year, they will be using the data to meet their goals.  Goals are another thing that I have been doing.  This year, students will be helping to come up with their own goals to achieve!  As you can tell, I am really jazzed about getting my students to become the leaders I know they can be!

 

 

Summer!........Where has it Gone?

It is hard to believe that it is now July, almost August.  Where have I been?  Well, I have enjoyed just being a mom this summer.  My oldest finished Kindergarten at the end of the school year last year.  He is very excited about being in first grade!

I thought I would start with what we have been doing this summer!

In June, after my classroom was packed and a professional development day was completed, my attention turned to my two little boys.  We started by having "Shape Week".

The first day was "Circle Day".  We did everything related to circles.  We had donuts for breakfast.  Lunch consisted of:  Spagettio's, grapes, soda pop (a rarity for them...but they have bubbles!)

For fun, we went outside, blew up balloons and tried to race them from one end of the driveway to the other.  It was a very windy day, so this did not work as well as hoped.  Fun all the same!  We also blew bubbles and watched how far they would travel.

The next day was "Triangle Day".  This was our most fun day!

We had PBJ's cut into triangles, Dorito's, pinapple tidbits as some of the things that were triangle in shape that day.  

It was kinda rainy, so we did an art project inside.  These will hang in the playroom when it is finished.  They turned out GREAT!  I got a pack of 2 canvases at our local Pat Catan's craft/art store for around $7.00 and 4 small bottles of acrylic paints in red, yellow, blue, and green.  I got paint brushes at Pat Catan's as well.  I taped off the canvases to make the triangles.  The boys helped me by telling me where to put the painter's tape to make the triangle.  Here are some pictures of the work in progress:

 They were so proud of their finished products!

The next week, we had "Space Week!"  We learned about the planets and the sun.  We talked about people get to space.  One of the things we did was to watch the Magic School Bus video, "Gets Lost in Space".  We also talked about the moon and how the moon orbits the Earth.  Below is a  picture of the boys making craters on the moon!  I put flour in a pie pan.  We used mini marshmallows to drop into the flour making a crater.  They tried using different forces with the marshmallows and found out that the harder they threw them, the deeper the crater!

 We, then, took the fun outside!  I found these water rockets at our local discount grocery store, Marc's.  They had a ball shooting the rockets into "outer space!"

 A few days later, we received our first Green Kid Craft box!  This box was all that it was cracked up to be!  Each kit contained EVERYTHING that was needed to do the activity.  I chose the "sibling" option when I ordered, so they sent enough for both boys to do the activities.  Well worth the money!  They asked when the next box would arrive, which was recently.  We will be building robots!  I don't have pictures of the boys doing the activities because I was having so much fun with them I forgot to take pictures!  LOL  I will try to get some pictures of the kids doing activities from the next box!

Click HERE to go to the Green Kid Crafts site!  They have other kits to choose from as well!

Next time, I will fill you in on some reading I have done this summer!