Happy New Year!

Happy New Years Everyone!!! Sorry for the little hiatus in my posts, but December was a whirlwind! I've been spoiled by working with my co-teacher, but unexpectedly she was out for 2 weeks in December. Me + 11 boys in Special Ed = Organized(ish) Chaos! I decided to take the holiday break to refresh my batteries and now I'm ready to go for 2014!!

We had a teacher day on Friday, and worked with our teacher teams. I'm on the Math Team. My project is to get to know Woodin Math and see how we can use it to help the struggling math kiddos at our school. If you know anything about it, I'd love to hear it!

Today was the 1st day back from break with kids and it was good to see them all again! They were all super excited to be back and definitely a chatty bunch! After the crazy month of December we jumped right in where we left off and picked up our usual routine.

Today we were working on creating compound and complex sentences. I can't believe how much their writing has progressed! Some of them could barely write a simple sentence and now are filling up full pages. We are a transition school and I feel like this is the biggest area I can help them move to the general ed classroom again when the time comes.

Our theme for this month is Famous Americans. Every year I've made the Evan Moor Theme Pockets for Famous Americans. I LOVE the project but it takes time to make that many books. I haven't decided if we're making the book or not, but we're definitely making the activities. I've also found this great Person of the Month book by Scholastic. I'm going to tweak the format and do each person for a day or two instead. I know this is a very condensed version, but my kids seem to have very little knowledge beyond presidents and I want to expose them to as much as I can. We're also going to do an "inventors" unit later this year so I may save a few people for that.