E/BD

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Home : 2001 : August : 16

E/BD
By Rachel

When I read your message, I thought it had been written by me. I too am a first year teacher in a regional EI (we call it emotional impairments in my state) program for 3rd through 5th graders. I have 8 students who
are mainstreamed for music, art, p.e.,lunch, etc. too. I also start on August 27th, so I feel like we may be in the same boat. I am not sure I can help in any way, but I will let you know what I am doing and maybe some ideas will come from that.
As far as scheduling goes, this is how I will be organizing my day (at least to begin with). Because their buses all come in at different

times, I have 10 minutes after the bell rings of free time. This ensures that everyone is here, those who didn't finish homework get a chance to finish it, etc. It will also give me a chance to read parent notes that come in, give me time to make any necessary phone calls, get attendance done, etc. After this, we start morning work. This is comprised of 2 DOL sentences, Daily oral geography, a math box of 4 problems individualized according to level, and a calculator problem. During this morning work time I will call reading groups and work with them then assign any reading work they may have to finish at their desk. I have an aide in my classroom who will pull kids for Spelling work at the same time. This normally lasts for about 40 minutes. All kids usually stay busy during this whole time. After this will come Science which will take us up to first recess. I plan on doing Science a little differently. I am going to run on a three year cycle. I will pull all the things for instance on the human body from the third, fourth and fifth grade curriculums and compile them. Then I will teach this once in three years. If I have a student for all three years they will get all of the curriculum. Because I love doing hands on activities for this and labs I thought this would be a better approach than by grade level. After recess, will come Social Studies. I will also use this time before lunch to let kids finish up on work, finish any reading groups I didn't get too, etc. I found lunch is a good motivator for kids to keep their behavior together during S.S., (can be a hard subject, I was told). After lunch is a read aloud, when my aide will take her lunch. Then I do math. I am planning on two math groups, grouped by ability. I will take one and my aide will take the other. Then comes afternoon recess. After this will be time for journal writing, critical thinking skills, handwriting, Weekly Readers, etc. Then the buses will start coming to bring students home. Of course all of this is relative to the situation depending on what time students have specials, any mainstreaming classes, etc.

As far as behavior management goes, my students will be on a point system. They can earn 2,1, or no points. 2's are behaviors that are acceptable in the general ed. classroom. 1's are behaviors that are not acceptable in the gen. ed. classroom and 0 are for when students are exhibiting no effort, or are in time-out. (We have a time-out room in my classroom.) These are earned for bus behavior (each student will bring in a bus slip each morning telling how they did) and every half an hour. A small point sheet will go with them to specials so they earn points there as well. All these points translate to levels on a level system. I am going to use 5 levels, which all have responsibilities and privileges. Each student will also have a target behavior, which is a specific behavior to increase or eliminate. For example, one might be, "I will stay on task." The student can earn either a 2,1, or a 0 for this. The target behavior is used as bonus dollars in a token economy system, which the student can use to buy things from my store.

On the first day/week of school, I am planning on going over rules and procedures a lot. On the first day, I am going to read "Oh the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss, which will lead us into goal setting. Because I have some new students, I plan on using the "Kid in the Red Jacket" as my starting read aloud. This book talks about being a new kid. We are going to make time capsules so at the end of the year we can look back and see how they have changed. I also plan on doing some assessments to see which groups I should form. We will also do a lot of "getting to know you" activities.

As far as parent teacher correspondence, I plan on sending home a classroom newsletter every week. I also have class line which allows parents to call in and find out what is happening each week. I agree with the last poster about sending positive notes home. I think this is very important.

Well, I have gone on for way too long. I hope some of this is usable for you. I got almost everything from my wonderful student teaching classroom teacher. She was amazing! Best of luck in your beginning of the year! I am sure it will go great.

Best Wishes,
Rachel

P.S. This teacher also used the Love and Logic system for behavior management, which I think is great too!