classroom mgt.

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Home : 2003 : July : 17

classroom mgt.
By Heather

This was the one time of the day when management issues were not a problem. They seriously loved the structure. In the beginning of the year, I made "seatwork" (that is what we called the work those who weren't in reading
group were doing) very easy to follow and somewhat routine. That way I didn't have to spend a whole lot of time explaining what they were supposed to be doing. At some points the children would be working on a story in our basal (yes, we have them too and I used them a bit because they had real literature stories in them). I used this as a way to teach children vocabulary, writing,

and how to respond to literature. On Mondays, the children might look up there vocabulary words in the glossary for their homework sheet & then they would take a picture walk through the story & make prediction. On Tuesday, they might partner read the story and then work on a Cloze activity to practice their vocabulary words in context. On Wednesday, they might answer some questions about the story. On Thursday, they might respond to the story in writing in some way. Then on Friday, the children did some kind of art project that related to the story.

It truly will depend on the students that you get what they are able to accomplish on their own. Some students that I had the first year I taught DI needed a ton of seatwork to keep them engaged and out of trouble. Other classes could do one activity and then could find other productive (centers) ways to keep themselves relatively quiet and out of trouble.

Your children will probably have a workbook to complete after their lesson. In the earlier levels of DI the workbook shouldn't take to long, but as you get higher up, it may take longer. I had two groups last year and it worked best to do it this way for me:

I would work with the Green Group- The Purple group would start their seatwork by completing the workbook from the day before and then they would do their daily assignment.

Then I would call the Purple Group to meet with me. We would grade our workbook and then I would present the next lesson. While I was working with this group, the Green group would complete the workbook from today and then their daily assignment.

This enabled us to go on to the next subject as soon as I finished working with the purple group.

I would teach your lower students first and then the higher ones after.

The basal activities are just a few of the things that I did for seatwork. Sometimes we would use this time to do a holiday activity. At the end of the year when all of the children were reading so well, they read chapter books on their own. They loved this and felt so grown up!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at hgausselinhotmail.com