Now for the reason for the title of this post. Last night I went on to pinterest for my nightly checking up on what I've missed since I've last been on, and found my weekly behavior chart freebie pinned that I have here from one of my posts a bit back. That totally threw me for a loop, seeing something of mine from this little blog, pinned by someone and then it said it had 209 repins!!! What??? So crazy. So I clicked on it myself, which led me to the part at the bottom that said other pins from C is for...and I found other things of mine that people had pinned. I couldn't believe people had actually pinned some of my stuff!!!! So strange and surreal to me!!! I just can't get over it! I'm glad people like it! Another thing that I still can't wrap my head around, my stuff being purchased on TPT. I'm amazed every time when I get the e-mail saying that one of my products has sold! I have also gotten really great feedback, which is so nice!!! It definitely motivates me to do more (I just have to find some time) since it's helping so many people!!! I guess I didn't realize how many people use the same reading series as we do and how much it would help. I knew it would help my team, which is why I created it in the first place, but to get feedback that others are loving it and it's helping them too is so fabulous and surreal. I just had to comment on all of that because it's so bizarre to me!
The next thing I want to discuss with all of you is CAFE. Now just like the rest of you, I love the 2 Sisters and everything they are about. Last year, after reading The Daily 5, I implemented it into my classroom and loved it. I so connected with everything that the sisters said in the book and followed it to a T and was happy with the results. I knew I wanted to use it again this year and felt even better about it after doing it last year. We had to tweak it a bit because we didn't have enough time to get to all 5 centers a day, we do 2 or 3 depending on if it's a recess day or not. Since I wanted to get really solid in it, I had decided to wait on CAFE. Then my school decided to implement an intervention block during the day. We already do RTI, but they wanted this block of time to really be differentiated to meet the needs of all of the students. So for the first 30 minutes of the day we are supposed to do what we are calling "Target Time" (cause we're targeting skills). Our principals said they weren't going to tell us how to run it but it should be smaller groups to get the instruction they needed. It was so hard to wrap our heads around this as we are just getting to know our kids and we don't yet KNOW what they need. So during our team meeting last week, we were talking about what we were going to do and how we were going to go about it. I said to my teammate, this would be a good time to do CAFE. She had already decided that she was going to try and implement CAFE this year, but hadn't worked out how she was going to fit everything in, especially since we do guided reading and Daily 5 together. She loved the idea and once we talked about it with the rest of the group, they loved the idea too. 2 of my teammates already have the book and so they copied the first 6 week plan out for us as a launching pad. However, I need the actual book so I can read how the sisters implemented it, so I ordered the book on amazon and it will be here this week. Now we're supposed to start "Target Time" this week, but we were still a little sketchy on if we could or not because we were each supposed to be getting assistants that could work with a small group too on a skill and we didn't have those yet. We didn't want them to walk in our rooms the day we begin and we say, "here are the kids you're working with and this is what you're doing" 5 minutes before they do so. So my plan this weekend was to learn more about CAFE. I knew the basics behind it because I had gone to a presentation on it by some co-workers who implemented it. I also went out to get the stuff to make my CAFE board. I don't have any more bulletin board space in my room so I got a presentation board to make my CAFE board and used the fabulous LadybugsTeacherFiles headings to make it.
Michaels only had colored boards, but I thought the black would work nicely. Then I used green ribbon to divide the sections.
I then found online chapter 3 of the CAFE book to read to see how to start it off, as well as reading the previous blog entries about it from the summer book study. That got me to see that we could start it this week because you start off whole group with it anyway. However I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on what books you used for the first few lessons. Any other tips you'd like to share? Also does anyone have a suggestion of where to get a cute graphic to use for a Target Time card for my schedule? Thanks again for taking the time to read my entries! :) Have a fabulous day! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment
I'd love to hear from you! :)