Whole Brain Teaching in the first few days!

I have been lucky enough to attend the Whole Brain Teaching National Conference for three years. I LOVE using Whole Brain Teaching in my classroom. One of the first things I teach my firsties is how to talk with a partner. It is so important to me that they know how to properly communicate with one another. They need to be able to speak and listen.

This does not just come innately. Students will need to be taught how to do this. This is very simple.

The teacher says, (clap, clap) Teach! The students responds, (clap, clap) Okay!

 As the student says okay they turn and face their carpet partner. My carpet is purposely setup to allow for carpet partners. I have two rows of purple and two rows of blue. My students are taught which row turns and which row stays put. As the students say okay, my friends who are on the blue rows turn super fast and face their friends on the purple row.

 And then we practice that about a million times. Hah! I like them to do it fast. After all, my favorite rule is Rule #1, Follow Directions Quickly! Once they know how to turn quickly I call each student who is sitting on ( I say a random color, doesn't matter which) purple to come and get a microphone.

Well, they naturally get super pumped! Who doesn't want a shiny microphone! I bought these off of Amazon.



I tell my students if you do not have a microphone your job is to listen. We usually practice with something super easy like rhyming words. Here is an example:

Friends, I want you to teach your partner about rhyming words. When I say teach I want you to list all the words you can think of that rhyme with cat, okay?  *clap, clap* Teach!

My students respond with *clap, clap* Okay!  And they turn to face their partner. If they are holding the microphone they then begin rhyming. I walk around and monitor during this time.

Now, once they have listed a few words I teach them how to switch. This is so fun and easy!

I say SWITCH!  Students respond, UH OH SWITCH and then hand the microphone to a partner and that person then begins listing rhyming words.

It looks something like this.

I'll be sharing more of my Whole Brain Classroom, and maybe even a video!!  Thanks for stopping by. :)

Britney Gillich

Fluency and Singing go hand in hand!

Hi friends, I hope everyone is enjoying the summer and I'm scared to use the words back..to...school all together so I won't say that BUT I will say that I have only 3 weeks left. AGH!! How did that happen?

 Today I want to share with you how I begin my ELA block Every. Single. Day. I have a collection of fun poems and songs that correlate with monthly themes. It is SO simple. Every day we sing for my friends to come to the carpet. We greet each other and do a short few minutes of morning meeting. 

Once, I have their attention and we are ready to begin I turn on my SmartBoard and on the board I have a poem or a song waiting on them. First, I read it to them to model how to read fluently. Then we read it together a few times. After that I usually have students bursting with excitement to read the poem to me, which they can now do because we have read it at least 3 times by now.

My students especially love the days when I have a song pulled up for them to sing. I catch them singing it throughout the day at their seats. :)


 Example: This is from my October Poems and Songs.

I have recently bundled all of my Poems and Songs for the entire year!

To check out my bundle, CLICK HERE.

Thanks for stopping by!

Hoppin' and Crackin' into Spring

Yall!  Incase you haven't seen on the news, Louisiana is under water. Not me, THANKFULLY!  Most places in our district are flooded and because of that we have been out of school for two days until the water recedes. So, when I heard that today was going to be no school for students and a work day for teachers I sprinted over to the dollar tree. I knew I needed to find something to keep me busy all day today at school. Mission successful.

They had so many different types of eggs!  I found some fun freebies for the carrots and the plain eggs.

For the carrots I used The Kindergarten Connections Spring Math Freebie.

On the plain eggs I wrote a number on the top and bottom of each egg. The kiddos will just need to make a random match, record it, and solve. The freebie is from The Happy Teacher.

I had a special plan for the chicks and rabbits. My students are OBSESSED with learning animal facts. They just die laughing when I tell them silly ones. I KNEW immediately I would have to incorporate facts about rabbits and chickens.

This is what I came up with.

Inside each egg is a sentence scrambled up that has facts about either a chicken or a rabbit. I made them in color BUT our lovely color printer is of course broken (always) so I used a different color highlighter on each set to make sure none of the pieces get mixed up.

There is a recording sheet for each center. My kids are going to love, love, love this when they come back to school (hopefully, fingers crossed, tomorrow).

And if you stayed with me this far, enjoy my Easter egg sentence scramblers as a freebie. :)

Grab it HERE!

Keep Louisiana in your prayers!