Later Gator!

Oh my goodness! Talk about exhaustion.

We are back at school and moving right along.

I'm (mostly) teaching from my chair right now.

I can't walk my class to lunch or specials because of the stairs.

 I have to teach my math lesson with an ice pack on my knee.

After 8 hours of school, I get to go suffer 1 hour of physical therapy (NO FUN).

I'm pretty much a mess, not to mention completely wiped out and it's only the 2nd day back to school.

Ok whining is over...now on to the good stuff :)

A fabulous gal that student taught at the same time I did was at a conference I went to and let me tell ya...I need to get this girl a blog. She is incredible. I think it's safe to say I'm very jealous of her ideas. I could probably write 100 blog posts specifically for her ideas.

One of her stellar ideas is to have one of these babies.

A Later Gator board.

You all know how little time we really have to teach skills at a mastery level.

This is one way to help at least get those kiddos heading in that direction.

After I'm done teaching a lesson, I always have little ones saying I'm confused or can you show me a little more please. SO here is the solution to that problem, since we also know that it's impossible to stop everyone else who understood the lesson to work with the one struggling (at least not for an extended period of time)

When this happens, I simply say "tell me later gator."

Then they go over to this board, write their name & question on a post-it, & pop it right up on the board.

During DEAR time & at the end of the day during snack, I will pull any student who posted something on the later gator board and work with them on the skill they are struggling with.

It's worked great so far---I only started it yesterday, so I guess I can't really offer up a huge opinion about it yet. But my super teacher friend swears by it. I'll keep you posted on how it's working in my classroom.

(By the way: how awesome is my hubby? He draws everything for me-it's amazing!! AND he is game when I bring home different projects and ask him ever so kindly to get to work :) Yea..he's great!)