Be Inspired by Teaching Strategies Blog Hop

Welcome to our blog hop for Teaching Strategies! We are always inspired by each other in our teacher network . We share our great ideas, and those ideas are altered into a new ideas. Since things never stay the same we never run out of creativity to share. That is how a network works...together. We may have individual blogs, and stores but we are apart of the same network. We share a common love of learning and teaching and it binds us as a community. I do see my TpT community as a family. We interact with each other and build these fabulous relationships. Its pretty neat, I love it.

I first learned about Tsu (pronounced Sue) from Teachers Pay Teachers bloggers, already I like how the network is based on family trees, you are able to grow your own network. You can read about it from Debbie at  Crockett's Classroom Forever in Third Grade and Blair at One Lesson at a Time.

Today I wanted you be inspired to teach students how to use planners or agendas. It is a product I am working on. You may ask for your students to take out their planners to write in them daily. What would happen if you stopped doing that. Are you thinking it'd be chaos. Its entirely possible they'd stop using it. Yet, what would happen if they were given more responsibility for recording their day.Would they learn to organize their day? Would they learn to manage their time? My vote it yes.

I have used several different ones over the years but I think the one that worked best for us are the ones that I created to meet children's individual needs. They can be taught to stay organized and given reasons why they should care about not having to look for missing papers, or forgetting about projects. Children can benefit from planner just like adults.

Think lesson plans. When you create your lesson plans you plan for them daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Children can have similar learning plans. It goes beyond a newsletter home or having it on your agenda. If next month you are going to learn about Rocks, students will have something to look forward to, if they have a rock collection they can gather materials to share with their classmates to be apart of the teaching process.

There is much talk about raising responsible young people. I even wonder how many I times a week I tell my little ones to act responsible. Then I wonder if I give them enough room to be responsible. We simple tell them to do this lesson or that lesson and they rarely know what is coming next or how it relates to the previous lesson. Do you often hear the why do I need to learn this? It's not enough to say because its on the lesson plan. They should be apart of that plan. We do that by spending a few minutes once a week, to talk about what is next on the agenda, answering questions, and hearing about how the week could have went better.

We use the sticky note system. If my little ones have a question or cant figure out part of an assignment they write the question and add a sticky note. Then we can come back together and look over it. We also use that in our planner. Once the week is over we add a new set of sticky notes in.

You can add a pocket to keep all their important information and dates to remember.

Busy little ones need a way to manage their time. To see time as dividable into sections that create their whole day. If they can predict how long an assignment will take they can set a time for it. Rushing is a big problem and you can tell they do when their handwriting is sloppy and assignments are smudged. They may learn stop rushing if they learn time management.

My favorite part about using planners is looking back and seeing everything they accomplished. They can visually see what they learned and the date they learned it on. They can use their agenda to review for tests by being able to find notes, and lessons as they are written. In front of them they see their personal growth and know where they need to put more practice into learning or areas they are comfortable with so that they can teach others. There is great pride in that for the student and for the teacher too.

 Find your free Morning Work with an Agenda here

Perfect for Second Graders

 

Find your free Daily Agenda here

Perfect for First Graders 

You know what I love about this new Pinterest board everything is turquoise. 

It just so happens its my favorite color!

Tsu for TpT on Pinterest

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