Reflect and Refresh

Welcome to Reflect and Refresh, a two part linky party where teacher bloggers share their reflections on the 2014-2015 school year and ways they are planning to refresh their teaching in 2015-2016. I am linking up with friends over at

Communication: This year I started a weekly email to my parents. I included our spelling words for the week, our homework sheet, a reading log and reminders of any upcoming dates. I have to say it worked AWESOME this year! No more thousands of questions coming in! I really think the parents appreciated knowing what was going on in the classroom too. 


This past year I was a team lead for our K team. In order to keep everyone up to date on everything I signed us up for Remind. It is an app that let's me text my team mates anythings. Last minute PLC just sent a text and we are good to go.  It was a life saver some days! I highly recommend it 🙂




Content:  After 6 weeks of school our admin decided to go departmentalized! I was F R E A K E D out! I did NOT want to leave my kids with someone else! Plus now I had to get used to another 22 students. Looking back I may not have had the best attitude about it  but, it ended up being really really GREAT! I taught ELA and SS. I did a lot of cross curricular lessons too. I also found that this content area is my strength! I loved planning reading lesson for whole and small group. I also was able to devote a lot of time to prepping and planning reading centers.


 I know lots of you out there might think it is crazy to departmentalized down at the K level but, I really think the kids did benefit from it. I was lucky to be paired up with one other teacher so I had a good 2 hrs in each class. Other team mates of mine were in groups of 3 and I know they always felt there was not enough time. I am hoping next year we are all paired up in with one other class. 


Organization: This was a BIG thing for me. I am a pretty organized person as it is. Now with me traveling to another classroom I had to have a system that worked! I decided to use these drawers for students to place their papers in. I also had drawers like this for me in each room. It really helped to get my copies sorted and ready to go!

I also got rid of our class clip chart this year! At the begging of the year I was using mini ones for each student that looked liked this

They worked for awhile and were effective. Truthfully I forgot to keep up with them and I was lucky to have a good bunch of kids this year. They just 
L O V E D to talk to each other! Next year I am going to implement the golden ticket method that  A Teeny Tiny Teacher uses. I am really inspired by it!




My BIG summer project: I really want to come up with a system using this cart that really collected dust in my classroom this year