Monday Eating, Drinking, and LInking Made It!

This is looking to be a very frustrating day!  GRRRRR....totally lost the first post of the day!  Deep breath...

 Okay, moving on to Christy's Eating, Drinking, and Linking party at Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road with a yummy recipe for Blueberry Buttermilk Breakfast cake from Alexandra's Kitchen.  This is so good, and since I am trying to be so good, I did not make it today:)

http://www.alexandracooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cakecut2.jpg

This recipe is so beautifully laid out and explained on her post, that I will not even attempt to duplicate it.  Let me just say that it is easier than it looks, and that it was a favorite with my colleagues and my contractors.  So good!

Now moving on to the Monday Made It portion of this jinxed post with Tara over at 4th Grade Frolics.

Before my whole post disappeared (it probably posted on Polyvore), I was saying that this week has not been very crafty.  It has been a week of errands, yardwork, and cleaning out closets.  Not very exciting:(.  However, I did figure out how to make a Facebook page for my blog!  I think it was an amazing feat of technological know-how, and I am very proud of it:)!  Also, I made my point sheet for my behavior management system, and decided on how to implement it! 

After this tough year, I decided to revisit a system that had worked really well for me in the past.  It took a little revamping to make it fit, but I think it will work.  Their points were die cut numbers.  Table 1 got ones, table 2 got twos, and so on.  This eliminated the incentive for stealing another table's points, because they couldn't use them.  The rewards were simple.  The table with the most points did not have to participate in clean up, they might go to lunch a couple minutes early, or they might get a little homemade treat.

So I morphed the classroom economy concept with the old point system.  Instead of numbers as points, each table will have a specific color.  Instead of single points, the new ones are in denominations like money - 1's, 5's, 10's, 20's, 50's, and 100's.

 

By using the similar denominations as money, I hope to improve their real world number sense.

This is the table point record keeping sheet.  Two of them print out nicely on one sheet.  My goal is make a little ongoing lesson on positive/negative integers and percentages.  Will we have time every day for all of this?  Probably not, but as the year goes on it should take less and less time.  And in the end, it should mean that I have to spend less time on the "lesson" about converting fractions to percentages.

Please feel free to use the points or record keeping sheet for your classroom.  The zip folder is here:).

Have a great week!  And thank you so much for those of you who came back to read the real post!