Teaching Tip Tuesday & Telling Time Activity

Coming at you with a couple of quick and easy tips today!  Do you use a word wall in your classroom?  Are you required to put up a specific number of words per week?  Does this require you getting out a ladder and risking your life?  If so, stop the insanity!

Tip #1:  Put your word wall somewhere that is easily accessible to you, but still allows students to see it.  A great place for this is on cabinet doors.  These are usually high enough for students to see, but still within reach.

Go ahead and create all of your words and stick them up with tape (just turned over backwards) so that you don't have to "store" them.  Then, just flip over the words for that week as you teach them!

It also helps to color code your words - one color per letter of the alphabet if possible (for example: one yellow "c" word, one  green "c" word, etc.) that way you can refer to words by color and students can locate them easily (that is the purple "c" word).

Tip #2  Do you use Brag Tags in your classroom?  I've seen a LOT of these in giveaways recently, so I'm pretty sure some of you are using these to reward your kiddos!  Don't they just LOVE them!?  I've seen a lot of teachers create elaborate "Brag Tag Stations" in their classrooms on bulletin boards, but since I just don't have the wall space for that I decided to keep it simple!

Each day, students wear their brag tag chains.  At the end of the day when they go to pack up they take their backpacks off their hooks and hang their Brag Tags there instead!  The hooks are already numbered so there's no need to label a special spot for these!  The next morning when students come in and hang their backpacks, they see their Brag Tags and are reminded to put them on for all to see!

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What time is it?  Time to share a fun little activity that we've been having a ball with! 

Students have been designing their own watches during our Time Unit.  The ones above are all to the hour or half-hour.

Then they walk around and ask each other "What's the Time?"  But instead of answering, the person must show their watch for the student to record the time by his/her class number on the recording sheet.  A fun, interactive way to get students moving while assessing them!  :)

You can pick up this activity at Teacher's Clubhouse for just $0.99.  It includes 48 pages of watches (full sets of time to the hour, half-hour, quarter past, and quarter 'til) plus one page of blank watches, a set of time to the five-minute slips for students to use in drawing their own times, a recording sheet, an extension activity of an AM/PM class book with cover and teacher directions!  Now, that's a deal!  Head on over and pick it up now! :)