A Love for Teaching: Prefixes and more

Yesterday I was working one on one with a student during Recess. Normally I don't like to keep students in during recess, but this particular student had chosen to play all during centers instead of do his work so he got to do his work with me during recess. He was working on an I am poem. One of the lines said "I worry..." I asked my student "What do you worry about?" His response was "nothing". When I asked him again he said "nothing, hakuna matata, it means no worries. I learned it from a movie, it taught me that hakuna matata means no worries." What a great reminder this was to me! In the end everything works out how it is supposed to, and chances are it will all work out better than I ever could have imagined.

Funny note: Today I wore a shirt that buttons down the back. As we were walking to lunch one of my students said to me "Miss Paul, are you wearing your shirt backwards?" Made me smile, oh how I love kiddos!

Happy note: Yesterday we made our multiplication monsters! Today we were doing some more multiplication. I put 3x5=15 up on the board and had the students discuss with their table groups what it meant. I heard one kid say "It's like 3 monsters with 5 eyes each!" YES! He got it! 3 groups of 5! Multiplication Monsters = success! I absolutely love it when I see or hear kids applying things that I have taught in previous lessons.

Prefixes -

Today we talked about prefixes un-, re-, and mis-. I came up with the idea of "prefix pockets". After watching a video about prefixes and talking about what the different prefixes meant I had the students work with table groups to brainstorm words with prefixes. They shared their words with the class and then I wrote the words and pt them in the corresponding prefix pocket! We just did this as a whole class activity, but you could make it an individual assignment. For younger grades you could turn it into a word sort where kids have to sort words with prefixes into the correct pocket. Anyways, just thought I would share!