Reading groups organisation version 2.0

I love to reorganise things, but only when they are not working perfectly (or close to). I run reading groups twice a week, and have done for the past 6 weeks. They are working well enough, but I could see room for improvement. Enter this colourful tray trolley:

I bought it from Officework yesterday, put it together while my kids were at Music, and set it up after school. I have five groups for guided reading, and I use the same groups for reading groups. What I normally do is have two groups that do guided reading, and they swap half way through the session, and two groups get to do two different activities (and they swap halfway through the session). The problems were arising with the swap. I was finding that one group was awfully slow when it came to packing up, and the other group would then get distracted and muck around. To stop this I've decided to have 10 tasks set up, and each group does their task box 1 first, then when we swap they do the box numbered 2. This way they don't have to swap with another group. My plan is that when they are used to the tub idea I will let the groups switch to their task number 2 whenever the first task is complete - so there is a bit of self-directed responsibility in reading groups.

At this stage I love the tubs (though they are a bit shallow and I've had to stack a couple of games behind the CD player on the top) and tomorrow will be the real test!

I have also been meaning to follow up about the SitSpots that I bought. Here they are:

They are working really well. Whenever I tell my students to sit on the carpet I always say "find a spot" and that reminds them that they must have their bottom on a spot. They have discovered that the spots come off the carpet (the are pretty similar to velcro) but we have tough rules in place that the kids aren't allowed to take the spots off the carpet. A couple of times, when there have been arguments and kids haven't been sitting sensibly, I have asked all students to stand up in a circle and I've allocated the spot they are to sit on. I also use the shape or colour to send the preps out to snack or lunch, ie. "Anyone sitting on a pink oval can get their snack". I tell them I'm looking for the row sitting the best, and they lift their game! One of my little darlings has even taken to jumping from one spot to the other and saying the shape name or the colour - he actually needs to work on these skills a bit so it is perfect for him! Basically, I love them and highly recommend them!

I had an awesome day with my kids today! We started the day with a song, which they always love, and then it was just writing, reading and maths (then they had music and Indonesian while I did some laminating etc). We have started work on persuasive writing, learned the letter Kk and started work on ordinal number. I'm really glad it was a nice day because I'm smack bang in the middle of report writing, and it's a bit stressful!! In fact, that's what I should really be doing now, but everything is more fun that report writing (especially blogging, and even doing the dishes!).