Clean That Table Kiddos!

I am at a little Christian school, where I have the privilege of teaching the first and second grade.  Total of 11 kids, crazy, I know!!  Cleaning our table after lunch has always been the worst chore.  "Who's the table washer?  Who are the floor sweepers?"  No-one seems to know.
We try, but we never have done very well at getting our table clean.  I figured, hey, we are the little ones, the 8th graders can handle our crumbs and juice drips...

Until....  I tried boys against girls.  I assigned each a table and said, ok, lets see who can clean it the best.  If anyone's table is not good, they will have to do both tables next time.  They pretty much went bananas on the most dedicated 6-7 year old cleaning frenzy I had ever seen!  They wiped off the chairs, pushed them all in, they did an incredible job!  And, they loved it.

I did have a few kinks to work out though...  First they were soaking towels, and then getting more towels to dry.  Big waste.  To solve it, I spray 6 half sheet towels and hand them out.  They are not allowed any more.  Problem 2 was they were running all around the room.  To fix that one, they will get a 5 min. time out for running.  No hurry just clean!

It's been a week and it really has morphed from being a competition, to just having fun working together.  Some of the boys even like to help the girls out, since there's only 4 girls and 7 boys.  I haven't had a losing team yet.

My New Lesson Plan Book, YAY!

I have tried numerous different planbooks, but I wanted to really go for it, and make my own.  Here is what I came up with.

The Cover Page

The class schedule.   Scroll down to get the schedule for free.  :)

6 Subject weekly lesson plan, room for detailed notes, and events and reminders in the top left banner.  Holidays are included in the banner too.

Pre-dated for this school year, yay, I hate doing all those dates by hand, it takes forever!

Here is the month at a glance calendar, there is a ton of "stickers" you can use for all those dates, inservice, report cards, conferences, birthdays, 1/2 days, meetings, etc...

Attendance pages come in 6 styles, somehow it makes me feel a sense of progress to have the pages different for each marking period.  Also like not having to write all those names by hand, just copy and paste them here, and into the grade book, next part...

I included all the elementary headings, you can copy and paste those in, or for higher grades,      period 1, 2, etc...

The kids:  So excited to have all this info right at my fingertips, no looking through files for the phone numbers, and allergies and all that stuff.

Pages for notes, self explanatory. :)

Year at a glance, always useful.

I'm excited, hope you like it.  It's editable in Power Point, also comes in PDF and is only $6. 

Get it here:   Lesson Plan Book

Free Class schedule:  Schedule