Hi Friends!
I hope you’re having a wonderful Sunday! I’m working on printing out all of the new 4th grade common core standards and student objectives to display on my objectives bored, but I wanted to share something I made last week.
I am so not a lazy teacher, but I do believe in making my life easier by having my students be independent and not having to do every little thing myself. When I taught first grade, I had the same philosophy, and now that I’m going to be teaching fourth, I definitely think my kiddos can take ownership in a lot of the daily running of our classroom.
When I was in college, one of my professors told us that we should never have to take roll the traditional way (calling out names and waiting to hear “present”) because it was a waste of time. I have to tell you, I couldn’t agree more!
Last year when I had a clip chart, my students had to flip their clip over from their initials to their number when they came in which let me know they were in school. I would just quickly glance and see who’s initials were still facing out, and then I knew who was absent. I didn’t even have to remind them, they just did it first thing.
Well, I’m using a classroom economy in 4th grade (read about it {here} and {here}, so I needed to come up with something new. I’ve seen different attendance check-in’s all over Pinterest, and I finally decided to make a magnetic one.
Here’s what mine looks like! (I still need to add ribbon to hang it)
I used a pizza pan from the dollar store and some magnets. I made the numbers and titles myself. I laminated the numbers and headings and glued them to the magnets.
I always give my students a numbers, so they’ll come in every morning, move their number from absent to present, and I’ll know who’s not in school that day! It will be one of my students end of the day jobs to move them back. I would recommend getting a long metal pan instead of this one, because I originally has the numbers as squares, but I had to trim them down.
Click the picture below to grab your free attendance headings and numbers (number go up to 40):
How do you take attendance? I’d love to hear about it! Leave a comment below!
