Another day without RM...

Today I was teaching solo again. RM was not able to be there, and I knew the night before so I wasn't flustered or anything- just busy as a bee!
I had prepared to teach "drawing conclusions" as a lesson in reading and I was prepared to review some concepts in math. We will be assessing them next week so I wanted to see how much they knew with skip counting. I had copied a worksheet earlier this week so we used that.
I had some problems with behavior with specific students today. Yesterday I had problems with the group as a whole but today was the opposite. It seems the individual students were challenging me- and I didn't like it one bit! I handled the situations as they came to me but went to two other teachers and asked their opinions of different situations.
We have three students that I can bet money will be off task at a moments notice if I let them. That is one thing RM keeps pointing out when giving me feedback- I can ignore their behaviors and this isn't necessarily a good thing. So I have been trying to focus in on these three and making sure that I'm addressing their needs and keeping them on task. The one student will shout out "I NEED HELP!" not a second after I have given the instructions. I will review the instructions with him and he will be able to answer several questions if I ask him. I will walk away and within seconds, he is hollering again. This is very frustrating! I understand he needs additional affirmations but I don't want to coddle him either. If he will just take two seconds to look at the question or read the sentence, he can get it- he is a rather smart child. But he needs that affirmation every step of the way. I'm struggling with this- not with the child, but communicating to him that he can indeed do it. For now, I am just sticking to reminding him not to shout out and giving him a "check yourself" signal hoping he will have some patience.
The other two students who I can guarantee will be off task aren't loud most of the time and I can stop at their seats every time I pass while going around the class and remind them of where they should be. I honestly don't know how these students learn anything given their 3 second attention span! But again- they are all rather smart- just busy busy busy!
Today was a bit different though. Aside from the normal three that I work with keeping on task, I had a student try to pull the wool over my eyes on three different occasions during the day. I know he is testing me, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Up until this point I have been laid back and trying to be nice- but after being with the kids for two days without RM I grew a spine (so to speak) and laid out the law. This child was not honest multiple times so now they are on my radar and I will keep track and make sure to hold them accountable. I don't want to be that way, but I also don't want to lose the established classroom management system either!
I was able to show them a couple of videos from YouTube on pronouns today. They had said a few days ago that they watched a great video on YouTube last year and they really liked it. So I went looking and thought I had the right one. I wanted to show them the Schoolhouse Rock one anyway. I had the screen up on the projector after the Schoolhouse Rock video and they saw the other one and they were all hollering, "THAT'S IT MRS. LEECE! THAT'S IT!!!" So I thought I would share...

I scored major bonus points with them for finding this! I let them watch both videos twice and I let them get out of their seats and dance to the music. We sang (yes, I sang too....) the song a couple times after the video and we brainstormed some other pronouns that aren't in the video. 

Other than some behavior issues, I think we had a good day. The students are ready for their pronoun and vocabulary assessments tomorrow. And I am happy to say that I finally think I can do this "teaching 28 kids at the same time" thing... at least as long as a I a pronoun song to play!