Attendance

Hi everyone!  How do you take attendance?  I’ve seen some teachers use pocket charts with cards for the students and some just call student names.  I have used the pocket chart method when I had a lot of wall space.  I don’t have a lot of wall space in my current classroom. 

The way I always take attendance is by using clothespins.  I write the names on a clip.  The clips are clipped to a basket that I have, one for boys and one for girls.  One of my classroom jobs is Attendance Clerk.  They need to tell me who’s clip is still up and they need to put all the clips back up for me at the end of the day.  It is an easy way for me to see who is not here.  This really works, but I want to try something different.

So this year I’m going to try something new.  I went to JoAnn Fabrics (yes again!) and was walking around with my shopping buddy, my son.  We were looking for something that I could use for attendance.  I was going to use the cookie sheet idea I’ve seen on Pinterest.  But cookie sheets are all of a sudden hard to find by me and I couldn’t find a cookbook stand anywhere!



We were walking around and I ran into these.  They are metal and have a stand attached so they stand up.   

I tried showing the back of it so you
could see how they stand up.

Cool, right?!  I got one in blue and one in green (my usual stand by colors).  They also had pink.  They were kinda expensive ($10 each), but I had a coupon for JoAnn's and one for Michaels and then used my teacher discount!  YEAH!

 Then I bought these little bubble magnets.  I was going to make the ones I’ve seen with glass beads, but these were sitting there already done!  I wrote numbers on them with Sharpie marker so that I can reuse them each year.

    

Then I printed the cute owl signs.  One says “Whoooo is here today?” and the other one says “Whooo is  absent today?”  The students will take their magnet off the absent sign in the morning and attach it to the here today sign.  I will still use my Attendance Clerk to check the magnets each morning and to put them back on the chart at the end of the day.  I put polka dotted ribbon in the holes to match the colors.  I put green ribbon in the blue one and blue ribbon in the green one.

         

Here is how they look with a few of
the button magnets on them

             

What do you think?  Are they “owl”tastic???

Tracey J