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2016-17

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Table of Contents: Books in Multiple Languages. Dia de los Muertos Art Project. One of the most popular celebrations in Central and South America is Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. It is a special day to remember loved ones who are no longer living. The art represented in the Day of the Dead celebrations are vibrant, energetic and colorful.

It’s hard not to be inspired by this special holiday. My fifth grade students created marigolds (the flower of choice for this holiday) from painted paper scraps and placed them onto a blue or eggplant colored paper. They glued the flowers to the background paper first. I used the book, The Day of the Dead / El Dia de los Muertos by Bob Barner as my inspiration. Fifth grade Day of the Dead artwork… Señor Wooly. Log In To log back in, start by finding your school. Don't see it? Tell your teacher to contact us, and we'll get it fixed right away. Don't see your teacher? Back Step 1 / 5 Sign Up To create a new account, click the button below. You'll need the class code given to you by your teacher. Enter your e-mail and password to log in.

Don't have an account? Sign Up Item Characteristics #3 Phasellus dolor. This week I ran across my Hispanic Artists Photo Challenge on my external hard drive. I got such a giggle looking through the slides that my students had submitted! They had a blast doing it and it made me proud that they could actually enjoy a project about famous Hispanic artists! For this project, students research the paintings of several Hispanic artists. They choose a painting, recreate it themselves and take a photo. How awesome are those!? ALL ABOUT SPAIN - Country and culture.

Explore Spanish regions, cities, coasts and islands, or book your travel to Spain. Here you find great deals on Spain Tours, flights, hotels, holiday homes, car rentals and special offers to discover the essential Spain. Like it or not, it's nearing that time again ... back to school. I know some of my teacher friends are heading back already! A few days ago on my facebook page, I asked people to leave a comment about their favourite back to school activity.

You know, those activities that start to build a positive classroom environment and get the students excited about the year right from the very first day. Their ideas were so fabulous, I knew I had to share some of them with you (and get them down somewhere so I wouldn't forget them). Make a silhouette of each student's head using a projecter. This was just a small sample of the ideas ... so many wonderful and creative ones were shared. I have a favourite activity to share, too. Whenever your first day happens to be, I hope you have a WONDERFUL back to school start. I know...I know...you have heard me say this a million times. It is important to have groups in science and to have individual jobs while you are working together! So how do you introduce it the first time???? We begin by Introducing our science groups. Each group has 4 people in it (as best as possible - because I have 22 students I do have two groups with 5 in them).

Each child is assigned a color as you see. Then I have a chart that shows the jobs. I can easily rotate the tiles daily to switch jobs. We began working as groups by setting expectations. Then we worked on two simple tasks. Why? Get your students into their groups of four and send your Getter 1 to the materials spot to get 6 solo cups and one rubber band tool. Students will need to make a structure that looks like this: Have your Starter create this structure. Then as a team, they will need to move the cups from this structure to a pyramid with three cups on bottom, then two cups then one on top. What do you think??? It's Saturday, so it's time to link up with my BBB Joanne from Head Over Heels for Teaching for Spark Student Motivation!

The weeks leading up to spring break were absolutely horrible with chattiness -- talk, talk, talk. I'm talking about the kind of talk when there shouldn't be talk. I know the kids were excited -- I was excited -- be we still had some learning to do! So I came up with this very simple, yet powerful, way to control all of the talking. I call it Beat the Teacher. It basically is a game of you versus the students, and who doesn't love a little friendly competition?

If I get to "1" and there is even one student talking, I get the tally point. Before I go, I wanted to make sure that you knew about a wonderful fundraiser going on over at Tori's Teacher Tips. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the motivational ideas over at Joanne's blog. Happy Saturday!! 2b Students engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.

Positive behaviors Interactions that convey a portrait of the way you want to be perceived and healthy interactions with technology itself, for example, moderating the time online or gaming, ergonomic issues and balancing use of media with daily physical activity. Safe behaviors Interactions that keep you out of harm’s way, for example, knowing the identity of who you are interacting with; how much and what kind information you release online; protecting oneself from scams, phishing schemes and poor purchasing practices (e-commerce theft). Legal behaviors Interactions that are mindful of the law, for example, abiding by copyright and fair use, respecting network protections by not hacking them and not using another’s identity. We already been in school for a month, but I was putting this post off until I could take better pictures. That hasn’t happened, like many things on my to-do list… ah, the life of a teacher and mother. I am teaching every period this year, with no planning period, and I’m trying to be as organized as possible to deal with paperwork and keep things in their place.

I moved rooms, as well as taking on some history blocks, so I was going for a streamlined look that would be calming for me and for my students. My room is tiny, but I love it. Here’s the grand tour: I tried for a maps, chalkboard and burlap theme with lots of blue and green. I have the Interrogative Posters available for download here. I had the students write their names on popsicle sticks for randomly selecting students to call on, or to quickly create groups.

This is a shoe organizer from IKEA that I’m using for flashcards, game cards, and other games that don’t store well in a hanging file. This is one of my favorites. Who doesn’t love teaching Spanish songs in class? Music sticks in our minds, uses repetitive language, and makes us fall in love with culture. For a long time, I used authentic songs badly. I wanted to do more, but because my class was textbook and grammar-centered, I felt like I had little time. I didn’t know how to maximize the lyrics, or make them comprehensible. Martina Bex, Kristy Placido, and Mis Clases Locas have helped tremendously in knowing how and why to teach with music. After throwing out my textbook, I started seriously looking for content– good, comprehensible, compelling content. I have arranged these by my tentative Spanish I units, so you can see the themes and structures I was looking for in the songs.

Enjoy! Unit 1: Nuestra clase & nuevos amigos Who is here? Language: Start super siete verbs (tener, ser, hay), decir, greetings, classroom objects, some numbers and colors. Input/activities: Martina Bex Units, storytelling. Unit 2: Mi mundo immediato y ¿quién soy? Untitled. I am still thinking through how I really should teach vocabulary. More and more, I’m convinced I should toss the lists (certainly the laborious, too-long ones from the textbook), but I’m not confident yet that I can toss them completely. Although it’s likely that vocabulary is better acquired through storytelling, in chunks, and not as part of themed lists, Spanish I is still tough because at this point students need a lot of words at the get-go. I’ve included my beginning of the year vocabulary booklet, which includes some basic greetings and classroom objects so we can quickly function in the TL in the classroom. Most of my students come knowing some colors and numbers and adjectives, so I introduce them fairly quickly and have good community-building games to play with them.

I also like to quickly teach these basic terms so that circumlocution is possible early-on. This flies in the face of some of the TPRS philosophy (input ONLY at this stage) but I’m still working my ideas out. §. We’re coming up fast on the beginning of another school year. That means a new batch of students to get to know, students who need to be made comfortable in your classroom, and who need to get to know each other. It’s essential to start building relationships with your students right from the start. And how to accomplish this? Icebreakers. I planned to create a nice big post with dozens of icebreaker ideas you could choose from. I would scour the Internet for the very best activities and games and store links to them here for your reference.

They require students to take massive social risks with people they barely know. So I have scrapped my plan to curate good icebreakers from the Internet. In my own classrooms, with middle school, high school, and college students, I have played all three of these games with great success. Each of these will likely sound familiar to you, although the names may not be exactly what you’ve known them as. Blobs and Lines Concentric Circles This or That. ForAllRubrics - Log In.