Blooming Orange: Bloom's Taxonomy Helpful Verbs Poster Here’s another poster to help get you thinking about how you can apply Bloom’s higher-order thinking skills with your children. This poster shows the segments of an orange with each segment relating to a thinking skill and some helpful verbs to serve as prompts. While there are many more verbs that we could have added, we felt that including just seven in each segment would make them easier to remember (For more information, see Miller’s paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” We thought it would be interesting to depict the verbs in a circular form as opposed to a hierarchical list, given that these skills don’t often occur in isolation and are interconnected. For those of you who prefer it, we’ve also created a grayscale version of the poster. Let us know what you think – you know we’re always listening! Download the pdf’s here:
Confessions of a Nerdy Teacher - Organization A few months ago when I decided that I wanted to organize and catelog my classroom library I decided I was going to need a little help. I imagined the 1000+ books that were stored in my garage and mentally calculated how long it would take me to type them all into Excel. And of course I would want to include the AR Level and Points, and while I was at it I wanted to label all the books into categories…I would probably be done by 2020, if I was lucky. So I did a little Googling and THAT is how I discovered the Intelliscanner, dun-dun, dun. Confession: One of my secret desires has always been to be a librarian. All my childhood books have numbers written in the covers, and my sister was forced to play library on more than one occasion. This handy little scanner connects to your computer, scans the barcode on your books, and puts them into a fantastic software that looks a lot like iTunes. Click the picture to see this up close Oh this next part just warms my nerdy, little heart:
How to do Blackout Poetry and "Unstuck" Giveaway For this week's giveaway I want to introduce you to a book called "Unstuck" by Noah Scalin. I was sent a copy to review by Quarry Books and I am truly amazed by this book. You can check out his website "Make Something 365". Inside you have 52 projects or ways to get you to start being creative. Things you may have never thought of before, interesting ways to do things, and great writing/art prompts. When I was putting together my "Writing and the Visual Arts" session with my colleague Kim McCullough we kept going back to this book saying "Oh we could do that, or that , or that". I have a waiting list of teachers at school wanting to borrow this book so you know that's a good sign! Here are the particulars: - soft cover - 240 pages - 9.25" X 6.25" or 23.5 cm X 16 cm - suggested list price $19.99 CAN but I found it for just over $15 at Chapters - publisher is Voyageur Press Here is one of the projects that I can envision as a larger art project. Find some old books. Let dry. That's it! P.S.
My shelf runneth over Here is the question of the day...If a person knows they may very well need an intervention, then do they really need an intervention? Probably, but I'll just keep closing my eyes and pretending I am perfectly normal. Everyone thinks exactly like me, and everyone thinks this is heaven right here! I had lunch with my wonderful hubby yesterday. When I headed out to stop back by the school to finish up planning for the week, it seemed like a complete sin not to stop by one of my favorite places in the world, Books-A-Million. You know - just for a moment, just to look around, I will be in and out in a flash! This is why I do what I do when it comes to buying new book selections for my class each year and then making such a fuss when the box comes in, genuinely showing them how excited I am to put my hands on the new books and share them. One of the great activities we did first thing this week was a sensory detail and simile writing with donuts. Fuzzy pics of my boys playing!
Adventures in a Gifted Classroom | Musings on Modern Learning Gotta love a prefix and suffix!! I've been completely enjoying my time in 3rd grade. The kids are a scream! I've been making anchor charts for them because I'm a visual learner. As you can see, I sorta ran out of room with all those suffixes, but it's better in person. @Westylish's Blog My Anchor Charts! I thought I would create a page and just post the anchor charts I have used! I will add new ones as I use them. I will probably change them out at the beginning of every school year to try to keep things current. Main idea/Details: Poetry: STAAR incentives: Nouns: Character Traits (FAST...feelings, actions, sayings, thoughts): Story plot and summarizing: Writing "Characters": Drama Text Features: "The Writing Games" Revising and editing: Adjectives: Non-fiction text features: Research Flipbooks: Persuasive texts:
The 5 C’s of Passion Driven Leadership “Passion is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Ralph Waldo Emerson I had the distinguished honor of giving the keynote address this week at the mid winter conference for the Utah Association of Middle and High School Principals. It was the perfect place to debut a new framework for leadership and systems improvement I have been working on called: The Five C’s of Passion Driven Leadership I believe passion to be the single most important asset we have as educators, education leaders, and educational organizations. Clear Direction: The future may be made up of many uncertain factors but the passionate will not only survive ; they will thrive. I closed the speech with the following call to A.C.T. which stands for: A.- Action C – Change T- Time. A – take immediate action on Books Referenced in the Talk:
Comma in a series, nouns, detail anchor charts This is a matrix I made to compare Family Farm and Meet Rosina, I also did one for the realistic fiction books, Mr. Putter and Tabby, David's New Friends, and the other fiction book for Unit 1. Just a Thought… Storage Solutions from Baby Wipe Containers | The New Home Ec By Just Heather | I still have baby wipe containers all over the house, even though we haven’t had a baby in diapers for more than 3 years. They make such great storage containers — the toy room has stacks of containers filled with cars, puzzles, and more tiny toys than I can count. We have wipes containers in the office, the garage, the kitchen, and bathrooms. They’re filled with items we use everyday, things we need to tuck away, and stuff I’d never find again if it weren’t neatly stacked and labeled in the perfect container. I’ve put together a list of my favorite uses — and some new ones that make me wish we were still buying wipes! Battery Storage We store our batteries in a wipes container — it's easily carted from room to room when we need it. Toy Storage Baby wipe containers are perfectly sized for some of the most popular toys — cars, action figures, Squinkies — and this idea for chalk paint labeling is perfect for kids' ever-changing needs. Playhouse Door About Just Heather
ICTyler I attended the Digital Storytelling (K-12) Professional Development session at BU today. It was presented by Ron Nordstrom, Art Teacher and Technology Co-ordinator for Beautiful Plains SD. contains links and examples of all the things he went over in our session. Not only did we learn about various methods of digital storytelling, we got to play around with them too. He went over Audio Storytelling, Photostory, Comics and Online Scrapbooking One major focus was that whenever you use technology in the classroom you are to use it with a purpose. I also downloaded photostory. I had my flash drives with pictures, so I whipped this up in our tutorial. Comic Life was already loaded onto the school computers, so I switched and tried it out. I used one of the sample photos that come with windows and some screenshots of the movie Superman Returns to make a mini-comic dealing with the isolation felt by the man of steel. We also covered Online Scrapbooking.
Reading Management Binder You will find our new, updated binder with editable files here: Reading Management Binder Be completely prepared as you head to your PLC meeting to discuss strategies and interventions for your struggling readers. This Reading Management Binder will provide you with an organized way to keep track of all of your reading materials – plans, conference notes, progress monitoring and data – so that you’re ready for these important discussions about your students’ reading growth. Also, pull out this binder at conference time to make sure you’re prepared for parents’ questions about their student’s growth! **For ease in finding your resources we have divided this post into categories we feel are important for planning and showing student growth. However, we recommend that your reading management binder contain a planning section, a tab for each student in your class, and then a section to place all of your whole class reports and documents. Conference Notes Progress Monitoring Student Data