Magic Play Dough We have officially finished our first “REAL” day of Kindergarten! I am proud to say that I survived! It is a fun place to be, but oh so hard at the beginning! Here is a fun little activity that we always do on the first day of school! All you need is red and blue Play Dough or two Play Dough colors that will mix to make another color! Make some balls out of the blue Play Dough. Flatten out a piece of red Play Dough. Finish by rolling the red Play Dough around the blue Play Dough. Place Play Dough in a baggie and attach this awesome poem to it! This magic playdough ball Is a special gift for you. Linking here:
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:
www.rainbowswithinreach.blogspot.com I'm learning!! I'm learning!!!! I'm growing!!! I'm growing!!!! I have cyber blogging friends!!! Here's the latest cyber link-up being co-hosted by Selina of 'Classroom Magic' and Kathie of 'Diary of a NOT so Wimpy Teacher' for their students who benefit from 'writing prompts' to get their number one imaginations and their number 2 pencils moving together! This is PERFECT for me -- because I have sooooooooooooooo many photos and can never quite figure out how to share them here. Here's one I took during our air-boat ride in the Everglades a couple weeks ago. At the end of every Everglades air-boat ride there is the proverbial 'gator-show.' This one is indeed from Planet Earth. Looked like it could have been from another galaxy to me. I thought that I'd work extra-hard today to create prompts that would be 'boy-friendly.' That means tomorrow I will have flowers + castles and images on the other side of the stereo-typical spectrum: girlie things. -- Debbie -- P.S.
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!
Guided Reading One of the things I've been struggling with this year at school is that there have been significant changes in the expectations for literacy instruction every year that I've been teaching. My first year we were told one thing. Last year that was tweaked in a big way. This year, it was tweaked again in a BIG way. The difference between this year and that first year is incredibly drastic. One change that was introduced last year is the way we are expected to distribute the time during a guided reading group. Here is a sample week of lesson plans for guided reading. I've tried a few different methods for data collection and informal assessment during guided reading, but I think I have finally settled on something that works well for me. Each group has a tabbed section with notes pages for each student. Because we are reading leveled readers from our core literacy series, my fluency notes aren't traditional running records. Tell me about your guided reading structure!
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. Interactive Bulletin Boards Get Students Involved! When it comes to classroom decoration, nothing gets students involved like an interactive display! Usually made of materials that move or that provide students with a hands-on experience, when developmentally appropriate, these classroom displays can help the formation of many skills including: Hand-eye coordinationVisual discriminationLeft-to-right discriminationProblem solvingOne-to-one correspondenceLetter and number recognitionColor recognitionSmall muscle coordination Rachel Stepp, author and contributor to A Learning Experience, suggests capitalizing on these very benefits and gives a wonderful example of how to create an interactive learning bulletin board! Did You Know? We love Stepp's ideas to get students involved in the classroom, but we'd certainly like to hear what you think too so leave us a comment below!
@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: Addition & Subtraction Games Students place markers on the numbers 2-12. Students toss two 6-sided dice, find the sum and remove a marker from that number, if there is still one. The first player to remove all markers wins the game. This game can be used as addition practice or as an introduction to the probability of the different outcomes of rolling two dice. This game was developed by a Monmouth University student for the Probability Fair. Download the Face Off!
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: