Skip to main content

Pinterest

Whew! First 7 days of school down, 180 more to go! While looking in Karen Bolotin's LiveBinder, (Online News and Magazines for Kids and a fabulous resource that in some way should be linked to your teacher webpage to get students reading high-interest, non-fiction articles online), I linked to Karen's Pinterest page, which has LOADS of picture ideas for the classroom! (Was that the longest sentence ever? Possibly. I hope it was intelligible.)

Pinterest, if you haven't discovered it yet, is a place where you "pin" your virtual, visual "interests". While you need an invite to join, you can request one from their website by submitting your e-mail address. It's a place to collect quotes, recipes, ideas for home redecorating, ideas for school, etc. and to credit the source that created it.

While looking through Karen's Pinterest page, I went another layer deeper onto Mrs. Morris' Simply 2nd Resources blog to a very simple way to show daily state standards. While Mrs. Morris teaches 2nd grade in Texas, this idea will work for any state standards that you want to show in your room on a daily basis and it will keep it neatly organized. So simple, but so creative! Seriously, how did I not think of this sooner? (Click 'Home' on the Simply 2nd Resources to see other fabulous ideas that Mrs. Morris has shared!)

Have fun exploring the WEALTH of links on Karen Bolotin's Pinterest page or in her collection of LiveBinders!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Quarter 1 Common Core ELA & Math

Forsyth County, GA posted a link to the pacing guide they have created for next school year. I printed it out and took it home to look it over and start planning for next August. I know, I know. I'm working on the first day of summer vacation, but I need to wrap my brain around the new standards and how they will mesh together with science and social studies. Here is what I created for quarter 1 English/Language Arts. (Hopefully, the following quarters won't be so time consuming!) Everything in black type was provided by the county or the Common Core Standards website. Everything in blue type is something of my own that I added. Here is what I created for quarter 1 math common core content.

Smile

Look at that shelf. Such disarray.  That's kind of how I felt around mid-August.  Pulled in too many directions.  On overload.  In need of a bookend to hold me up and set me straight.  (or, in need of more time in my day)  One week, I tried staying no later than 4 PM, and leaving undone what I couldn't accomplish, but that was stressful, too! I currently spend around 30 minutes everyday, either during classes, during planning, or after, afternoon car duty, to keep all of the books shelved.  I'm doing a better job of preventing the shelves from looking like the one pictured above.  (We've had 3 different moms come a collective six times to volunteer to help with shelving. Yay for Mrs. Stratton, who has come back multiple times!)  I implemented a new change this year, to allow 4th and 5th graders to re-shelve their own fiction or everybody/picture books.  That has helped! I also started a 5th grade program called "Castle Apprentice" (since our library

Khan Academy

Good Morning! Enjoying a relaxing morning at my parents' house for a family visit. We were watching CBS This Morning and saw an interview with Salmon Kahn about his Khan Academy . It offers online videos of a grand variety of topics so that all students can have a "world class education". However, it ALSO has benefits for teachers, other than being FREE, it offers detailed profiles on individual students with an at-a-glance tool for seeing every video that that child has viewed and a class summary graph to show progress or need for remediation. The site also offers a vertical continuum of skills so that you can go straight to the topic you need and/or go back to more foundational skills to tackle more difficult skills. Lastly, the site awards "badges" for student mastery of skills. Students must create their own account and then add the teacher as a "coach". There are several safety features to keep students from posting private informa