Skip to main content

A New Year

Made it successfully through the first full week of my third year as an instructional media specialist, kicking off the 15th year of my teaching career!  Started a bit early by attending a Code.org workshop with these lovely ladies before summer's end.  Learned about the importance of teaching computer science in our schools, and began pondering how to incorporate it into my already-packed library and literacy skills lessons for the year.
During pre-planning, received a package at school containing this advanced reading copy of Grace Lin's soon-to-be-published book When the Sea Turned to Silver.  (Thanks to Mrs. Weng, a former parent and friend of Mrs. Lin for connecting me with this opportunity!)  I'm not gonna lie.  I've been reading it as slowly as possible.  I don't want it to end!  I LOVE her stories and the way she writes stories within her story.    Her books are GREAT for teaching figurative language, too!  So beautifully written!  (Also very excited about Where the Mountain Meets the Moon being on this year's Battle of the Books reading list!)
Crafted this trifold board for Open House in hopes of gathering some donations for our library's upcoming Makerspace.  Thanks to Mrs. Cooper, our Science Lab teacher, for her help in getting an idea of how to make our board cute!  Thanks also goes to her for donating tangram shapes and building materials!  Got 12 library volunteer names, and have already had one mom come in twice, to help students with checkout.  She also helped me change out a bulletin board.  We've had several donations come in so far, so stay tuned to see how it goes!


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