Blessed to Teach and Read

Oh my goodness!  I found a draft of a blog post from back when I got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.  I was so excited and relieved to receive it!  I was proudly, fully vaccinated as of mid-March.  In the original draft, started a summary run-down of all the lessons I had been doing with students, but only managed to get through kindergarten and first grade.  To the draft, I added on what I did with students for the rest of spring 2021.   I do have to say, I am so proud of all of teachers everywhere for our efforts, our love, our devotion, and our perseverance in the face of truly difficult times this school year.  We made it to the end of a year to be proud of, building relationships, teaching students, and growing as professionals! Without further ado, here are my lessons: Kindergarten:   We made puppets of Kevin Henkes' characters from Egg,  after reading the book together and learning about how he uses his typewriter, his S...

This January kicked off with one of the best birthdays - ever!  Lots of students gave me cards and birthday posters.  Several classes sang to me.  Had a blast!  January also brought the start of an Educational Specialist degree in Instructional Technology, completely online, through The University of West Georgia.  And now that it's UWG's spring break, I am finally making time to update my blog.  ('Cause updating my blog is much  better than doing our taxes!)  In Issues in Instructional Technology, one of the assigned texts is Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns  by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.  It was first written in 2008, but my copy is an expanded edition from 2017.  I LOVE reading current texts, especially since technology has changed so much year to year.  We just got to chapter four, "Disruptively Deploying Computers" about how there are ...

Guess what?!? When eating at Your Pie in Suwanee, I saw an advertisement in the side of the napkin dispenser. It got me to thinking, 'Do our school napkin dispensers have this feature?  How could I leverage that into getting my students to read even more?'  It turns out that our Cafeteria Manager, Mrs. Mathis, is cool with me having students share their book reviews in the sides of our cafeteria napkin dispensers!  So, I pulled typed, book reviews that students had already submitted on Biblionasium, and formatted them to fit.  I added a picture of the book cover with the students' name, teacher, and grade.  I emailed their teachers to send them down for a photo to share on our school's Twitter feed, #SharonStrong.  Fingers crossed more students take the time to write an engaging book review to share with the school!   I set up a Biblionasium challenge for Newberry books where students have to read and log 10 of 25 Newberry winning book...