Skip to main content

Day 3

It was fun to explore Google Earth.  I have not previously used it in my class with my students.  If it isn't blocked, it would be great to use it so that students can analyze the movements of both British and colonial troops during the American Revolutionary War.  I hope that SumoPaint is available at our school because I loved the symmetry tool.  I also like the wealth of royalty free pic sites that were shared with us because I despise having to search for long periods of time looking for different pics or clip art. 

I'm excited to use Tagxedo, again, if it is not blocked, because it is very fun!  While similar to Wordle, it pulls text from websites, blogs, tags, or tweets and puts them into different shapes and themes.  It was suggested that students could use it to tell about themselves at the beginning of the year. One of the ideas from the site was to make a class list.  It would be so cute!

I'm also interested in seeing how students could use Voki.com to create a guide of some sort to add to a webpage report on a research topic.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fond Memories & On to Summer!

As always, I'm very far behind on posting, but I've finally combed through all of the photos and put them into Layout to share with you. Created a "Reading Helps Your Mind Bloom" book display, to leave up as state testing started.  I pulled lots of gardening, bees, and butterfly books. Plus, lots of potential parents came through at the end of the year for tours, so it was good to have this out to keep it from being too sterile as all the library books started coming back.     I did a "Hop Into a Great Book" display here to put an emphasis on some seldom-circulated books as well as to highlight nonfiction, though I also put out some fiction books too! Kept on teaching kindergarten and first graders about different authors.  I did create some very fun centers for Mo Willems.  As one paraprofessional said to me, "You're brave to do Play-Doh on carpet."  However, we didn't really have any issues when I gave the kids clear expec...

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 Apprent...

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.