Guess who I met today??

He's tall...

He's funny...

He's orange...


Did you guess correctly??  I met Moby!!

I was so excited to take a picture with him at the TCEA conference today!  My coworker and I literally walked down every aisle in the exhibition hall to find the Brain Pop booth!!  We also got some bookmarks and pins for our classes.  They are going to FREAK OUT when I show them this picture on Friday!

So today was my first day to attend the TCEA conference and I had a lot of fun!  There was one presenter in particular that I really loved and I have to share all the great things she shared with us!!  Her name is Tammy Worcester Tang and she had so many great tips to share today!  I'm going to look up the rest of her sessions tomorrow as well.  This will probably be a fairly long post, but I promise it will be full of great ideas!!

Today she shared her top 20 technology tips and we all loved them!  My coworkers and I kept looking at each other like "Wow!" "Great idea!" each time!

She shared a tutorial on printing on sticky notes, which I've seen on Pinterest, but it was still great to see it in person.  She also shared a lot of information about Google- tips for using Google Chrome, the Google drive and even doing better Google image searches.

If you use Google image searches, they've actually made it a lot more streamlined to find what you want.  She showed us the 'Search Tools' button and all the different features to help refine your search.  I did the same searches Tammy showed us and took some screenshots for you.

You can search by the copyright licenses to know how you can use the image.

You can search by color, because you always need to find purple cows, right?

You can even search by type of image to just show clip art, or just real photos.

Tammy also had some great tips about using Google spreadsheets for a variety of things.  She even shared something she created for automatically generating short URLs and QR codes.  If you are lucky enough to have iPads or other devices for your students to use and you have a website to share with them that is too long to spell out, you can just enter it in and it will create the bit.ly short URL and QR code right there for you!  It's available on her website if you want to check it out here.

Another online resource she shared is called Flippity.  It is a site that can turn information from a Google spreadsheet into online flashcards.  I think it would be so much fun to use with my first graders to practice addition facts.  All you do is create the spreadsheet with 2 columns, one for the questions (or addends) and one for the answers (or sums).  From there, you publish it to the web, copy the link, paste the URL and press go!  Then you'll have your flashcards all ready to share.  You can set them to cycle through randomly and I can think of so many topics that would be fun- state capitols, vocabulary words, math facts, the list goes on...

I really enjoyed the tips Tammy shared about YouTube.  Maybe you already have your own YouTube channel, but I didn't know anything about that!  I love showing YouTube videos to my class, especially Harry Kindergarten, but I would be excited to have my own channel!  There are so many ways that this would be helpful, for example, a kindergarten teacher at my school wants to create a library of recorded read-alouds for our students to watch at home.  A lot of our students are not read to enough at home, or even at all, and it would be awesome if they could listen to their teachers at home!!  Each teacher would be recorded reading a few great books and the kiddos could pick them out at home.  Creating our own YouTube channel would be a create vehicle for sharing our videos!  Tammy also shared a resource she created for clipping YouTube videos through Google spreadsheets.  You enter the video link, type in the time parameters you want and then it will produce a new link or even give you code to embed into a blog!  It would be great to use for science and social studies lessons, when you just want to show a part of a longer video.  It could also be fun to show part of a movie and then have the kids make up an alternate ending or predict what might happen next.

She also shared a few iOS ideas that would work on both an iPad or iPhone.  There is a program called Reflector that wirelessly broadcasts what is on your device onto a computer screen.  If you have that computer plugged into an overhead projector, it turns your device into a mobile document camera!  You could walk around the classroom during writing time and highlight great work or students who remembered to use finger spaces.  You could project a science experiment, like plants growing on the window sill, so that everyone could sketch them in their science journals at the same time.  You could even highlight and model behaviors during center time.  She also recommended the app AirSketch free, which turns your iPad into a wireless, mobile white board!  You can draw Venn diagrams or practice spelling words without having to turn your back to the class to write on the board.  She also shared the app Notability, which enables you to write on any pdf document.  The possibilities are endless with that one!

The last thing I'll share are a couple YouTube video from StoryBots.  I wasn't familiar with this set of videos before today, but they are super cute!  We're starting on geometry next week and I found a video on circles and one on squares!  So fun!







Click the image below to visit Tammy's Technology Tips for Teachers!

What are your favorite technology tips?  I'd love to hear them!!

Telling Time!

Hi there friends,

We've been practicing telling time over the past few weeks and I wanted to share some of the things we've been doing!

We've worked hard building the times on our little clocks during small group-

We've enjoyed Annie and Moby's lessons about telling time-

We love Brain Pop Jr. in our classroom!!

We even had fun with these little snowmen-

I really want to share about a fun center game we've been playing!  It's Laura Candler's Monster Math Mix Up and my kiddos love it!  I taught it to one of my small groups on Monday and they had a lot of fun with it.

It's a group game where each kiddo has a monster puzzle to build.  They take turns pulling a clock card and if they can correctly identify the time- they get to spin the spinner!

I really like the fact that she included a spinner because it really kept the game interesting.  It would be too easy if they simply got to put a piece on after identifying each clock.  My kids were really excited to land on the 'Add 2 pieces' section and were quietly hoping (well, not so quietly) that their opponents would land on the 'Remove 1 piece' section!

They did a great job with the game and it was neat to see them really think about each card before saying the time.  According to our TEKS, we're only required to teach hour and half hour, but this group was more than ready for time to the 5 minutes and they rocked it!  I loved seeing them count by fives along the clocks and how excited they got when they got the right answer!  They even asked if they could play it again today, and of course I let them!  There's a answer key included for the clock cards, so I didn't have to facilitate the game at all- they did it all themselves and were totally sad when it was time to clean up!

The game also comes with a set of cards to the minute, if you want to check it out in her store.  I'll be adding the 5 minute version to our math center routine next week- they'll be so excited!

I hope everyone's staying warm out there!  We had our 2nd ice day yesterday and the driving conditions were just awful!  Our district waited fairly late to call the day off and lots of teachers were already on the icy roads to school when they found out.  Luckily, they made it home safely!  How's the weather in your neck of the woods?

Writing, writing and more writing!

I'm popping in today to share some of the writing we've been doing over the past 2 weeks!

I'm totally jealous of those of you who have lots of dedicated time for Writing or even hold Writer's Workshop every day- I wish!  We have 30 minutes officially dedicated to writing, so the activities I do often run over their allotted time!

Last week, we wrote Christmas cards to some elderly folks at a group home associated with my church.  The kids were so sweet with their thoughtfulness and came up with some great things to spread some holiday cheer.

We also used this awesome freebie from Stacy over at Funky Fresh Firsties to do a little snowman writing!  As a kid born and bred in Texas, I could count the number of times I've seen snow on one hand.  As an adult, I've been lucky enough to see it lots of times in Colorado and in Kansas visiting my in laws.  I still sit there in my mother in law's kitchen and stare in amazement when the little flakes are actually falling, especially at night- it's so pretty!!  Anyway, back to the classroom...we wrote about what it would be like if it snowed at our school!!

 

We're getting pretty good at rough drafts and doing little edits to our papers (mostly guided by me, of course!).  On Thursday, however, one of my particularly moody girls exclaimed, "I hate rough drafts!"  You'd have to know her to understand, but I let that one slide because I wanted her to actually make it through her writing.

We ended this week with some letter writing.  We talked about the 5 parts of a friendly letter with what else?  An anchor chart and Brain Pop Jr!

We wrote letters to our awesome custodians and hung them outside their storage closet on our hall.  I swear we have the hardest working head custodian in the whole world!!  He is amazing!!  I know you'll agree that custodians should be paid waaaaay more than they are.  Our staff always pools together to get them gift cards at the holidays, but we always wish we could do more.

Only one more week until Christmas break- can't wait to sleep in for 2 weeks straight!!  What are your plans for the break?

Five for Friday!

Hello Friends!!!  Are you as excited as I am that it's FRIDAY?!?!  Woo hoo!

I hope you had a good week this week!  The weather is finally cooling off down here in Texas and our 1:35 recess was actually bearable and enjoyable this week.  We also had a training day on Monday with an hour and a half lunch- which we enjoyed on the patio of a local restaurant!  I'm loving this cooler weather!!

Anyway, I'm glad to be linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching again for Five for Friday...here are my random pictures from this week, and I really do mean random!!  :)

I love switching out my calendar at home each month (even though I'm always a few days late)!  I love this calendar from Dana Heacock and have used hers ever since college!  A family I nannied for had it in their kitchen and I just loved it, so now I get a new one every year!

This will give you a little clue about how busy everyone at our school is this year!!  In August, I made new alphabet cards to hang in my room and just now had the time to print and laminate them!!!  With trainings, meetings, huge class sizes and everything else thrown on a teacher's plate- I just haven't had two seconds to get these printed!  I still have my boring one up that came with our reading curriculum, we'll see how long it takes me to get these stapled up there!!

On Wednesday night we went to see ZZ Top!  They were so awesome!!  This is actually the second time we've seen them and they are just so energetic, it's crazy!  I hope I can move like that when I'm their age!! 

If you don't know those two faces on the screen- you are missing out!!!  It's Annie and Moby from Brain Pop Jr.!!!  I seriously love those videos and so do my students.  There are videos on a huge variety of topics- bullying...Pablo Picasso...washing your hands...colors...tally marks- anything!  There's also a version for older grades that is just called Brain Pop.  Luckily, our district pays for the subscription, but I really do use the videos on a weekly basis!

I plugged in my very first Scentsy warmer today and wow, my classroom smelled Ah-maz-ing!!  I used Autumn Sunset today and I also have Cinnamon Bear to try next!!  I loooove cinnamon and anything that smells like fall!!  And now it can smell like fall all year round!!  Yes!

I do hope everyone had a great week and has an even better weekend!  We don't get Monday off, so I don't have a three day weekend like a lot of you do!!  So sad...oh well!  And speaking of sad, I'm about to watch the Finn episode of Glee on my DVR.  I need to go get the tissues ready!!

Don't forget to link up with Kacey to share your pictures!!