Google Classroom Trouble Shooting

How are you handling this shift to Distance Learning?  How are you holding up, personally?  Teachers across the country are working their tails off to create meaningful educational experiences for their students and it just makes me so proud to be an educator right now!!  My district is launching our remote learning plan on Monday, with our first week of online learning.  It has been challenging, but very exciting to be planning with teachers for this new venture.

We've had to do a lot of new learning and, for me, that includes Google Classroom.  A lot of our teachers are using Google Classroom for assignments, so I've been educating myself so I can help trouble shoot.  One issue that has come up has been assigning specific things to students from resources and files that teachers are using.  Specifically, I've been looking into how to assign specific slides from a larger Google Slides presentation.  I read a little about the GSuite App called Slip-In-Slide that allows you to insert slides into multiple student presentations at one time, but I don't know much about it.  I'm guessing that you have to have a GSuite account, which I know not all districts have.  So the only workaround I know of is to create mini presentations based on the needed slides.  I recently wrote a blog post about my Writing Center and have been working on digital versions of my Writing Prompts to use in Google Classroom.  I thought I'd do a little tutorial about picking certain Writing Prompts to assign to students in Google Classroom!  I hope you find this helpful!

So let's start with the large Google Slides presentation.  This one has 25 slides, each with one Writing Prompt and a space for students to respond.

Some people might want to make all 25 prompts available to their students and make a list/schedule for which prompts to complete.  That works great as long as the teacher is checking each week to see that the students have completed the correct prompts.  Since it's one long presentation, the students wouldn't be able to Turn In their assignment until all of the prompts were complete.  That's definitely an option and if that works for you, great!!  :)

Another option is to assign certain slides to the class.  There is no way, that I am aware of, within a Google Slides presentation to assign anything other than the whole presentation.  But here's how you can make it work.

Step 1- Make a copy of the entire Slides presentation.  I'm going to rename it 'Week 1 April Prompts', which will make sense after reading Step 2.

Step 2- Look through the whole presentation and decide how you want to organize it for your students.  My Writing Prompts contain 25 unique prompts, so there are more than enough to assign 5 per week.  I can decide which 5 prompts I want to assign for the first week of April.  Once I decide, I am going to delete all the other slides.  Remember- this is a copy of the other file so I still have the complete presentation in my Drive, I'm not deleting them forever!!  Whew!  My new file looks like this-

Step 3- Assign my new file to my students in Google Classroom.  Remember to change the option to 'Make A Copy For All Students' after you add the file from your Drive.

Now all of my students have just the prompts I want them to have for the first week!!  I will go back to my original file and repeat the steps with 5 different prompts for Week 2!

I really hope that this tutorial helped you!  You can use these same steps with any Google presentation that you have.  Please let me know in the comments if it did or if you have any other questions!

If you'd like to see more of my April Writing Prompts Gone Digital! click the links below!!

Do you have a Writing Center in your classroom?

When I first started using Daily 5, I knew I wanted to have a Writing Center.  I wanted to offer my students choice in what they were writing about, but I didn’t want free writing every day, either.  I took the time over the span of that school year to write enough writing prompts to give my students weekly choices when they visited the Writing Center.  I used a tabletop pocket chart and put two prompts out that my students could choose from. 

I love having full page prompts to post in my Writing Center.  I loved having a variety of prompts- some that were seasonal, some that were narrative, some that were imaginative, and some that tied in with math and science concepts we were working on!  

  One of my colleagues who taught right across the hall wanted to have prompts out for the whole month that her students could choose from, so I reworked my prompts to create quarter size pages to put on a ring.  This was a great option for her class and easier on her- she made two sets of prompts on binder rings and then she was done for the month!

 After I started selling my prompts on TeachersPayTeachers, a teacher contacted me about them.  She said she loved using them, but really wanted to start sending home writing homework with her students.  She asked if I would put all the prompts on a monthly calendar so that she could start take-home writing binders for all of her students!  I loved that idea as soon as I heard it!

 I also eventually added writing prompt strips for a friend who uses Writing Journals.  He loved being able to have prompts ready to go that students could glue in their Journals and work on each morning during Morning Work.

 All 4 of these types of prompts are available in each of my monthly Writing Prompt sets!!

  Since I only required my students to write about one prompt (they had the option to do both or do some free writing afterwards) I needed something else for them to work on.  This is how my Sentence Scrambles were born!  I wanted something for my students to get continued practice with sentence structure and sentence conventions, but not in a daily worksheet.

 I started adding bags of cut up sentences that they had to work to put back together.  This gave them practice with remembering to first look for capitalization and punctuation and put those words where they belonged.  Then they moved the other words around until their sentence made sense.  They were practicing sight words and sentence fluency at the same time!  They had to read it to themselves or to a partner to make sure it made sense, so this added reading fluency practice as well.  I always let them illustrate their sentences, which they thought was fun (win!) and I knew they were showing me their comprehension of each sentence through their illustrations (win! win!).

 These Sentence Scrambles have been such a great addition to the Writing Center and I love how engaged my students are as they work on them.

 

 Do you have a Writing Center in your classroom?  I'd love to hear about it in the comments below!  What have you found to be the most successful with your students?

#TBT Week 4- Reading Fluency Activities (plus freebies!)

Hey Friends!!

Hope you are adjusting to back to school season!!  Hope you are getting lots of time in your room and not stuck in meetings that could have been an email!!

Today's Throwback Thursday post is one I wrote about Reading Fluency.  This is such an important part of literacy development and it is vital in the primary grades in order to be successful later in life!  Click on the image below to read it and let me know how you help your students build their fluency!

#TBT Week 1- Daily 5 in My Classroom

In honor of Throwback Thursday, I am going to revisit some of my favorite blog posts from the past!  I will be sharing a post every Thursday for the next 8 weeks! 

I hope you enjoy this week's post, check it out by clicking the image below!  It's actually a 3 part post, so be sure to click all the way through!!

The 411 on Centers: Part 3!!! (Linky Party)

And now I'm back for my final post about Centers!  Here are the links to Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them!!

background image- Ashley Hughes, alphabet graphics- Teaching Super Power, font- Jennifer Jones

Today I'll wrap up with explanations about Word Work, Listening and Read to Self.  Part 2 has info about Writing, Buddy Reading and Computer.

Word Work

My students do activities from the Word Work center at their desks.  Word Work is really the only part of my Centers that takes work/prep on my end each week.  I have a Word Work choice board and a shelf with the different activities next to it.  

I switch out the choices on Friday afternoons and we go over the new ones first thing Monday morning.  After trying a variety of systems, I now put out 4 choices a week and I number them for my students.  I used to put out 4-6 choices and let them choose which ones they went to first, but I found that they were just going to the same ones over and over and some of the ones I really wanted them to visit were not being used.  So now they are numbered 1-4 and they just pull them in order.  That way, I am able to put certain choices first, if I feel they are important for that week, and I usually put a more fun, game-type activity for number 4.  I use a lot of different activities for Word Work- spelling activities, word sorts, fluency passages, word family games and more.  There are a lot of great freebies online and on TPT and I'd love to share some of those links with you!

One Breath Boxes from Teacher Tipster
ABC Order from Maria Manore
Short A Word Work from Sarah Kirby
CVC Puzzles from KBPRO

I have a lot more Word Work ideas in my Word Work Start Up Pack in my store.

Listening

My students do activities from the Listening center at their desks.  I used to have the old school, giant tape player for my listening center and then eventually a CD player.  Well this year, thanks to Donors Choose and Caring Classrooms, I was able to update to the 21st century!  I have 4 iPods for my listening center now!  I took all of my books on tape and books on CD and converted them into mp3s using Garageband on my Mac and now they are all ready on the iPods!  I created a listening sheet to go with all of my books and my students locate and write things like the author and illustrator's name or draw a picture of their favorite part or write about the beginning, middle and end.  I really LOVE having the iPods because everyone in the group is able to pick their own book and listen to it independently.  I also got a Belkin splitter if I need to have 5 students in a group eventually.

Read to Self

My students do activities in the Read to Self center on the carpet. Each student has a spot to keep their books on this mailbox shelf.  I put a few decodable readers from an old reading adoption in each student's box and they get to pick 2-3 books from our classroom library as well.

I also have them go over our teaching chart from our current ELA adoption, Treasures.  The chart goes with the sound patterns we are learning that week and I also aligned our spelling words to match those patterns.  They like to take turns being "the teacher" and pointing to the words for each other.

Well, now that I've spilled the beans about my routines (Look, I made a rhyme without even meaning to!), I want to hear about yours!!  Please leave me some comments about your centers!  Or if you have a blog of your own, I would love for you to link up!!  You can link up a post you already wrote about Centers, or give us an update about how things are going now that we are 3 months into the swing of things in school.

Please use the graphic below to link back to me and feel free to link up any post you write about Centers!  Can't wait to read what you have to share!