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 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!!

Animal Research Projects!

Happy Saturday!  (And I'm so glad it is Saturday!!)

It has been a loooong week and I kept meaning to sit down and write this post, but never did!  So glad it's the weekend (even though it will fly right by)!

So true!!!!!

Anyway, back to business!  Right after Spring Break (which was sadly 3 whole weeks ago!), we started our Animal Research Projects.  I've done this project every year that I've been teaching and it is always a lot of fun!  The week before Spring Break, I have each student pick the animal that they want to study.  I send a note and a little research guide home over the break and ask parents to help out with research at home.  I usually get most of them back filled out, but there's always a few that come back empty-handed.  No big deal, we just find some books in the library and do a little online research in class.

Then it's time to take our research and write it into our research journals.

I pull the kids in small groups during writing time, so it takes about a week to get everyone done.  This year, our awesome librarian showed us World Book Online.  We had half of the class looking up their animals online while the other half looked through books and worked on their illustrations.  It was great!!

After our journals were complete, we went to the computer lab to type up our research into a Kidspiration web.  I love using those webs because it is easy for the kids to use and it looks great as a part of the final product.

Once our projects are complete, the last thing we do is have a party!!  I love to invite other classes to come see our projects as a warm up for the kids.  They're a little shy at first, but then they do such a great job.  On the Friday after we're done, I always invite the parents and admin and other teachers to come and see the projects as well!  We had a great turn out this year and the parents were really impressed with all of our hard work.  It was so great to see how proud everyone was of their project!

Did you see my little photo-bombing friend?  She tried to do that in every picture!  Love her!!

Love these big, cheesy smiles!!

What are your favorite traditions from your classroom?  I would love to hear what you enjoy doing each year!!