Digital December Writing Prompts are here!!

Check out this video to get a sneak peek at my December Writing Prompts Gone Digital!!

These prompts are ready in Google Slides and super easy to load into your Google Classroom!  I just posted these to my TPT shop, check them out here!

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!!

Free Digital And Print Resources To Send Home To Parents

We just had our first two confirmed cases of COVID 19 here in Austin today.  Today starts our Spring Break.  As of right now, we are still returning to school on the 23rd, but honestly, I am just waiting on the inevitable email that our break will be extended.  I'm not even sure what to think.  With the possibility of so many schools closed, I love that so many teachers are sharing resources to send to parents.  I am not a fan of homework and I think that spending time outside, time reading, time playing together as a family is important, but let's face it- some schools are canceling for 3, 4, even 6 weeks!!  That's a lot of time to keep kids entertained at home!!  So if there are some educational activities, websites, and yes worksheets we can send home, I'm all for it!

I honestly started this list to share with the teachers at my school, but thought that since I am already compiling it, I might as well share it here!  I will try to keep adding links as I find them.

1. Recorded books at Storyline Online

2. Free 90 Day Trail for RAZ Kids from Reading A-Z

3. Non Screen Activities For Home from Pobble

4. School Is Out Reading Challenge from A Teachable Teacher

5. Continuous Learning Activities from Sharing Kindergarten

6. Home School Lessons with Maria Dismondy

7. Read, Wonder, and Learn! from Kate Messner

8. Word Work Home Connection from My Day In K

9. Home Organization Tools and Schedules from Lindsay Flood

10. Free Elementary Science Activities from The Science Penguin

11. Kindergarten Daily Google Slides from The Blue Brain Teacher

12.  Free Math At Home from Just A Primary Girl

13. Free Reading At Home from Just A Primary Girl

14. Free Spelling City Membership using code VSCFree90 at checkout

15. Spring Cut And Paste Worksheets from Especially Education

16.  40 Best Indoor Activities from Busy Toddler

17. Free Museum Virtual Tours from Hello Giggles

18. At Home Learning Packet from Teaching In The Tongass

19. Supporting Student Learning At Home from Teaching With A Mountain View

20. Home Folder Practice Sheets from The Wright Nook

21. Preschool Home Learning Activities from Just Reed and Play

22. Free Math Resources from Engage Teach Reach

23. No Prep Phonics Review from The Designer Teacher

24. Home Learning Choice Board from Research & Play

25. Home Learning: Kindergarten from Second Story Window

26. Home Learning: First Grade from Second Story Window

27. Home Learning: Second Grade from Second Story Window

28. Home Learning: Third Grade from Second Story Window

29. Fourth Grade Fluency Passages from Second Story Window

30. 3 Free Weeks of Literacy Work from Out Of This World Literacy

31. Learning From Home from LMNO Pond

32. At Home Learning Resources from Shelley Gray

33. At Home Learning 2nd Grade from A Sassy Apple

34. 21 Days of Free Access to Fluency & Fitness from Fluency & Fitness

35. Learn At Home from Scholastic

36. Free Spring Printables from Miss Kindergarten

37. At Home Learning For Kindergarten from Miss Kindergarten

38. Math and Literacy Bingo from The Stay At Home Teacher

39. Point and Read Freebies from Miss DeCarbo

40. March 18 Facebook Live with Ben Clanton (author of Narwal and Jelly series)

41. Complimentary Access to NewsELA for the remainder of the school year

42. Nightly Facebook Live Read Alouds from TEPSA

43. Free Resources For At Home Learning from My Day In K and Learning To The Core

44. Home Learning Kindergarten from Kinder Shenanigans

45. Brain Break Tic Tac Toe from Jodi Southard

46. Nonfiction Learning for 2nd and 3rd Grade: COVID 19 from Hillery Kiser

47. Movement Map from Little Minds At Work

48. Extended Time Family Letter from Two Little Birds TPT

49. St. Patrick's Day Activities from Flying In First

50. Free Kindergarten Printables from Glitter and Glue for K-2

51. At Home Boredom Busters from A Modern Teacher

52. Read At Home Bingo from A Cupcake For The Teacher

53. Work From Home Packet Grades 3-5 from Primary Perfectionist

54. Tips and Freebies For Digital Learning from Teach, Create, Motivate

55. Free Resource Library Google Drive from The Engaging Station

56. Emergency Printables from Missing Tooth Grins

57. Free Resource Library from Primary Paradise (password teachingabreeze02)

58. Math Video Lessons for Remote Teaching from EdPuzzle

59. Education Companies Offering Free Subscriptions from Amazing Educational Resources

60. Free K-5 Science Lessons (Teacher and Parent) from Mystery Science

61. 30 Free Virtual Learning Sites from Cara Carroll

62. Student Schedules With Links and Activities from Khan Academy

63. Project Based Learning Collaboration from PenPal Schools

64. One Week of Home Learning from Ideas by Jivey

65. Daily Read Alouds, Math and Writing Videos from Susan Jones Teaching

66. Upper Elementary Freebies from Two Little Birds TPT

67. Free Virtual Field Trips, Story Times, and Homeschool Resources from Surviving a Teacher's Salary

68. Math Activities for At Home Learning by Math Coach's Corner

Beautifully stated by The Hipster Art Teacher @hipsterartteacher

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?

Happy Pride!! 6 books to help you celebrate!

Happy Pride!!

June 1st marked the beginning of Pride Month and I've got 6 books to share!  We are already out of school, so I am reading these to my son, Murphy, this week.  My thoughts and prayers go out to anyone still in school!!  Having to write June anything on the whiteboard is a crime!!

First up is Love is Love by Michael Genhart.

(click on the images of this book to view on Amazon)

A story about a child who talks with a friend about his family, saying that people question if he has a "real family" since he has two dads, rather than a mom and a dad.  They discover that their families really aren't that different at all.  I really enjoy the way this book doesn't sugar coat anything or talk around the issue; it goes right into an honest discussion about his dads being gay and him feeling proud that they are his family.  There are even several pages at the end with advice and talking points for teachers and parents.  If you want to have a great, straight-forward conversation with your class, this book is the way to go!

Next is And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson.
 

(click on the images of this book to view on Amazon)

This book tells the true story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins at the NYC Central Park Zoo who hatched and raised an abandoned egg, who the zookeepers there recognized as a couple just like every other penguin family at the zoo.  It is a really sweet story about the two penguins as they raise their baby, Tango.  This is a great book for kids to identify with because they see these two daddy penguins just as they would any other animal family.

Third on my list is A Family is a Family is a Family by Sara O'Leary.

(click on the images of this book to view on Amazon)

This is a really cute book where everyone in the class describes their family.  One lives with her grandmother, one has two dads, one has a mom and dad who've known each other since they were little.  This is the perfect book to start conversations about how we are all different and alike in many ways we might not realize.  This would be a great way to start a writing unit about families as well!!

Next up is Pink Is For Boys by Robb Pearlman.

(click on the images of this book to view on Amazon)

This book needs to be read in ALL classrooms and homes!!  It's really time to eliminate the thought that there are "boy colors" and "girl colors".  With a Kansas State alumnus husband, we've got plenty of purple in our closets- for all of us to wear!

The last two on my list are by the amazing Todd Parr!!  Love him and all of his books!!!  His illustrations are so fun and his message behind every story is always one of acceptance and love for everything unique and special!

I love The Family Book.  Such a fun book about celebrating differences!!

(click on the images of this book to view on Amazon)

Last is It's Okay To Be Different.

(click on the images of this book to view on Amazon)

This is perfect for Pride, but it's also one of my favorites to read during the first week of school!!  It's such a great way to kick off a unit about what makes us all unique and special.  So many writing ideas can stem from this book, too!

I really hope you'll read any or all of these books with your class and your own children at home.  We have had so many great conversations with Murphy, and he's only 4.  I know there is still a lot of work to be done, but I am so glad that he is growing up in a time where these books are available for all to read and learn from!

{Disclaimer- All of the titles and images contain affiliate links, which means I receive a tiny commission from the purchase of these books, at NO additional cost to you!  Thanks for supporting my future book purchases!}