The Pinterest Pledge

Hello All Things Upper Elementary Readers,

It is Kristy from the 2 Peas and a Dog Blog. I am here to share some quick tips for keeping your Pinterest addiction manageable. If you are anything like me you have access to Pinterest on your phone, tablet and computer, and it can be tempting to pin all day long.

Pinterest is a great tool for teachers because it is full of so many great ideas that we would not normally be exposed to. I feel like Pinterest should be considered a form of professional development because most of the pins I follow are to reputable bloggers who have excellent ideas.

But how do you organize your pins? Lately, I have been seeing a lot of people pinning my pins to general Pinterest boards called "Education". If you pin all of your teaching pins to one board called "Education" how long will it take you to search for the one specific pin you pinned months ago?

I am challenging all of you to take the Pinterest Pledge to clean up your digital PD system.

Create new topic specific boards that are relevant to you: classroom organization, classroom management, math, language, etc. All my of boards are organized by subjects that I teach or teaching concepts like back to school or classroom management.

Reorganize your old Pinterest boards by re-pinning old pins onto their new specific boards. This also gives you a chance to delete pins you did not find useful or are no longer relevant to your teaching assignment. 

Rearrange your Pinterest boards to be alphabetized or by theme: teaching, home life, cottage life etc. This will help you sort through your boards quickly and narrow in on the idea you want. I organize my teaching stuff at the top and then at the bottom of my page are my home and food boards. Left click, hold and move your Pinterest board around to where you want it to be positioned on your Pinterest site. 

Set a daily Pinterest time limit. This can accomplished by setting a timer on your phone, iPad or computer. There will always be cool and interesting pins to look at on Pinterest, but it is important for you to take time for yourself and your family as well. 

Check your pins before you pin them. I open my potential pins in a new tab before I pin them to a board. Recently I saw this awesome pin about teacher fonts. When I clicked through to the pin, I did not find a site with a link to "Awesome Teacher Fonts", I got a blog about Mood Disorders. 

Happy Pinning! 

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Kristy @ 2 Peas and a Dog

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Create Your Own Comics on Toondoo.Com!

Hi, friends! It's Blair from One Lesson at a Time here. Can you believe it is already OCTOBER?! Time sure does fly, huh?! Today, I wanted to share a fun website with you called Toondoo. 

Kids LOVE comics - so creating your own comic books is a great way to hook kids into whatever lesson you are teaching that day. This website allows you to create your own little comic books! 

Disclaimer: This website requires a fair amount of trial and error - it's fairly user-friendly, but you will need to do a lot of playing around in order to really get the hang of it. 

I like to create comics based around one character - my dear, made-up friend, Buster Bluepants. Buster Bluepants helps us learn all sorts of things throughout the year! Here is a comic that I created about choosing a "just right" book.

Buster Bluepants - Choosing a Just right book by skeeterbkt | Make your own at www.toondoo.com

The easiest way to use them in the classroom (I think) is to project the comic on a SmartBoard or other projection device. (I had a cable connecting my computer and TV, which allowed me to show what was on the screen that way.) You can also print them out - and I have - but you will need to do some cutting and pasting to get them formatted with multiple images per page. 

In order to get started, you'll need to create a free account. Then, once you are logged in, hover over the "Toons" link in the top bar and click on "create toon". 

From there, you can select your layout:

 The images at the top have all kinds of different options for you to play with. Here is where the trial and error really comes in - spend some time just playing around and seeing what you can do. The first box has all kinds of different characters that you can use:

You can choose different backgrounds, add in speech bubbles and text, and create a fun and interactive supplement to any lesson! My kids LOVE it! 

I've thought about having kids try it on their own - but it's a little too involved for my third graders to do on their own, in the time we have for computers. If you had older kids, though, it might be a great way to publish quick writing assignments or review specific content! Check out Toondoo.com and see if it could work for you!

Thanks for stopping by ATUE today - and Happy October!

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TenMarks

With the end of the school year in sight for many teachers, the days seem to lend themselves to meetings, grading those final exams and essays, and meeting with students and parents to evaluate progress. The days can seem to go on forever. However, this week I can honestly say I learned some valuable information while attending those meetings.

I have been sitting in promotion/retention meetings all week. For each student we have met on, there have been strategies, helpful tips, and the information about summer school shared. In several of our meetings, my colleague and math wiz shared a program with our group. The program is called TenMarks. Until these meetings, I had never even heard of the program, maybe because I do not teach math, but nonetheless, she felt the program would offer needed assistance to many of our struggling math students.

As soon as I left the meeting, I went straight for the computer. I had to see what this program was all about and how it could help students. To my surprise, the initial website offered wonderful information. Many times this is not the case, but this company knows how to market. Because of this new information I stumbled upon, I wanted to share it with all of you. (I am not a sales person for the company or any related entity to it. I learned about it, and I felt it was information many math teachers would love to have.)

Upon further browsing, I found links to the state standards, content covered for grades 1-10, differentiation, and remediation. If I was a math teacher, I probably would have been turning cartwheels down the hallway! It had so many ideas and resources to reinforce what the teachers were teaching in the classrooms. It is aligned to the SBAC and PARRC; their are example questions that familiarize students with these assessments. There are short video clips that explain content. The instruction is data-driven and individualized.

By the time our meetings rolled around today, our instructional coordinator had informational materials to hand to the parents about this program. A school system can purchase it, or individuals can pay a fee to use the program. It is a fantastic tool for students to use over the summer to continue to practice those concepts and be ready for the next grade's standards. It is also a wonderful resource, whether a student is struggling or not, to use throughout the summer break to keep their minds working and retaining the learned information.

If you teach math or if you are a parent of a child in grades 1-10, I would highly suggest checking into TenMarks.

I hope everyone has a great rest of the week! 

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Fun with Fractions

One of my favorite units in my math curriculum to teach is fractions.

It's easy to apply the concepts to the real world and show students it is a important life long skill.

Students come into 3rd grade with a basic understanding of what a fraction is: part of a whole.

From there I can jump right into teaching fraction equivalency.

With spring in the air, I have the perfect project to drive home fraction equivalency in a concrete, visual way. Equivalent Fraction Kites , as seen below, model fractions that equal the same: 4/16 is equivalent to 1/4 and 8/16 is equivalent to 1/2. Students have so much fun designing them and in the process own the meaning of equivalency. This project is available in my TPT store.

I also have some other valuable resources to share with you that I incorporate into my fraction unit study.

This video helps build background needed on equivalent fractions.

Another handy tool is this manipulative fraction bar number line model from the site Math is FunIt visually shows fractions with the same value.

I have a set of fraction task cards that my class uses with the fraction bar interactive model.

You can get them in my TPT store

The Illuminations site has an interactive tool that allows students to create equivalent fractions by dividing and shading either squares or circles and to see the position on a number line.

Happy April Fool's Day by the way...I hope you see that it's no fooling that you can approach the teaching of fractions in meaningful ways.How do you teach fractions? Share your ideas with us!Happy teaching~Denise

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5 Ways to Liven Up Standardized Test Practice

We had our 4th quarter training session for the math department last week.  I was asked to talk about our ISTEP (Indiana's state test) resources. Each of the textbook series comes with a practice book of standardized test questions.  You could always just have the students work in the book and talk about the questions, but what fun is that.

1.  My students will do anything I ask them to if it is on the whiteboard.  They love to write on it.  I often use the dry erase boards when we play review games.  The group comes up with an answer together and when I say that time is up, they hold their boards up.  You could use the white boards in groups or individually.

2.  I was at the HASTI (Hoosier Assoc. of Science Teachers, Inc.) conference last month and went to a workshop by representatives of Dinah Zike. It was about using foldables for assessment.  We made the foldable that is below.  You fold over about 1/2 in. to glue to notebook.  With the rest, you cut into fourths and label A, B, C, D. When you ask the students to show their answer, they hold all but their answer choice down.

3.  My students LOVE using the clickers.  There is just something about using technology that gets the students fired up.  We use clickers from Turning Technologies. The only bad thing is trying to get the "recorder" to capture their answer.  The kids sometimes have to push their buttons many times to get their answer recorded.

4.  Last year our district had principals visit other buildings and do evaluations.  Of course, mine would come the week we were doing test prep.  I hunted for something that would be engaging for the students and look good for the evaluation.  I found Laura Candler's Buddy Test Prep.

The students work through a set of problems on their own.  When they are done they mark their answers in blue.  They then partner up with a buddy to discuss the problems.  If the student changes an answer after working with the buddy, they cross out their original answer with purple and circle their new answer.  The class then discusses each of the problems marking them with a green check mark or red X.

When I did this for the observation, I also added in the clickers...lots going on that day!!

5.  This last idea is what I call the cheap interactive smartboard.  I have a Mimio Pad. I can pull anything up on my computer, project it with the Dukane and use the Mimio Pad to do everything I would do with the mouse or keyboard plus I can use the drawing tool. You could use this to have a student work through a math problem, showing their classmates how they solved it.  I've used this when practicing for the constructed response portion of our state test.

I hope this gives you some ideas that you can use to get your students ready for your state testing. Thanks for taking the time to stop by and visit!

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Visual Thesaurus

This week my students are reading Chris Van Allsburg's book The Garden of Abdul Gasazi.

 In the text, Gasazi is a a retired magician who detests dogs. He states, " I detest dogs. They did up my flowers, they chew on my trees. Do you know what I do to dogs I find in my garden?" "I TURN THEM INTO DUCKS!"

This is the lead in for my lesson on using a thesaurus and finding the meaning and synonyms for the word detest.

Visuwords is an online dictionary/thesaurus that shows word associations and is great for vocabulary building strategies.

Here's a screen snapshot after I entered the word detest.

It shows the focus word in the middle and words branched off that are similar. The colored circles of the words represent parts of speech.  The lines stand for derivatives of the word. In addition, the pink line pointing to love indicates the opposite of the word detest.

If you hover over a word a definition and example sentence is given.

I created this reference sheet that can be used along with this online resource.

~Enjoy

Denise

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Ten Marks

A four day week awaits! I hope you are enjoying your MLK day.

I'm sharing with you today a fabulous math resource I use with my students called TenMarks.

If you haven't heard of this, it is a free online program that can be customized by teachers for their class based on math standards and lessons you teach. There is an option for premium features, but I just signed up for a basic account. The great thing about it is students can review or reinforce math concepts at home too. Teachers can even assign lessons as homework.

To get started sign up for an account and then you can customize assignments to meet your class needs.

Here's a screen snapshot of my most recent assignments I set up:

 I love  the "Hints" and "Video" feature options. As students practice each problem the option to get hints and view a reteach video is available.

Video example:

Report features are available for each student. You can see the time spent on each task, the number of hints a student used, and if videos were viewed.

Are there supplemental math resources you can't live without in your classroom?

Leave a comment and share!

~Denise

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