Tried It Tuesday: PicMonkey

Sorry I've been MIA for the past week.  I was really enjoying my February break at home with my sweet little girl.  Check out my sweet Valentine!!!

I'm super excited to link up with my BBB Holly for her weekly linky party Tried It Tuesday. I know that it's Wednesday, but I actually did try this yesterday, but just didn't get to blog about it!

This is a linky party where you write about anything that you have "tried".  It can be from school, home, family, food... really anything!  I love seeing what new things all of my blogger friends have tried!

So this post is really a spin off of Amy's of the Babbling Box's post from last week's linky party.  She wrote about using PicMonkey.com to have her kiddos create pictures with quotes and then blog about it.  Holy Cow!!!!  Why didn't I think of that? I love using PicMonky personally.  It's actually how I put my blog address on my pictures that I post here on my blog, but I never thought of using it with my kids! After reading Amy's post last week, I knew that I needed to figure out a way to use this in my classroom!

Enter yesterday...We have been working on our government lapbooks for the better part of a month between snow days, extended math lessons, and February break.

We finally finished them on Monday and I knew that I wanted my kids to blog about their learning on Tuesday.  As they were getting their laptops out, I remembered Amy's post and shifted gears right then!  I modeled everything we did as the kids did it, which is always a little challenging, but definitely helpful.  We used Google Junior to find an image that represented the government (they have added images to the safe search, YAY!).  Then we went to Brainy Quote and found a quote about the government that went with the picture we chose.  Then enter Pic Monkey.  I showed them how to upload the picture and then add text and then I let them go to town playing with the effects.  They had a blast and made some very cool pictures!

Here are a few of the edited pictures

I love how he changed the font color so you could see the words depending on where they are on the picture.

Next we had to learn how to upload a picture to our blogs, which we had never done before.  Again another challenge, especially when my picture wouldn't upload (oh technology)! Then they had to write about what they learned in their study of the government.  They finished their blogs today and then they had to comment on two other blog posts.

One other cool thing about this lesson, was that one of our district technology specialists was in the building and peeked in to see what we were doing and was pretty impressed with our blogging and such!  I love being able to show off how I'm using my grant in my class!

Tried It Tuesday: Sage on the Stage

Oh Happy Tuesday!  The snow and ice around here is finally starting to melt and we are supposed to get up into the 50's by the end of the week!  HALLELUJAH!!!!

I'm linking up today with my BBB Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried It Tuesday!

For my "Tried It" I let my student be the teachers otherwise known as Sage on the Stage.  Let me explain.  About two weeks ago now, I taught my students how to measure angles using a protractor.  First I gave them some angles and a protractor and didn't give them any instructions on how to use the protractor.  This was their first experience with this math tool and boy was it interesting!  They tried all sorts of things, most of which were WRONG!  After about 4 minutes, they were frustrated and I couldn't take it any more either!  I showed them the proper way to measure an angle and we did a few examples in our math notebooks with one of Jennifer's foldables.  Then I gave them a simple measuring angles worksheet to complete independently.  Easy enough, right???? SO WRONG!

I graded their papers and it was BAD! I had 3 students who got a 100% and I decided that I would let them be the teachers.  I had a review mini lesson with the whole class about acute, obtuse, and right angles.  The biggest problem on their papers were that they put the wrong measurement, not that they couldn't measure correctly.  For instance, putting 40* when the the angle was obtuse and actually measured 140*.  So we had the discussion about does it make sense that an obtuse angle would only measure 40*? Of course not, and all of my students understood this!

So I made my three students with perfect papers the "teachers" and split the rest of my class up into three groups.  The teachers helped everyone in their group identify their mistakes and correct their papers.  I made everyone stay with their group even when they finished correcting their paper and told them to help the other members until everyone was finished.  I loved listening the conversations in the group.  My students have learned such great questioning techniques, asking "If that's an acute angle, would it make sense for it to be 140*?"  Melt my heart!!!!

After the time to correct, I gave them a second practice sheet.  For the most part, they did a lot better.  I still have a few that I need to work with, but I was pleased with the progress!

Have you ever let your students be the teacher? How did it go?  Make sure to check out all of the other Tried It's for the week!

Made It Monday: February

It's my favorite Monday of the month!!!!  I love linking up with Tara at Fourth Grade Frolics for Monday Made It!  I love getting to share what I've been working on and see what craftiness everyone else has been up to for the past month!

Here is the craftiness I've been up to over the last month

MMI #1

I love to crochet.  I whipped this blanket out for a baby shower for a friend at my old school.  I like making them a little on the small side so they fit strollers and carseats.  This was a super easy pattern that I used 3 different yarns to make. 

MMI #2

I moved my desks back to groups after Christmas and I needed some kind of label for my tables.  This is what I came up with!

New table decorations.  

There are tons of tutorials out there for tissue paper pom poms so I won't bore you! :) 

MMI #3 

I'm super proud of my canvas!  It was quite the project but I think it turned out really well!  The music behind is from an old hymn book!

MMI #4 A Little Throw Back

I posted this picture of my crying little girl back in October but couldn't share why she was crying.  I forgot to add this MMI to my January post, so here it is now in February.

We made Mistle Toe plates for Ainsleigh's grandparents for Christmas!  I guess I never took a picture after the plates were fired, but they were super cute!  She HATED having her feet painted with the cold wet paint!  It was worth it though!

Make sure you head over to Tara's blog to check out all of the other adorable made it's!

Five for Friday {1-7-14}

Well, this was a very short week for me with 3 snow day! I'm still exhausted though!  I'm going to do a hybrid Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching of the last two weeks since I didn't link up last week!  

 Here is my house covered in snow from Sunday.  We got snow Sunday, Monday, and a little on Tuesday.  The roads were super icy and so we were out until Wednesday.

The little one and I made it outside on Monday when the sun came out for a little while and made a mini snowman!

 I got to do some fun Pinterest activities with my little girl during all of our snow days.

Here she is painting.

Playing with fabric scraps in an old wipes container.  Tons of fun!

 We have been working on our government lapbooks for a couple of weeks now, with so many other things going on it's taking us a while to finish them.  Last week, I had my students jigsaw the reading for this foldable.  Each person at a table took one page to read and took three important notes on their foldable.  Each group got together to compare notes and then each person shared their notes at their table.  Great cooperative learning!

 Even though I teach math, I still like to read the books the kids are reading.  We have an Arkansas book award called the Charlie May Simon Award that 4th-6th graders vote on.  In order to vote, the students have to have read at least 4 of the titles.  I am working on reading all of the nominees before the end of the year.  I finished my 3rd book last week and started book four!  Here are all the titles with the ones I've finished crossed out. I started Eight Keys a couple of nights ago.  I've been told it's a tear jerker!

Valentines' Party!  We had our party today because we will be on February intercession all next week. (We petitioned to make up snow days instead but lost that battle). My kids made out with quite the haul!

 They also made this cute project!

These are the Valentines I made for our two classes.  Aren't they cute?

I've put these and two other versions of teacher valentines in my TpT store for those of you who need Valentines for next week!  They will be half off through Sunday night! 

What have you been up to this week?

Math is Real Life: Crockpot Group

It's the first Wednesday of the month, which means it's time to link up with all of my awesome math blogging buddies for Math is Real Life!

A monthly REAL WORLD math blog link-up hosted by

 4mulaFun, Fourth Grade Studio, Teaching to Inspire in 5th, AND MissMathDork,

I love this linky, because I'm constantly trying to stress to my students that math isn't just for school, but that it is all around them!

Ok, so first of all, I have to tell you about two different students who came up with real world math problems in class just with things that were around us.  I was passing out file folders to make our government lapbooks and there were 50 folders in the box and four different colors of folders.  One student says, "Mrs. Webber we can figure out how many of each color there are by doing 50 divided by 4!" Wow!  Then later I was passing out notebook paper for a math problem and I had opened a brand new package of paper with 150 sheets in it.  A different student says, "Mrs. Webber, if you gave each student one piece of paper, then you would have enough for 6 classes if there were 25 students in each class!"  OMG!!!!!  They really are getting it!  Made this math teacher super proud!

On to the actual post at hand... Crockpot group!

My partner teacher has quite the love for her crockpot.  She has been known to make crockpot meals for breakfast, and dinner in the same day!  She decided that she wanted to put a group together that would make crockpot freezer meals (everything you would need for a crockpot meal frozen in a gallon size bag).  This would require getting 10 people together, each person makes one recipe 10 times to share with everyone in the group.  I said, "Sign me up!"  It took us a while to get all 10 people together including some last minute adds and drops, but we exchanged on Saturday and this is the haul I came home with!

We met at a Starbucks (too small for our little exchange) so we went to a parking lot next to the Starbucks and traded bags in the freezing cold drizzling morning! It was a little crazy and VERY cold!

For my contribution to the group, I decided to make Chicken Fajitas from {this} recipe. Seemed easy enough and wouldn't require any cooking before hand on my part.  Now for the math.

First I I had to write out my recipe.

·       2 peppers 

·       1 onion

·       1 1/2 pound chicken breast

·       1/2 cup chicken broth

·       taco seasoning packet

·       1 tsp. chili powder

·       1/2 tsp. paprika

·       1 tsp. salt

Then I had to multiply each ingredient by 10!

For most of it, not too hard.  1/2 tsp of paprika = 5 total tsp of paprika.  I actually didn't really even need to worry about that too much because I had to measure out 1/2 tsp for each bag as I put them all together.  Let me say that I have never used that much paprika at one time!

There were a couple of tricky math conversions for me.  1/2 cup of chicken broth = how much of a can???  I had no idea, so I went to Google to verify my conversions that 4 oz = 1/2 cup.  Well, each can had 14.5 oz in it, so I could do almost 4 freezer bags with one can.  Which meant I would need a total of 3 cans, which were sitting in my pantry!

Next was the taco seasoning.  We don't buy the individual packets, because they really are a rip off.  We buy the giant 20 ounce seasoning from Sam's Club.  I didn't know how much seasoning was in an individual packet though.  Again, I went to Google.  I packet has 1 ounce, which is actually 2 tbls!  Ok, easy enough!

I did all of this math before I went to store.  Here are the groceries before we got started! Sorry for the blurry picture!

I had to write the directions for the fajitas 10 times as well.  Each bag has the directions for my meal

The hubby did a great job of cutting the veggies while I added the seasoning to each bag.

Here are 10 of my bags before they went into the freezer.

I kept one bag and got 9 different bags in return.  I'm so exicted to have 10 different meals ready to put the crockpot over the next month!

One of the most fun parts of this experience was sitting at Starbucks sharing our stories of converting measurements, cost cutting measures, and time it took to put the bags together.  I was getting a kick out of the frustrations and loving hearing all the math talk!

Don't forget to go check out all of the other Math is Real Life posts to see where math is in the real world!