Pencil Sharpener Give Away

I've seen these wonderful pencil sharpeners all over the blog world




I've been debating getting one for some time, but here is an awesome give away by Lamppost in a 1st Grade STEM classroom.  There are so many different ways to enter the give away.  So go ahead and enter!!!!

I Love Staples Back To School Sales!!!

I know it's only July 21, but I have students in my classroom in 11 day... that's right, I have kids on August 1!!!!!  Back to school sales in July mean it really is time to go back to school!  I love the Staples sales at this time of year.  You have to be on the ball to get all the good deals, but when you do they are AWESOME!!!  Here is the ad for this week.  I'm so happy with all of my purchases and I can't wait to use them/ have them in my classroom!

Here some of the supplies I got today.  Nothing was over $2.00!!!

Here are the crayons and my new cute stapler I got!

These scissors are the best deal that I got today.  They are Wescott 7 inch scissors that normally retail for $6.29.  There were on sale for $1 each!!! Normally they have a limit of 2 but there wasn't a limit in the ad so I bought 28 to have one for all my students in class!!!  $28 instead of $175!  So exciting!

And last but not least, I finally broke down and bought a laminator!!! I haven't even gotten it out of the box yet, but I'm so excited to use it!  I'm planning on doing a review of it later  this week!

What school supplies are you buying this week?

Extending Children's Mathmatics

Summer Professional Development: I don't know about the rest of you teachers out there, but I've done quite a bit of Summer PD ever since I started teaching.  This summer I've spent a total of 9 days in PD out of my 5 weeks of summer (courtesy of the non-traditional calendar I work on).  The first five were spent in Technology training that I wrote about here.  This past week I spent 4 days in math training.  I'm in year 2 of Extending Children's Mathematics. This is a totally different way of teaching math than how I learned in school.  The basics of the training is teaching multiplication, division, and fractions through word problems.  It's also the concept of not actually "teaching" the students how to solve the problems but rather facilitating a variety of problem solving that students come up with. Instead of teaching the method and then giving word problems, you give word problems first and explore the different ways kids solve and use their methods to extend kids' thinking.

This is the book that we are working with

 

We spent a lot of time exploring A TON of ways to solve one problems.  At times is was repetitive, but I did quite a lot out of it.  Last year in Year 1 we talked about how a multiplication problem should be set up to describe groups of something.  So 6 groups of 7 puppies should always be written as 6 x 7.  I never saw it as a big deal which way the problem was written because of the communative property.  Our trainer opened my eyes to see the difference between 7 houses with 2 people in each vs. 2 houses with 7 people in each. What do you think? I also spent a lot of time thinking what numbers to put into problems instead of just pulling numbers out of a hat. :)

 I have 3 more day of training to go to throughout the year where we will analyze student work and get to see this type of teaching in action in a real classroom.  I've really learned a lot, but I'm going to try to enjoy my last week off next week with my little girl.  My building opens on Monday, so I plan on spending some time up there, but hopefully not too much.

How do you teach math? What different things have you tried in the past? What do plan on doing this year?

Monday Made It: Date letters/numbers

I'm so excited to link up with 4th Grade Frolics today!!!

I don't know about you but during the summer I have a much harder time remembering the date because it's not up on the board!  We all have the date on our boards to help with due dates, and other scheduling activities. On my board, I like having the "long date" as well as the "short date" on the board for students (and myself) to refer to  throughout the day.  However, I don't like to write the date everyday and erasing one number ends up looking messy and that's just not cool!  So here is my solution:

I used my wonderful, amazing, fantabulous Cricut to cut out the letters and numbers to be able to display the date on my board!  I used the Mickey Mouse Font cartridge to make these with the silhouette option for the teal. They are 3 and half inches tall. I had a set that I've used for the past 3 years, but I'm redoing my classroom theme with orange, teal, pink, purple, and OWLS this year so I HAD to make a new set of date letters.  I have to laminate these guys and put magnets on the back, but it makes it so easy to display the date on my board in a super cute way!

Bloglovin

Follow me on Bloglovin!  I've just linked up my blog to bloglovin and really would love to see all the amazing teacher blogs I follow to follow me :) !!!

I'm an Arkansas Blogger

So I'm kinda excited... I just added my blog to the blogs by state linky over at Fifth in the Middle.  This post is a #TBT sort of but I've never linked up before!  There are only 7 blogs from Arkansas linked up so if you are an educator in Arkansas with a blog... GO LINK UP!!!  There is a great tutorial for how to put the button on your page, too!

21st Century Technology

As I mentioned in my first post, I received a grant for next school year from my district for 30 laptops in my classroom.  I participated in a training this week to learn about all the fun web 2.0 tools that are available for use in the classroom.  5 days of technology information is a lot to process, so here are some of things we learned.

Monday we covered Edmodo, Todaysmeet, and Googledocs.  I have started using Googledocs with regularity because I bought a Chromebook, but my mind is reeling with ideas of how to use Googledocs for next year.  I teach with a team teacher and my goal is to have lots of collaborative documents that we both can go in and edit. I've been thinking about using Todaysmeet as an exit slip strategy for lesson closings.  Lesson closures is one of my weaknesses and I think this will really help show me what students have learned and what questions they still have at the end of a lesson.

Tuesday we covered a TON of information!  I was slightly overwhelmed and decided I needed to choose just a couple items to focus on for this school year.  I'm really excited to use Symbaloo for all of my math sites that I want my students to have easy access to.  I am trying to figure out a way to use my laptops as part of my math rotations.  I think I want one station where students can play games on the laptops that practices the skills we are working on.  We also talked a lot about digital citizenship- teaching students how to be responsible when online.

Wednesday we worked on Project Based Learning (PBL).  We had to present a PBL scenario to our group on Friday based on something we had previously taught.  I did PBL on area and perimeter by having the students design raised bed gardens for our school.  We had to present our PBLs in a powerpoint Ignite style (20 slides, 15 seconds each for a total of 5 min).  I stayed up pretty late on Wednesday putting my powerpoint together!  We also talked about Genious Hour on Wednesday.   Genious Hour is the idea of offering 20% (or a set amount of time) to your students where they get to work on things that they are passionate about instead of you constantly telling them what to work on. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this one!  I stayed up quite late this to work on my Ignite powerpoint.  I created my first PowToon for my slide on what my entry event would be. It's pretty simple since the slid can only be 15 seconds long.  You can view it here.

Thursday we continued our work on PBL.  We had a wonderful presentation from a team of teachers  from the East side of Arkansas present how their school implements PBL.  I took 3 pages of notes during the presentation!!! Talk about awesome!  They really laid out the planning method they use for PBL. They shared lots of good practical tips for implementing PBL, including how to group students, group contracts, entry documents, workshop time, and rubrics.  I also got confirmation that the project I've been planning this week is right on track with what elementary teachers are using in their school.  I also learned how embed a video into my powerpoint by using youtube downloader and zamzar to convert my file.  It took a little work, but it was all worth it!

Friday we all presented our PBLs.  It was amazing to the amount of creativity that came out of my colleagues.  We saw 29 five minute presentations ranging from science to math to history to ELA.  I think we all decided that we want to go back to school and be in each other's classrooms! 

Thanks for staying with me though this super long blog post!  This post has a been a great reflection for me of the week of new learning! I learned so much this week and I can't wait to implement all the new tools and resources I learned!  As I explore my new tools and see how they work in my classroom, I will share with you on my Tech Tools pages!  If you ever have any new ideas or tools to use in the classroom, leave me a comment!