Slideshow For Lines, Rays, Angles...(Do Re Mi)

A couple of years ago, I found a cool song to help teach lines, line segments, rays, angles, points, parallel lines, and perpendicular lines (not in my curriculum, but it fit with the song). The song is "Do Re Mi" from The Sound of Music.

http://screenmom.com/2013/03/24/bring-us-back-to-do-the-sound-of-music-and-the-beauty-of-scene-selection/ ©20th Century Fox

I love the opportunity to throw some music into my lessons, so I found the clip from the movie on YouTube and practiced singing the song myself. First, I show the class the clip so they can be familiar with the tune, which many of them have never heard before.

Then, I show the slideshow while I sing the song. Then, my students and I sing along with the slideshow. It's catchy, so my students soon learn to sing it without me or the slideshow. It helps them understand the vocabulary so we can dive deeper into geometry.

Enjoy!

oneword

With only a few days to go before school starts again, I am going through my emails. I subscribed to The 2 Sisters (Daily 5/Cafe) Tip of the Week emails but I never looked at them. Today, I found something interesting. On the February 24th email, there was a link to oneword.com. It's a very simple writing exercise. Every day, one word pops up and you have 1 minute to write about it. When your minute is up, you submit and get to see what everyone wrote. I feel like it can be a very powerful tool. However, I have no clue how to make it work in my classroom.

PROS: 

Seeing what everyone else writes is fantastic for 3rd graders. It's instant sharing.

It has the potential to expand the vocabulary of my students.

There is no leg work on my part. My students can just hop on and go to town.

I can see what they all wrote about and how much they wrote.

CONS:

There is (seemingly) no filter, which is not great for using with 3rd graders. 

My students may not know the words each day.

They have to be able to type well if they are going to type more than a simple sentence in 1 minute.

Now to sit back, digest, and bounce this off of my PLN. How would YOU use oneword.com?

Storing Tech Tips for Kids

How many times have students come up to you and told you about a shortcut they discovered or a faster way to do something using Microsoft Office/Google Apps? I love when the students can do the teaching and show their classmates how things are done. In the past, I have just had the students share it and move on. However, that doesn't help those students who forget how to do it a week later and are too shy to ask.

So, this year I am going to do something about it! I am going to archive all of those tech tips to keep for anyone who needs them. My hope is that I will only be responsible for placing the tips on my Weebly* for everyone to access. When a student discovers something that would be helpful to others, I am going to have them type up the tech tip, complete with title, on this Google form. That's when I'll take it and throw it on my Weebly* tech tip page. I'm not sure as of yet how to set it up, but I'll figure that out when the tips start coming in.

That's about it. I'm sure there are many things that I didn't consider with this, but I'll discover them and learn on the job. If you see anything that looks odd or doesn't make sense, PLEASE let me know.


*Don't judge me on my Weebly right now. I just set it up and don't have much on it as of yet.

TechItU

This summer I attended the 2nd TechitU institute and I learned a ton of new things and new ways to integrate things I already knew about. I was reinvigorated and ready to go for the upcoming school year. Then vacation hit. Once I got back home, I realized that I needed to start working toward my tech integration goals. So, I am going to start posting about what I want to do in my classroom and how I think I should do it. Then, when school actually starts, I am going to come back on update on what worked, how it worked, what didn't work, why it didn't work, and ask for some suggestions. I figured that if I throw this on my blog now, I might just be able to keep up with it. Who knows?

Blogging Conundrum

Last year my class and I dove into blogging headfirst and it was a huge success. My students loved it. They learned a lot about writing and about each other. I learned a lot about my students, who struggled with spelling, who had great ideas, and who was empathetic (and who was not). Success is wonderful, but you can't dwell on it too long. If you don't build upon success, you fall. So, I am beginning to think about next year already (just a little). We used kidblog last year and I liked what it offered. However, what else is out there? Is there something out there that is better? Maybe another site has more options. Maybe another site allows for easier audio and video uploading.

On that note, I thought about my wishlist.
I want:

• my students to have their own accounts
• to have the privilege of approving both posts and comments
• anyone around the world to be able to comment on their blogs
• to be able to upload audio and video with ease

There are a few sites that I looked at and I narrowed it down to edublogs or back to kidblog again. I'm sure I am missing a great site, but I haven't done too much research just yet.

So, what do you use? Why do you like it? I am going to do more research but I put a great deal of stock it what others have used. I appreciate all of your comments, suggestions, and criticism.

Thanks!

Picture Pie Fractions

I know this isn't exactly the most technology-laden lesson, but it turned out great and I wanted to share it. I was surfing for some ideas to help me teach fractions, I came upon the Math Cats idea bank, which is a decent site. It mentioned Picture Pie by Ed Emberly. I remembered Ed Emberly from my childhood. He taught me how to draw! So I checked it out from my school library and looked at how he created the amazing plants and animals out of circles and fractions of circles. He uses whole circles, halves, quarters, and eighths. I had my students fill out a label paper telling how many of each fraction piece they had in their plant/animal. I decided that my students could do it and would love it. Check out the results:

Here's an example of a fraction animal.

There are more animals and plants up there now, but this is how it started.

News for Kids

At the recent institute I attended, I was introduced to a couple of fun kid-news sites. Prior to that, I had only been able to find one (after many hours of searching). I'm excited about them all. They each have some positives. So I am going to take a deeper look at each one over the next few posts. I'm going to start off with the one I found: Tween Tribune.

Tween Tribune is a site with wonderful age-appropriate news stories that my students have loved. The stories are sorted into 16 different topics that they can read about, such as animals, fashion, odd news, tweens in the news, etc. If you have older students or students who are Spanish speaking, when you register on the site, you have access to the Teen Tribune and the TTEspanol as well the Tween Tribune.  AND, best of all, it's all FREE!!!!

After you create your teacher account, you can decide whether to create accounts for your students yourself or have them create their own accounts. It's not difficult at all. The one tricky thing is the security question. I had my students choose the favorite movie question since they are all into movies it seems. However, I had them type the movie titles themselves. That became a problem because some of them misspelled the movie, which led to some scrambling on my part. This year, I am going to have a movie title already chosen for each child and give it to them on a slip of paper so they have less of a chance to misspell it.

The reason I really enjoy the Tween Tribune is that the students can comment on the stories. This brings some authenticity to the assignment of read a story and post a comment. The comments don't automatically post, though. You have to approve them first, which is a great feature. That serves two great functions. First off, if any inappropriate comments are made, you know who made them. Secondly, it allows you to see the types of comments each student makes. One bonus feature about the comments is that they MUST be 25 words long in order to post. If a student has fewer than 25 words, it will notify them so they can go back and add some details accordingly.

There are other features on the site, such as posting a story and a "faculty lounge" where teachers can share ideas and lesson plans, but I'll let you check that out yourself. Now that I have put my thoughts to words, I really have a grasp on why this site is so important to me. This blogging stuff my just work out.

My next post will take a look at the next kid-news site, Dogo News.