Lakeshore Review and Giveaway!

So a while ago (longer than I'd like to admit) I came home to a surprise package from Lakeshore:

Inside were 5 of their awesome Interactive Software games to try out. I saved one to give away, but the games I did try out were really well made and covered a broad range of curriculum and levels of difficulty.

My class just LOVED the Phonics Quiz Game Show! It is a Jeopardy-style farm themed game. I would recommend this game for late Kindergarten through beginning Second Grade. It seemed a bit easy for my Second graders post winter break.

You start by selecting from the categories below:

You can choose how much time your students will have to answer the questions.

Then it pretty much plays out the same as any Jeopardy game.

Here are a few examples of questions:

My city kids thought this farm girl was hilarious.

Annnnnd game over!

I also tried out the Bubble Pop! Math Challenge for grades 3-5. I was tutoring a group of fourth graders in the mornings to help them prep for the state standardized tests and decided to try it out with them. I think the fourth graders got more excited than my second graders did. They LOVED it!

What I really like about the math, was that even though it was labeled as grades 3-5, I was able to use the rounding and fractions categories with my second graders. I also just got a new student (with 26 days left in the school year :/) who needs a challenge with math, so I will use this as an enrichment tool for him. 

So basically, the kids look at the problem on the alligator, and pop the correct bubble before it hits the water. They can tap the monkey to make the bubbles slow down as they fall to the water.

So again, my assessment of these games is that they are easy to use, well made, and provide opportunities to differentiate across ability levels. I can't wait to try out the Place Value Quick Shot and Phonemic Awareness Games!

Now it's your turn! I'd like to give away the Can Do! Interactive Solar System Game to one of you! If the Solar System is a part of your curriculum, or you have kids who are really into space, this would be a great game for your classroom! Good Luck and Stay Fabulous!

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Mother's Day 2013

First I want to say thank you to Tammy from Forever in First for giving me a shout-out on her Mother's Day post. Go check out her cute silhouette tiles! And if you missed last year's post and want to catch up on that click on the photo below:

I have to say that I totally agree with Tammy that gifts made at school can and should be gifts worth holding on to. Not that I'm against pretty handprint flower art (my non-blogger teammate made beautiful handprint art cards) but if possible, I'd like my student-made gifts to be able to stand the test of time. I decided to try something different this year based on this pin from Kimbo at A Girl and a Glue Gun:

Here are some of mine:

I have to say that I've never worked with Sculpey clay before and although it wasn't difficult, I don't think I have a gift for it. I picked out a pretty light petal pink color with a bit of shimmer to it thinking it would turn out something like Kimbo's. But after baking the hearts in the oven, they all turned a fleshy-clear color. And they also looked dirty even though I rolled the dough out on a clean, flat surface. Kimbo's didn't seem to change color after baking like mine did. Maybe I baked them too long? Anyways - my teammate (The Meek Moose herself) had some gold spray paint left over from our Ancient Egypt unit so a quick spray solved the color problem. I'm actually glad I painted them because the shiny gold really made the thumbprints pop.

After the paint dried, I attached the jump rings using pliers (if I do this again I will skip that step), the kids attached the string and bells, and I tied off the ends with the clasp.

When it was all said and done, I felt like I had done a bit too much of the work for it to be a kid project so we made pocket cards for the key chain to hide in. We are working on poetry in writing workshop now so what better than an acrostic poem for the front, and then a pocket on the inside for the heart. A few students wrote what they could in Spanish for non-English speaking mothers.

 

 

Something to the effect of "You are the prettiest mom in the whole world. Look here"

As always, stay fabulous!

Creating a Professional (not quite) Portfolio

I decided recently that it was time to create a portfolio of sorts for a few reasons. One reason was that I was cleaning and came across the portfolio I had to make during student teaching and was so disgusted by it and decided it was a bit er-- outdated. Another reason was that I recently saw this post about making a portfolio from HoJos Teaching Adventures and was really inspired by this picture:

Aaaaaaannnnnnnnddddd perhaps the most important reason was because I have decided that I would like to transfer to a different school in my district, which means interviews, which means panic attack-deer in the headlights-sweaty feet nervousness for me (sorry TMI). I will go into more details about the transfer stuff later, but I would like to share that my interviews went great, I DID use my portfolio during the interviews, and I DID just accept a position at the school I wanted for next year. Yay for new adventures!

Anyways. Back to the portfolio stuff...

So I knew I wanted to make a new portfolio. Because let's face it-- my student teaching portfolio was beyond repair. This had to be a total re-build.

BUT I had also talked to far too many colleagues who said they put all these hours into making a portfolio and no one ever wanted to look at it..... so I decided to do it a little differently - the Flamingo Fabulous way!

Enter..... my professional "Look Book"

TA DA!

I really wanted this to be more of a structured collage of my teaching experience rather than copies of lesson plans and long dissertations about my philosophy of education and all that jazz. I do have some of the more traditional stuff in the first section of the binder, like my resume and other professional documents, but the rest of the binder is strictly photos and captions.

My thinking behind this was that I needed to make this a tool for ME to use during my interview rather than just something I'm HOPING these people will take a few minutes to look through (which they never do). When hit with those, "Tell me about a time when you . . ." questions I wanted to be able to flip through this book and show them photos of a time I did whatever they are asking about. Presto! Instant photographic evidence that both helps me not get stuck on a question and helps the interviewers really visualize what I'm talking about.

So here are a few photos of my Look Book for your viewing pleasure!

Here is the "About Me" section where I put the more traditional stuff:

This is a copy of a grant I wrote for books in my classroom a few years ago. This came in handy when my panel asked me about my skills with written communication.

Blah Blah Blah

I included a copy of my weekly lesson plans just in case that came up in discussion (which it didn't).

My summer letter to future second graders and long-range plans.

This is where the fun begins! This is from the Literacy section. I included topics such as Writing Workshop, Book Buddies (kids are partnered with a different grade level class), pictures from the Fairy Tales/Storytelling unit, Book-related projects, Book character dress up day, etc. 

Every year I set up times to meet with my students at the public library over winter and spring break if I'm not traveling. In the book it goes...

Here are some math pictures. I used the measurement lesson pictures when asked about cross-curricular lessons.

Social Studies

Science Stuff

Classroom Community projects and activities

And lastly, I included general pictures from my classroom and of my management systems. I used this when they asked me about my behavior plan.

So there you have it! If you go through all the trouble of making a portfolio for interviews, MAKE THEM LOOK! And the best way to do that is to give them something to look at that gives them a sense of who you are as a teacher. When it comes down to it, I made this book to help ME so why not use it during the interview?

And btw... My panel asked me "How would others describe you?" which was like the scariest question of all because I have no clue really what others think about me. I am just living in my own little akward world over here. So the first thing out of my mouth was:

"umm... quirky."

I'm immediately thinking to myself, "why do I always fail when given those epic opportunities to really "sell" myself????"

The principal said, "I've never heard that one before. You're honest, I like that."

And I guess there's something to be said for standing out in a crowd and being memorable. Because they just hired the "quirky girl".

As always, stay fabulous my friends.

Plants vs. Erosion

Anyone else notice how "vs." turned into a verb seemingly overnight? I have kids that write in their stories, "And then I versed Jimmy at soccer...." Kinda irks me. But anyway that has nothing to do with this post so I will save that gem of a thought for later.

My county recently revamped our science standards, and a major shift was made in our Life Cycles strand. We used to teach the basic life cycles - plants, butterflies, frogs, and grasshoppers - but now we only focus on plants, butterflies, and white-tailed deer. Yeeeeeah. Don't ask. I understand they wanted a mammal, and that they wanted to choose something that was prevalent in our state, but deer? Could they have possibly found anything with LESS available resources? Ummmm O.K. Aside from deer, the other major shift was that there is a much bigger emphasis on plants now. Yes they need the life cycle, but they also have to know about plants/crops that are native to our state, the importance of plants to humans and animals, what products come from plants, and the role plants play in erosion.

I decided this was a good opportunity for a messy science experiment. Of course me being me, I structured the "mess factor" in such a way that it really wasn't that messy at all. But the kids enjoyed it.

I gave each group of junior scientists two aluminum cake pans. One pan had a piece of sod at one end and the other pan had a scoop of loose topsoil at one end. Unfortunately I got so wrapped up in the lesson that I forgot to take pictures until most of the action was over :(

We first made scientific drawings of the two pans before starting the experiment and made comparisons of the two pans. Then the kids used "rainmakers" aka styrofoam cups with holes punched in the bottom, to rain over the grass-end of the first pan. Then they lifted up the pan to let the water run off and collect at the empty end of the pan. This was a good opportunity to review a few stages of the water cycle.

Then we repeated this process with the loose topsoil pans. The kids were really excited to see how the water washed the soil all over the pan. They spent a few minutes drawing their after sketches of the two pans and then discussed their observations. Obviously they noticed that there was less water filtered through the sod than the topsoil, and that the sod water was much cleaner. They also observed that most of the actual dirt in the sod pan stayed in place, where the topsoil washed and spread all over the pan. Because we had spent some time observing and discussing our results, much of the water in the sod pans was "sucked up" in to the sod. I hadn't expected this to happen, but it made for more interesting discussions.

Here are a few of their scientific sketches and conclusion statements:

In the end, we concluded that the roots of the plants helped keep the soil from washing away (yay!), so it was time to introduce the term EROSION, so they could have a proper name to go along with the phenomena they had just observed.  We decided to let our pans sit over the weekend and see how they had changed by Monday.

We had a great (and messy) time, and hopefully some of this will stick to their brains!

Now on TPT...

I've decided to start uploading my most-requested items to TPT. Please check out my store and follow me :)

Fairy Tales - Robert Munsch Style

Well we continued Fairy Tale/Storytelling activities this week and as promised, I have Paper Bag Princess and Mud Puddle activities to share.

  

 Ok Ok, Mud Puddle is not exactly a fairy tale. But as I have mentioned I like to bend the rules and include a variety of stories into this unit. ESPECIALLY trickster tales. I LOVE trickster tales. We started working on Tops and Bottoms on Friday but didn't finish due to the super awesome two hour weather delay gifted upon us. Pictures soon to come.

A while ago, we (my team) decided that a good way to start thinking about fairy tales was to focus on the settings of each story. Our students have a particularly difficult time understanding setting for some reason and we figured that focusing on setting would be a good way to see commonalities across Fairy Tales. So I decided to have my kids make a setting book for The Paper Bag Princess and Mud Puddle and use these settings as a backdrop for retelling the stories.

This is my example:

The puppets. Princess Elizabeth is double-sided.

 The castle pre-dragon smash:

Elizabeth goes to the dragon cave to trick the dragon and rescue Prince Ronald

Elizabeth realizes Ronald is a JERK and doesn't get married after all BUT still lives happily ever after.

And here are the Mud Puddle pictures:

Jule Ann's Backyard:

Jule Ann getting squeaky clean.

 Jule Ann decides to wear a raincoat:

The Mud Puddle Awaits his second attack:

Baggie for the puppets attached to the back of the setting book:

FYI - If your school has a subscription to TumbleBooks (which I highly recommend) You can watch an animated telling of Mud Puddle on that site.