Kindergarten Pond Getting Techie!!

I have spent the last two days at our county's Digital Renaissance Summer Conference!!  (If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a lot of tweets with #digrensc.) I am on fire and ready for school to start so I can share all this fabulous tech with my kiddos!!!

( 2nd, 1st, and Kindergarten representing with our Superintendent!)

Here is just a taste of what I learned from the past two days:

Kevin Honeycutt 

Have you met this guy? If not, you are missing out. He is an amazing teacher with so much to share!!! Check out his web page and YouTube channel.

My  five major takeaways from him were:
1. Relationships are important between student and teacher! Teacher empowerment comes from being trusted, how you feel when you are learning is how you remember the learning – emotion cements learning and leads to launch moments!!!!

2. We need to teach ourselves and our students to "Learn to Love to Learn". We should all be "self-updating software" continuously improving and learning on our own.
3. Be prescriptive! Make the tool fit the students.

4. Don't be secret geniuses!!!! Share! Social media is like a jar of lightening bugs, the more you have the more you can see!!!
5.  Find the teachers you want to be like then stalk follow them! Learn from each other!

Kindergarten Tech (using 1 to 1 iPads)

Here are some fabulous apps I discovered:
Brainstorm & Brainstorm Companion (to use whole group, students respond to a question or prompt and then "flick" their answer to the teacher's iPad which can be displayed on the board)
Stage (allows you to use iPad as a document camera, it also have tools on the side to annotate and more)
Eggy Words (sight words game)

Using Popplet in K

Beginning sounds sort - (reading center) Letter cards on desk with a lot of different picture cards to sort (ex. Letter b card on table, find the pictures that begin with /b/, take photographs of cards and add to Popplet)

Students take a picture of self and then add adjectives around the picture

Students take a picture of self and add pictures of all the other students and type in their names

Essential question – so that everyone can share their answer: students come up and answer on the  board or on the iPad in a center

Facts about a topic - written or pictures

Pre-writing - answer questions to prepare to write a narrative

Using QR Codes in K
Record reading, writing, and singing to send home.
Teacher record leveled readers, add QR code to the book, students can follow along in the book as they listen to the story.
Multiple uses during reading centers - memory, sight word review, sound matching, word writing - using the QR codes to check work.
*Great sites:
www.recordmp3.org, www.qrcode-monkey.com, www.qrstuff.com

iMovie 
Let me begin by saying, Eric Lee from Technology in Motion (Jacksonville State) is amazing! He is so knowledgeable and patient. This is the second time I have attended a session of his and learned so much each time! (I attended his iMovie session last year and then updated my OS system and iMovie changed.) I plan to make a how to video and share with you very soon for my students and to post here!

Google Drive
I have used Google Drive in the past as a file sharing tool but oh my goodness, Drive is so much more!!! I may not use it to it's full potential with my students but it will definitely come in handy with our new collaborative planning!!!

And last but not least, I WON AN IPAD MINI FOR MY CLASS!!! I am so excited and so thankful!!! Thank you to all of the people that presented and organized this amazing conference!!!

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My Five for Friday!

 I am finally getting back into the swing of things after the holidays and the craziest month (January and half of February) of my life!  I have linked up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share with you 5 things my class and I have been up to for the last few weeks!

Picture taken by a student using the IPad, guess they know how the camera function works!!

 Digital Renaissance in Kindergarten

I had the chance to go to see our counties Digital Renaissance in action. Gulf Shores schools (elementary, middle & high) have been utilizing technology for a while. 3rd - 12th grade students all have a MacBook while K-2 classrooms have between 6-8 iPads the students share. This was a great opportunity to see how the class and teacher uses technology. A lot of teachers I saw had students using virtual libraries, Keynote, Board Builder (this is in Discovery Education's website) and a class Moodel page. This year Kindergarten is getting (some day) 12 IPads which puts us at a 1:2 ratio. Next year we should get enough to make us 1:1. Do any of you use IPads in class? What are some of the ways you have incorporated IPads into your day?
This month I have also began the training to be a Discovery Education Network Star (sounds fancy right!). As I have said before, Discovery Education is a fabulous sight our county has purchased (subscriptions) for our use. As I learn more and more about the fabulous resources, I will be sure to share them here! Check out my shadow lesson below (#3) for a little taste of what DE can do in your classroom!

I thought we would never make to 100! With all this crazy winter weather here in the deep south the 100th day changed 3 times!!!!
This year we celebrated not only the 100th day but (because we ran out of time on the 100th day) we also celebrated the 101st day of school. Some of our favorite activities on the 100th day of school, as voted on by the kiddos, were: doing 100 exercises, reading Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the 100th Day of Kindergarten, counting/singing along with different YouTube videos (by 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s), and making hats with 100 drawings.We also took pictures using an app to make us look really old and then the next day wrote about what we would do if we were 101! The kids LOVED seeing the pictures and a lot of them came up with some really good answers! What are some of your favorite 100th Day activities?
Our finished writing samples:

 If I were 101 I would, be in Heaven.

 If I were 101 I would do nothing and be a skeleton.

If I were 101 I would knit. (I love her illustration of herself knitting!)

Groundhog's Day & Shadows

I completely stole this EXTREMELY cute idea from Welcome to Room 36!
I used letters from Lettering Delights to make the words and clipart from Little Red's Clip Art for the cute groundhogs on the bottom.
Since Groundhog Day fell on a Sunday this year, we started this project the Friday before. We made the cute groundhogs using different shapes (hello math lesson) and then graphed our predictions. We also completed the cute recording sheet from Welcome to Room 36 to record the actual results on Groundhog Day the following Monday. (seen below)

Two fantastic books we read about shadow!

We read the first book, Who Will See Their Shadows This Year, when we were talking about Groundhog Day. It is really cute!!! When the different animals see their shadows crazy things happen. Then kids thought it was hilarious. I have planned a writing activity to do with this book next year - What will happen if you see your shadow?!!

The second book, Shadow Play, is really cool, I was even surprised by the ending. I don't want to say too much but it is about a a circus side show with shadows. REALLY great book!!! We read this after starting the science unit on shadows, it is a good follow up to the Reading Rainbow episode about the poem "My Shadow". 

This is the first year I have spent this much time on shadows and we had a blast. Discovery Eduction has a great lesson plan aligned with 1st grade common core all about shadows. I used it and modified the lesson to fit my Kinders! The lesson uses the poem "My Shadow" by Robert Louise Stevenson to not only learn about the science behind shadows but to also learn about poetry, vocabulary, author's craft, narrator verses speaker, as well as comprehension skills and writing skills. I tweaked this lesson to cover my ELA and Science course of study for the week. We used fiction and non fiction video segments to learn about shadows as well as some actual shadow making (inside since it rained all week). We used the closed captioning during the poem (from a Reading Rainbow episode) to find sight words and vocabulary words. We searched DE and found additional materials about shadows such as songs, graphic organizers, pictures, animations, and much much more. This is the second lesson plan from DE I have used this year. Some of the best parts of these lesson plans are:  DE provides essential questions for use in Project/Problem/Challenge Based Learning, there a links within the lessons to the digital resources you will use as well as links to printable resources, the lessons are very easy to understand and tweak to fit your classroom. I simply cannot say enough about Discovery Education, it is an amazing tool!!!

Valentine's Day
Most years I have made little Valentine's Day bags for my kids to put their Valentines in they pass out. This year we have been pressed for time since we have missed days of school due to weather and a lot of professional development that all hit in January. So, instead of taking up teaching time making boxes, the entire grade level decided to send a letter home to parents asking them to help their children decorate a box of some sort. I shared with them my Pinterest board where I had pinned some examples (here) and sent home a few pictures of examples.
My little happy for the kids was last minute but I think it turned out really cute!

I have begun to rub off on my parents, the mom getting cupcakes for our Valentine's Day party said she just had to have frogs on our cupcakes!!! 

Welcome to the World Baby Girl!

Earlier this month a few friends and I hosted a baby shower for our friend Amanda and her sweet baby girl! One of the things we found on Pinterest and did for the shower was to have everyone fill out an envelope with their name and mailing address for Amanda to write thank you notes. I had Amanda bring the envelopes for her thank you note stationary she already had and the guest filled out their information on those. If she did not already have thank you notes, that could have been a gift to her from us. Amanda loved the idea!!!

I also made a very cute banner for baby Arabella using letters from one of my favorite graphics websites. Lettering Delights! You get tons of free fonts, letters, backgrounds, and more just for creating an account and signing up for their news letter!

I am so happy to be back in the swing of things and blogging again! I cannot wait to see how everyone else has spent their week/month!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! 

Five for Friday

Here we are again! Another Five for Friday with Doodle Bugs Teaching and another week closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Time is flying by this year. I know I sure have been busy with starting a TPT store and starting this blog. I have also been working on implementing my AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative) training into my curriculum. This has meant a lot of video and audio recordings of my teaching and my students learning. So for #1...

AMSTI Math

 Roll and Record
Working on one to one correspondence, subtilizing, writing numbers, counting, composing numbers and more!!

Pattern Block Scarecrows

 Build It - number recognition, counting, composing numbers, ten frames

I have loved using the Terc Investigations math series along with my AMSTI training. It is all about being hands on and the kids taking ownership of their learning. We have learned a lot of different math games and the kiddos don't even realize how much learning is going on. 

AMSTI Science

Weather Unit: Thermometers & Temperature

Math and Science have always been my favorite subjects! So being able to get AMSTI science kits this year has been a dream come true. I was amazed at the learning that went on in my class during our weather kit. The work my kiddos did with thermometers blew my mind! Using talk moves during my lessons has made a huge difference. I was astounded to watch them work together sharing ideas until they figured out what a thermometer was and what it did. 

 My Last Post About Mamma Mia (at least for a year)!

WE WON!!! We took home first place in our food category and we were part of a three way tie for overall Mamma Mia Spirit!

 The theme for the entire night was Rificolona - a Paper Lantern Festival in Florence Italy where farmers and peasants sold their goods.

 Under the Tuscan Moon
Our team took that theme and ran with it! We decorated our booth as a booth at a 17th Century farmer's market and dressed the part! We cook Tuscan Pasta and Chickpea Soup and made Caprese salad bites (displayed on a head of lettuce).

Luckily we live in south Alabama where there are a lot of farming families! One of our teammates found the wagon, butter churn, and even an old scale (not in the picture) in her in-laws barn! 

 iCurio + Discovery Education = Learning in the Digital Renaissance

I know I have mentioned Discovery Education here before and shared with you how absolutely fabulous a resource it has been for me. If you don't know about DE check it out here! It has an array of wonderful multimedia resources and lessons.

Another great resource has been iCurio. This is another subscription site that our county has purchased for us. It is amazing. It is a resource where you can gather multimedia rich content aligned to both state and common core standards. From their website:

• Over 330,000 digital resources for all K-12 curriculum areas aligned with state and Common Core standards.
• Supports the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework.
• Flexible, dynamic content can easily be targeted to differentiate instruction for all students.
• Address learning outcomes for every class, every lesson, every student.
• Improve student engagement with videos, text, learning games, images, simulations, and more.

As a Kindergarten teacher and being new to this site, I use it to plan my lessons. There are links to amazing resources for everything. You can even save pages you find and share them with your grade level, school, or district. This week I found an entire unit on Pilgrims. We started with a Pilgrim scheme sheet (they love learning "5th grade" words), made a list of things we would pack if we moved to a new home, sorted those items into what the pilgrims could have brought on the Mayflower, and wrote about what it would have been like on the Mayflower. We are also going to create an ONLINE venn diagram comparing pilgrim children and children today. Next week we will focus on the first Thanksgiving. 

Click on Picture to visit ReadWriteThink.org to create your own online venn!

 On a personal note:

I LOVE Christmas. Christmas is my favorite holiday. I love everything about Christmas!!!!! I love the wonderful church services reminding us of the Reason for The Season. I love the time spent with my family and friends. I love buying presents, especially for my two beautiful nieces. And I am absolutely giddy just thinking about decorating my home and classroom. I have a tradition, the day after Thanksgiving or that weekend, Christmas music plays, hot chocolate is drank, and the house is trimmed out in red and green!  I cannot wait for our class elf to arrive when we get back from Thanksgiving Break. I say all of this so you know I am not a scrooge when I say: Christmas in October and November has gone too far! What is going on????  In October,  I was looking for Halloween decorations but I couldn't find them for all the Christmas decorations. I lost most of my Thanksgiving decorations in a horrible attic accident (pic below) and could not find replacements because Christmas had invaded all of the shelves. I just think each holiday should be given the appropriate attention and not be used as a marketing tool. Each holiday has a special meaning to someone and should not be overlooked just to make a few extra dollars. 

Exiting soap box now! 

What have you been up to this week? Any great Thanksgiving or multimedia lessons to share?

Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching and share!

Wednesday Wild Things!

 HAPPY HUMP DAY!!! I LOVE that silly commercial!

It is Wednesday and I have been looking over my plans for next week. I am a little nervous because I am going to try to teach my kiddos about book reviews and how to write them. Luckily I have a lot of help from one of my favorite teacher tools, Discovery Education!



If you don't know about Discovery Education (DE), stop reading and go look at this site right now! Then come right back and continue reading :)! This is a subscription site paid for by our county school system and is an amazing resource. As part of my county's Digital Renaissance Leadership Team, I have been able to attend a lot of different workshops on how to use DE effectively in my classroom. At the last workshop I attended, we where shown different model lessons that have been created to align with common core and to integrate technology across the curriculum. You can find these lessons by looking under the Streaming Plus icon on your home screen and then search by grade level, subject, strand, cluster, standard. Not all standards have a model lesson. There are four model lessons in Kindergarten ELA though and they cover most of the ELA standards. 


Next week I am teaching Wild Things! During this week, we do a lot of work with the book Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. After 10 years of teaching this unit, I was ready for a change. This summer I started by looking on my favorite idea spot, Pinterest! (My Kindergarten Creepy & Spooky board is here.) I found a cute directed art activity and then when I found the model lesson on DE to go with the book, my week was practically planned for me! Here are the things that I have planned for next week.

Idea from ElementaryArtist (picture links to their lesson)

Monday: Book Introduction, Using Details in Writing and Illustrations to tell a story
We will read the book Where the Wild Things Are. We will discuss the characters in the story and talk about how each wild thing is different. We will talk about how illustrators use details from the story to add details to their illustrations. We will take a look at all the details used to create the different wild things. We will create our own wild thing using directed art for the main body parts and then each student will be allowed to go back and add their own details. We will use crayons to draw and water colors to paint our wild things.

Tuesday:(DE Lesson) Finding Your Voice: Sharing Opinions about Books - Part 1
First we will vote on what is better: hot dogs or hamburgers. We will use this vote to discuss what an opinion is and how someone's opinion is not right or wrong. We will then vote on if we like fiction books or non fiction books best. This time I will get some of them to tell my why they chose to vote the way they did. Next we will review the book Where the Wild Things Are. We will make a graph of who likes/dislikes the book. I will ask them what they did and did not like about the book. We will then view a video of the story  Where the Wild Things Are from DE. I will tell them to think of the reasons they like or dislike the story. After summarizing the story again, we will watch the video once more as I stop and ask questions about what is going on in the story. This way the students can really focus on the different parts and details of the story so when they write their book review later in the week, they can give good reasons for liking/disliking the story. We will wrap up with some of the students giving me their opinions of the story - hopefully adding more details in their reasoning.

Wednesday: Writing to a Prompt & How to Write a Book Review (2 different lessons/meetings)
We will use our story telling pieces to retell Where the Wild Things Are. We will then write to finish the the sentence..."When I feel Wild, I..."
Later more students will share their opinions of the story. I will introduce them to a book review. We will read and discuss a book review for Where the Wild Things Are. Next we will watch and discuss book reviews (from Reading Rainbow) of Where the Wild Things Are and two other books.

Thursday: Writing a Book Review
First we will review what a book review is and what it contains. We will review some of the books we have read recently. Students will be able to choose which book they want to review. (Here is my book review form.) The student will copy the title of the book onto their paper. Then they will write if they like or dislike the book. ("I like this book." "I do not like this book.") Then they will draw an illustration showing why they like or dislike the book and write a sentence (as best they can) describing their picture. Students will then work in small groups to video each other giving their book reviews using IPads.

Friday: Speaking and Listening - Sharing Our Book Reviews
Students will either share their book review in person or use the videos they prepared the previous day.

So these are my PLANS for next week. However, as you all know, with Kindergarten (or any group of kids) things may or may not go as planned. Fingers crossed for success. I know they will love doing this all the time if we can get the procedure down!

Have any of you tried doing book reviews with your kids? Any tips????