QR Chatterpix/Famous American Museum

Our second grade Famous American Museum is coming up this week and I've made a few really fun additions... A few years ago I read a blog post on Teaching Maddenness where Amanda talked about how to use the Chatterpix app to create Famous American videos. Ever since then I have included the Chatterpix video in with the project. I love that with the app students can practice reading/speaking skills in an exciting way. Here's a link to her amazing post: Chatterpix post

Here's where the new comes in...Every year I take those Chatterpix videos and put them together in a big slide show that I have running during the Famous American Museum. (I use the Biography unit from Teacher's Clubhouse where students dress up as a Famous American. It's a great day!) This year I was thinking about how often parents who visit our museum stand and wait for his or her child's video to appear. I've seen lot of great ideas online about doing digital portfolios with QR codes to display work. That's when I got the idea to load the Chatterpix videos onto Google Drive so my students could copy the link to create his or her own QR code. There's a ton of great QR generators out there, but this is the one I had the kids use QR generator. It was very simple and easy to navigate. Below are a few pictures of the student's digital projects and my instruction sheet for parents. I'm excited to show off my students' hard work this week! 

Happy 100th Day!

I like to start the 100th day off with a favorite treat! "Donut" you know we are 100 days smarter?! :)

We spend the morning doing station activities with K-2 students in our grade school. We have lots of fun! "Thumbs up for 100 Days"

This is one of my favorite activities to do for the 100th day. I like to show the kids an old Tootsie Pop commercial like this one I downloaded from YouTube: Original Tootsie Pop Commercial. You can grab a copy of the fun & FREE recording sheet at First Grade Wow's blog! She's an amazing blogger with tons of super 100 day ideas.

It's always fun to celebrate 100 sweet days of learning! :)

GRINCH DAY 2017!

HAPPY GRINCH DAY!!!

This year the Grinch visited our classroom leaving tiny green footprints and green hearts behind...

The Grinch also messed with our classroom rules...This was a new activity for us this year and it was a success!! I got the idea from Cupcake for the Teacher The kiddos were so surprised and we had a great time reviewing our rules together. 

The kids were also shocked when the grinch had come into the classroom to add green erasers to the pencils in their desks. He's so sneaky! ;)

The kids left out red candy canes before recess...

After recess we found that the Grinch had licked all the candy canes green leaving green "Grinch" glitter in his path. We used the glitter in our grinch grime. First Grade Wow has tons of AMAZING grinch ideas and her packets are free to download. Below you can find pics of my kiddos solving scrambled sentences, making grinch grime and more!

This year I made some awesome crinkle cookies with this super easy recipe from Pinterest. We ate crinkle cookies and watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It was a wonderful day! 

Reading Detectives!

Do you have trouble getting your students to look closely at text? My students often want to rush through reading a text and then answer the questions as fast as possible without looking back at the passage to support their answers. This week I told my students that they were going to be reading detectives to find answers/support for opinions in text. We put on our pretend trench coats and pulled our detective hats low over our eyes. Our detective tools included the text, questions, clipboards, highlighters, and one of these handy dandy super spy special pens: 

My dad is an accountant and he always loves pens with extra gadgets ☺. For Christmas every year he sends out cards with these special Christmas pens. He had some extras that I was able to snag last year and let me tell you, the kids absolutely loved them! The pens have a little flashlight on the end that the kids could click on and off. 

We turned off all the lights in the room and the students got to work! My students were so focused on finding answers with the lights that they truly studied the passage (not to mention they were crazy quiet! #teacherwin) Here's a few pics of my Reading Detectives in action: 

Sister Sister STEAM camp

My sister and I have been talking for a while about wanting to do a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) camp. We decided to take a chance and create free mini morning STEAM camp on a day we had off from school for K-5 students to come make ballon cars. We were able to incorporate lots of different standards into our lesson. Here are just a few that fit with our project:

Mathematics

MP1: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

MP5: Use appropriate tools strategically.

Literacy

CCSS.ELA-RL.2.3: Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.

Engineering

K-2-ETSI-1: Ask questions, make observations, gather information and problem solve with development of an improved object or tool.

Science

K-PS2-1 Motion and Stability: Forces and Interactions: Plan and conduct an investigation to compare the effects of different strengths of motion on an object.


Students really needed to persevere to make their cars... We talked about how it's okay if the balloon car doesn't work right away or even by the end of the camp. Students were able to try their cars out and make changes as they designed. We want to instill growth mindsets in our students so that they keep working when engaging with challenging tasks!




Here's a few videos of the finished projects in action: 

Some of them worked...

And some did not...

The important thing is we that kept trying!☺☺☺

Insect museum 2017

We had a lot of fun learning with our insect museum this year. Mrs.Wall, our high school science teacher, (and my AMAZING sister!) helped us out with fancy tubes for our critters so we were able to look at them easily under the microscope. Mr. Watkins, our tech and science teacher, helped us out with some awesome iPad gadgets to further explore. The kids were so fascinated! 



Here are a few pics from our museum where students were able to share what they learned with other classes, teachers and parents: