My class is focusing on biographies right now and I've compiled resources over the years on my blog for Martin Luther King. I hope you find something useful to use in your own classroom.
Boy my Thanksgiving this year has me feeling like I'm running around with my head cut off.
To give some background, my family dinner is postponed this year until Sunday since my mom and dad are out of town. And since they've always cooked the turkey no one else wanted to take on that job. My ONLY job today was to take the turkey out of MY freezer and drive it over to their house to thaw out in their fridge for the next few days. Sounds simple, but not really. Yesterday my automatic garage door was acting up and not shutting properly, so I put it into manual mode. So I got up this morning, put the frozen turkey in my car, manually lifted up the door, pulled my car out and then the trouble started. I got out of the car to pull the door back down and my middle finger got caught and pinched in the now closed garage door. I was literally stuck to the garage door. I started hollering for help like crazy.
Luckily some volunteer workers for the annual Turkey Trot heard my ruckus and I told them to call 911. After what seemed like forever a police officer saved the day and pulled up the garage door and I was released. Now I'm nursing a big, fat bruised finger and I REFUSE to park my car back in the garage until I can get someone to figure out how to get my garage door to work properly. Said car is sitting in my driveway and I'm icing my finger.
Hope everybody else's Turkey Day was a little less hectic.
Just sharing how I'm recognizing my students' birthdays in a quick but fun way this year.
The past few years my school put into place a No Food treats school birthday policy, which I do like because one year, on the same day, I had 2 sets of cupcakes dropped off unannounced and a whole sheet cake to slice up and serve from 3 separate families. YIKES, talk about sugar overload and interruption of instructional time.
My solution to still giving a bit of attention to birthdays is using this Ice Cream and Cake dance song on each students' birthday. It gets the kids' attention and celebrates the birthday girl/boy in a fun way.
Click picture for Ice Cream and Cake song
Happy Birthday Mice (another option)
I print and label this free birthday calendar graph from Scholastic to keep track of every birthday so we can celebrate it Ice Cream and Cake style.
Now, I'm off to call my mom because it is her birthday today.
It's my all time most viewed post originally posted back on April 19th, 2011
Hope you find some new ideas for using Bucket Filling in your classroom.
Originally posted 4-19-11
For the past several years I've used the popular Bucket Filler books by Carol McCloud in my classroom.
If you've not taken a peek at this series it is a MUST do. At the start of every school year I begin the bucket filler program. I have this bulletin board display of personalized buckets for classmates to add positive bucket filler thoughts.
Here's my Bucket Filler Bulletin Board. I personalized each bucket with student's names and taped them to party favor treat boxes.
I've also created seasonal themed bucket filler notes. Grab them here:
My class does this edible model of landforms every year.
We start with a graham cracker base.
Cover 3/4 with brown icing and 1/4 with blue icing.
Use various food items to represent landforms:
Brown M&M for an island
Blue M&M for a lake
SnowCap candies for mountains
Fudge Graham cookies split into pieces to form a canyon. Then use blue sprinkles to show a river between the canyon
Wafter type cookie for a plateau
Coconut colored green with food coloring for showing the plains
We also complete a Landforms Definition Booklet. Students learn five facts about hills, mountains, canyons, valleys, plateaus, plains, cliffs, islands, volcanoes, and deserts and then illustrate a picture of each geographical feature.
I also mix in some landform videos and songs I've found online
Randy Sauer has written a testing theme song called Rock This Test.
So has Dallas Thompson's 5th graders. Links are below for both songs.
I'm adding them to my bag of testing tricks.
Standardized testing in my district will be in April. It's creeping up quickly.
I reinforce testing skills from week one of the school year though as part of my regular teaching.
Catchy rhymes and hints stick with my students when I use my Test Tip Posters.
Also, the week prior to testing I send home a healthy snack donation letter to parents so I can pass out brain friendly treats in between testing sessions.
It is so versatile and engaging and can be used for any subject. Students get to "grade" the teacher's work, which is purposely filled with errors for them to find. It's great for an exit ticket and error analysis. Plus, students don't even realize they are doing ALL the work by correcting and reteaching the teacher!
I love when I hear my students (yes, third graders), singing learning songs on their way out to recess or lunch. It shows they were certainly paying attention.
It's time to honor our veterans. Here's my Veterans Day unit that includes letter writing, a poster, acrostic poem, a holiday overview, and ABC order dog tag badges.
With common core standards and 21st century learning comes the necessity for the 4 C's
Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, and Creativity.
This wonderful video by Fablevision Studios encompasses these skills.
How are you planning to help your students go Above and Beyond?
On a personal note, my niece had to complete some service hours for her government class and I kept her busy with teacher stuff. She came over one Saturday and laminated, cut, cut , cut, laminated, cut, cut, cut. We practiced the 4 C's together. We had a little trouble on the communication part, as she tuned me out by either watching I Love Lucy on TV, or CONSTANTLY checking her Iphone.
I told her I should not have given her my guest Wifi password, LOL.
She did share with me this way COOL video of one of my fav tunes.
The original song is by Goyte "Somebody That I Used to Know"
But this Cover Band, Walk Off the Earth, took the song to a whole new level, AND uses the 4'Cs of
collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity.
As you know I've taught a span of grade levels. As I was trying to unclutter my cupboards, I found a wonderful memory from my years in 1st grade, my poetry books.
This oldie but goodie is the inspiration behind it
I have a Big Book copy of this story and would read it once a month.
Then my little firsties would get a copy of the poem and illustrate it.
By the end of the year my whole class could recite each poem like no tomorrow!
I leave you with a musical rendition of Chicken Soup with Rice
