Independent Game Time

Over the past couple days, I have been doing a lot of teacher teaching...with a science training on Tuesday and a math training on Wednesday, I feel like my creative juices are flowing.

FIRST, yesterday my school district did a training on our new textbook. During the whole training, I was actually a little put off. Our district is giving us a consumable student textbook (that they will replace every year) which would be great...if I didn't want to do anything exciting in my classroom. It has everything you need, parts for a mini-lesson, guided practice, independent practice, and center activities/games (which really didn't look like games to me but more of worksheets in disguise). I am an advocate of a student-centered classroom, so seeing the district pushing more of a teacher focused classroom with this textbook.

MY CHALLENGE FOR THIS YEAR IS TO TURN THIS TEXTBOOK INTO STUDENT CENTERED AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES.

Starting with taking the independent practice into time where students play a board game, like I have done during extended learning time. Students will grab a board game and solve the independent practice problems and every time they get an answer right, they will get to roll a dice and move. If they get the answer wrong, they have one more chance to get the answer. If they get the answer right the second time, students will get to roll but take away two spaces from what they roll. If this is confusing to you, make your own rules and have the students play.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS...during this time, I will pull a small group for intervention while kids are playing. To make sure students are being responsible and following instructions, I have created game board job cards. Each student group will be leveled by achievement and in groups of 4. Since there will be groups of four, there are four jobs. I have created these job cards and included them here as a freebie! I hope they can help you out.

STEMscopes training

Today I went to a STEMscopes training and it was great, engaging, and worth my summer time.

Here are some things that got my attention:
1) It is important to time things so we don't have hogs and logs
2) Private Universe is a great resource
...while discussing this I thought of a possible way to teach sesons...put a fan on one side of class and a heater on the other side of class like the Norther and Southern Hemispheres on Earth. Explain that this is like the tilt that gives us seasons. Is the whole world hot with us? Students can research average temperatures of different places through out a year's time
3) Introduce vocabulary through a hands-on activity(experience), do not define vocabulary first
--Say for example you have an apple...make observations of that apple using your senses and write them down. Then what observations could you make of a model of an apple...then a picture...then just the word "apple." How much would you know about an apple if you had the real thing to observe compared to just the word?
--Same with vocab, giving someone a word before they have any background/prior knowledge/experience does not stick

The 5-E model contains: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate
--If time is an issue in your classroom, the first 3 are a must!! I suggest to evaluate as well.

Some cool new parts about STEMscopes are:

• Teacher Background=Mini-lesson information because it talks about key concepts
• Standard Correlations=tells you what other TEKS the lesson correlates with
• Scope Summary=tells you what students will be doing in each part of the 5E
• Standards Unwrapped=dissecting the standards with verbs, nouns, misconceptions, and STAAR questions
• In the teacher Toolbox they have objective signs...and other cool things
• Under ASSESSMENTS you can make your own test
• Planner allows you to plan out your week/month, just drag what you want on each day or it can be dragged over for multiple days

I'm sure a lot of this stuff is copyrighted, so I'm not using pictures, but this is an AWESOME program and I look forward to using it next year.

Ta ta for now!

First post

First blog post...

Here we go...I teach...I travel...I love...I struggle.

This will be the story of taking chances and making mistakes! How neat is that :) And also a journal to myself, and hopefully at some point, a help for others.

To start off...I am not technology savvy in the slightest, but I will give it my best shot to post pictures, links, ideas, awesomeness. This could be a blog of jumbled mess, but it will be great.

To start off, this is my love and I

We met in junior high, during the awkward stage, in our woodshop class...I started liking him at my 16th birthday party, shared with my twin brother, at my grandparent's lake house when I grunted for him to pass the honey ham and he said, "Use your words." Then, one year later I asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and it took off from there...after he went with the boys to blow up a dry ice bomb of course. Who likes girls in high school anyways?

Fast forward a couple years, we graduated from high school, went to college, my love went on a 2 year mission to Sweden, came back and we got married 9 months later! I plan on breaking that story into other blog posts for memory purposes, but NOT.TODAY.

In our 2 and a half years of marriage we have adopted 3 AWESOME animals: Colt, Peyton, and Zelda

We bought a house, that has already been TP'd...SUCCESS

I've had two teaching jobs, one in Utah and one in Texas. The picture is from our field trip where I got two fish! This one was the biggest :)

My husband graduated from BYU with a Psychology degree, has worked at a big dog law firm in Texas as a paralegal, and starts law school in the Fall with a full ride scholarship! This is his happy face...that is Martinelli's grape juice by the way :) We don't drink, and it's awesome!

We love life and I'm excited to document it.

Ta ta for now :)