Friday, March 30, 2012

Ugggg... Technology frustrations!

Ok.  So here is the frustrating part about technology...  Sometimes it doesn't work like you want it to!  I had this great idea of taking my students' non-fiction "question/answer" books and turning them into flippable pdf books.  They worked sooooooo hard on them and did a fantastic job.  They made question answer books titled, What do plants need? .   They finished today and I tried to upload one of them to two different websites, flipsnack, and youblisher.   I haven't been able to get either one to work. Bummer.  I am sure that it is user error and that I will figure it out but I hate to make my little ones wait.  I promise to keep everyone posted!  Wish me luck.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Life Saving Website!!!



Ok,  I always dread rainy days and standardized testing days.  Why?  Because we don't have recess, specials (art, pe, music) or both.  This makes for an extremely LONG day in a kindergarten class.  By the end of the day the kids and I are very fidgety and quite grouchy!  Standardized testing days are starting up next week and I am not dreading them nearly as much this year.  This is because I have signed up for www.adventuretofitness.com .  My students absolutely love this website.  "Mr. Mark"  the guide is very engaging and they are "glued" to the adventure.  They are also very, very tired at the end of the adventure.  They have a new adventure regularly and you can always go back and watch previous episodes.  I highly recommend that you sign up for your free access today!

Monday, March 19, 2012

Geocaching! How Fun!

Before Spring Break we had such a great time learning about Living and Non-Living things.  We really started out confused by some things.  For example...  Was the apple I ate for lunch living?  Isn't it a plant?  We quickly learned about the 4 essential questions we need to ask when deciding if something is living or not.  When I told the kids that we were going to use GPS to help us find things on our search, they were so excited to share their prior experiences and schema about GPS units in their moms' cars and Dads' phones!  They actually thought that I was going to let them each have a phone!  After I explained that we were going to use a different kind of GPS, they were ready to get going. 
I hope your enjoy watching our learning!



Monday, March 5, 2012

Geocaching??? Wish me luck!

I am super excited about an activity this week.  I am going to try using handheld GPS units for a type of geocaching activity.  The kids are going to be split into groups. (Thanks to my math IC for helping with this).  They will use their GPS units to locate ribbons tied to items all around the school grounds.  When they reach the item, they will have to ask a series of questions to determine if the object is living or non-living.  They will then take a moment to record a picture and a lable of the object in their journal.  They will also record if the object is living or non-living.  This activity is scheduled for later this week.  I will be sure to take pictures and let everyone know how it goes!  Wish me luck!

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Sharing work with parents



I love this quick and easy way to share our work with parents.  The kids did a fabulous job learning how to create character maps in their journals!  I simply snapped pictures with my phone, uploaded them to www.animoto.com  and created a quick video. I then emailed the link to parents.   Since they do not take their journals home,  parents would normally miss out on this fabulous work.  Pretty painless... and the kids LOVED seeing their work in video.