Hi everyone, it's Becky! I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for another Five For Friday! I know I'm a little late to the party, but we had a great week and it is just too good to not blog about it! So let's get this party started!

On Monday we finished up our First Birthday stories. One of the standards my students need to meet is to recall or gather information from a source, so I thought that writing about their first birthday would be perfect! Who doesn't like thinking about such a fun event, and I don't know any parent who doesn't like to take a walk down memory lane when it comes to their kids! So each of my students took home an interview sheet with questions about their first birthday. Once the interview was completed at home, we used the answers from mom/dad to write our story. My kids loved hearing about the funny things they did when they were one. The birthday cake answers were the best! You can see more about this product here in our TPT store!

Tuesday, of course, was St. Patrick's Day, so we HAD to write about how to catch a Leprechaun! This was a good way to incorporate how to/direction writing, and my kids just loved the cute craftivity by A Cupcake for the Teacher!

We also learned "ar" this week and practiced blending, reading, building, and writing words with "ar' all week, so of course Babbling Abby's "AR" pirate was a must!

We also read the story The Tree from Poppleton Forever and focused on story structure. I had my students think about the characters, setting, and plot. We then used the 30 Hands app on our iPads (the free version) to display our learning. This was only the second time my kids used this app, and you would have thought that they were old pros! I continue to be amazed at how quickly they pick up the process, and how engaged and excited they are to show their learning! This took only two 20-minute sessions to complete from start to finish! Take a look at one example of our finished products! I was so excited when I viewed them, and I can't wait for my kids to do another one! #nailedit!

We have joined The Creative Classroom for the March Blogger Match-Up! Our team is Xavier, and so far they have not let us down! Check out our blog post here for a product giveaway to celebrate March Maddness!

That's all for now! I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Hi everyone! Greg and I are going to share the Five For Friday post this week and give you a peek into what we've been up to!

Urban got his second set of ear tubes on President's Day. I was pleasantly surprised at how much better he did this time! The procedure was very quick, and by 9AM he was ready to eat a donut! We spent the rest of the day cuddling on the couch watching Caillou, since he had become pretty moody from the anesthesia and developed a fever. By the next morning he was back to his old self again!

Greg here. I’ve been making a big push away from content and towards skills-based instruction. Whether it be assessments or thinking activities, content has been backseat to how I’m asking students to develop ideas and thoughts. I ask students to create original arguments about the content, but always have a difficult time showing them what that looks like. The above idea came to me early one morning this week (you know, those mornings where you wake up with ideas already sprinting through your head), so I pulled it together rather quick. Please feel free to download and use it with your own students. Let me know if you think modifications would help.

I ask students to analyze information in a wide variety of ways, so they looked at me funny when I assigned sketchnotes this week. For those of you that haven’t heard of sketchnotes, it’s an interesting way that students visually connect pieces of content to (hopefully) demonstrate a deeper understanding. The students were a bit hesitant, but the end results turned out quite well! 

I was given the opportunity to be a guest blogger for GoNoodle this week! I wrote about an opinion writing challenge we did using GoNoodle brain breaks! My first graders loved it! You can check out my post here, and you can get the freebie here!

Fellow blogger Kristin from My Carolina Classroom is celebrating her Blogiversary! Be sure to check out her blog and enter to win one of these awesome bundles packed full of fantastic products! Our Primary Sources Football Edition is part of the 3-5 Bundle!

Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to check out what everyone else was up to this week!

Hi everyone, it's Becky! I'm linking up with DoodleBugs Teaching for Five For Friday! MLK day and the snowy weather really made for a short week! Even though it was a short one, it was probably one of the busiest weeks I've had this year! 

Greg and I spent some of our time on Monday mapping out a presentation we will be giving at Elizabethtown College (our alma mater!) to the ed majors for their professional development day! I am honored that they have invited us to speak about technology in the classrooms, but also a bit nervous. Although Greg has done presentations like these many times, this will be my first...with hopefully more to come!

We had our "A Community Is..." movie premiere on Tuesday and invited our parents to come in and share in the excitement of watching our first movie together. Everyone loved it, and I really think the parents were surprised at the end product! This was definitely a memorable project for all involved. You can see my blog post on the movie making process here.

Since the movie was only 2 minutes long, and I had the parents in the room, I thought it would be a good idea to have the students show their parents how we use our iPads as learning tools. One goal of our district's move to a 1:1 environment is to educate the parents and public that our iPads are not to "play" on, but are used as a tool to create and showcase our learning. So I had my students do a QR code activity, as well as work on a journal writing and math app together. The parents were really into it!

And if the movie premiere wasn't enough, I had my formal observation on Wednesday. I decided to go big and have my principal see me introduce Educreations to my kids and use it to create a compare and contrast slide with the animal groups we had been reading about in our Journeys anthology. I was a little worried about how it would go because my kids had never even opened up the app before that lesson! I had my kids work in parnters to alleviate the anxiety that sometimes comes with trying something new. It also allowed for collaboration. We then went step-by-step in the beginning stages. I modeled how to do a step, and they did it. After modeling the stage one or two times, my kids were ready to do it on their own! I was pleasantly surprised at how well they grasped onto Educreations and could complete the rest on their own! I had been having nightmares of me having to run around to every set of partners fixing things the whole time...and it was NOTHING like that! Everything went so smoothly, and I have the confidence that my kiddos will be able to navigate through Educreations even better the next time! And, they LOVED it! I don't even think they realized they were doing school work! Check out two examples of their work! 

Due to our short days this week, I was only able to introduce our Primary Source Football Edition to my first graders. Although we only discussed the pictures for 10-15 minutes, my kids were hooked! They loved looking at the football pictures from long ago! My favorite question/discussion so far was when we were looking at the fan pictures. One of my little girls asked, "Where are all the girls?!" Another one then said, "I don't think they were into football long ago." I asked them where they thought the women were, and they thought the women were at home taking care of the kids! #probablyright!

Thanks for stopping by! Be sure to check out the other great blog posts at the Five for Friday linky party!