Happy New School Week! 

Here are some ideas that we would like to share with you this week.

We are sure that many have heard of Go Noodle.  It is a great way to have a break in your busy day with your students.  There are a variety of  videos that you can use for your students.  Here is a link to get you started.

 https://family.gonoodle.com/activities/are-you-more-like-a-foot-or-a-sock


We use Wixie from Tech4Learning for our younger students as a platform to do activities.  One great part of Wixie their work is automatically saved.  No worries of lost work or tears as they lost their work.  It has many built in templates to use to create your own lessons.  It is simple and easy for you as a teacher to make your lessons for your students. 
There is also a online resource called Creative Educator to help you with ideas along the way.
https://www.tech4learning.com/

https://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/?utm_campaign=t4l_menu&utm_source=t4l&utm_medium=web


Have a good week.  More later

Happy Fall All!

Fall is in the air and we are getting ready to plant flower bulbs around our school.   We do a flower bulb study and use Journey North as a resource.  https://journeynorth.org/ 

 It has a great section on planting flower bulbs with a  booklet you can make for your students.  It also  a section of a online video to help the students learn about flower bulbs.  We need to get going on it before our Indiana weather turns very cold and the ground freezes.  We have a had some pretty cold mornings with frost on the ground. 
Journey North has lots of great links to projects besides the Tulip bulb section.  You may want to take a look. 

We also started a pumpkin experiment. We placed a small pie pumpkin in a container with soil in the bottom.  We poked a few holes in the sides of the pumpkin and added some water.  Now we just wait, with luck it will decay and break down inside the closed container.  We will watch the water cycle and see if the seeds inside sprout.  You can then take that pumpkin in the spring and plant it in your garden.  It does work.  Last year was not successful, but the year before it worked great!

Will be posting more helpful hints later. 

Back to School -- IN FULL SWING!

Wow! Our first quarter is quickly coming to an end.  It is hard to believe how fast time zips!   We are up and rolling along, sometimes hitting speed bumps that slows us down.  We have been busy learning how first grade works and exploring IPAD  apps.

Our favorite online site, as well as an app, is SpellingCity.com.  We are lucky to have the premium edition which gives the students more activities to learn their spelling words. I love it as a teacher since I can go into the site and see what activities the students have been using and the length of time of engagement. 

Skoolbo is an app available but it has a fee.  The kids are able to create their own avatars and play various activities in reading and math.  They play against their fellow students as well as other students around the world.

We are looking for our buddies using Flat Stanley. com as a resource.  At this point in time, we have not made a connection yet, but some of the schools in other parts of the world are just getting started.  We are hopeful to have a connection soon. 

We celebrated International Dot day on Sept. 13th.  We played twister, made giant dots on the playground with chalk, created a human dot and decorated and cookies with M&M dots. We sang the Dot song at morning assembly to get everyone motivated for the day.  We had fun making our mark and seeing where it took us!

Our next project is planting tulip bulbs and connecting with our schools around the world using the IEARN tulip bulb watch program.  IEARN is  a fee-based way to connect with schools around the world.  The cost is $400.00 for an entire school or $100.00 per classroom. There are numerous projects available for all grade levels to connect their classroom globally. We are involved in the Holiday Card Exchange. We always look forward to receiving the unique holiday cards from around the world.

We use JenProjects but we are saddened to hear that at Christmas she will be no longer be involved in creating programs.  Jen has been fighting cancer and it has spread to other parts of her body.  She will be in our thoughts as she battles her disease.  One of our STEM projects is the Oreo stacking.  The students see how tall they can build their tower of oreo cookies without holding them up.  We count to get an average, submit to the project and see how we compared.