Math Stations

We've spent a lot of time exploring our math manipulatives.  The students have been sorting, counting, measuring, creating patterns and creating 3d shapes with our Polydrons.  Here are a few pictures of the students hard at work.

First Day of School Eve

It's the day before the first day of school.  The classroom is ready and I've made all the plans I can to make sure the students are busy and engaged throughout the week.  I am just as excited, nervous, anxious, scared, worried and happy about tomorrow as I know my students are.  Tomorrow will be my 15th first day as a teacher and I still have all those butterflies that I had on my first, first day.  Here's to a great week.

I spent 5 hours in the classroom today!  I feel good that the furniture is where it needs to be but I left a list a mile long of things that need to be done.  Is it too late to head over and start now?  I just sent out a welcome message to the parents of my students.  Here's hoping they come check out the blog.  Goodbye summer.

Web 2.0

As I told you in my last post, I am in a techsploration class this summer.  This week's assignment is to explore several web 2.0 tools.  I have had a great time looking at many of the suggested sites and found  Glogster, FlipSnack and Sliderocket to be the three that I enjoyed the most.  I get really excited when I think about all the ways that I can use these sites in my classroom and with my colleagues.  What I want to share with you today is my experience with Glogster.

I created a simple one as an example of what I envision using this site for with my students.  At the beginning of the year we study the author Eric Carle.  We discuss his artwork, his characters, his story lines and the author himself.  The students are usually familiar with many of his books and this helps to make them comfortable beginning that ever important task, talking about the books we read.  While using the site, I imagined myself posing the topic sentence, We Love Eric Carle, and then I recorded what I believe the typical first grade answers will be.  After 14 years in first grade, I can usually predict what they will say, but there is always one...right?

I've included a link to my simple Glog here.  My plan is to set up the Glog before the lesson with the topic in the middle and several shapes around the outer edges where I will add student comments during our class discussion.  This seems like a great way to liven up the author study wrap-up (and ditch the marker and large notebook paper).  Plus, we study several authors throughout the year so with each consecutive author we study, I could allow the students to help with the creation of the background details as well as the text.  I imagine that by the end of the year when we are studying Robert Munsch, my students will be able to create their own Glog! (perhaps with some competent and always helpful 5th grade buddies, right Mrs. Vielleux?).

I found this site easy to navigate and enjoyed "playing around" with the different tools and options that are available and there are a LOT of options.  There are different backgrounds, shapes, fonts, ways to embed video and other images as well.  I did find some of the periphery information on the site (ads, banners and messages)  to be distracting and I do worry that this could be problematic for the students when I am trying to get them to focus on the Glog itself.  Overall, this site seems like a great way to capture the attention of my first graders and get them excited about the author and technology at the same time!

All this talk about these ideas to try in the classroom has me ready excited to go back to school and try them out!

Summer Homework

Most people think teachers are spending their summers relaxing on the beach, reading trashy novels and just enjoying their time "off."  I am spending my summer working doing all those things AND taking a class to improve my abilities to integrate technology into the curriculum.  One of my assignments is to explore Google apps.  
I started with Google Reader, because I am obsessed with organizing things and this is a great tool to organize all of the blog bookmarks that I check regularly.  I also worked on learning more about Google Maps.  This will be a great tool to help my first graders use technology to enhance their learning.  I am so excited about all the ideas I have to use this tool with my class!!
They could create a map with all of  the community helpers locations indicated.  So, instead of just talking about community helpers and learning about them through books, we could identify the actual locations in our community and record them on a map, making the unit more concrete and real!  
They could also create a map that indicates each child's address.  Each year I find that first graders have a hard time learning their addresses (they confuse town, state and even country!).  Being able to add a pin to our class map would be a great incentive for them to learn their address.  I can just hear the excitement now as each student gets to add a "pin" to our class map and see where their house is in relation to other classmates and to the community helpers we will have learned about.  
You can view the example map that I created here.  It is a map of community helpers in our town. 

It is officially my first day of summer vacation and I am spending it creating a blog for school next year.  What's up with that?  It's probably wrong that I am actually enjoying the process more than I am wishing I was outside, right?  Outside means mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, planting the flowers and weeding the gardens.  That's it, I'm going outside!

This blog will serve as a way to keep parents informed of the learning and activities taking place in my classroom. Stay tuned for updates beginning in September.  

Now, get outside and enjoy summer!!!