Our Promethean boards arrived!

I feel like it has been forever since I have posted but life has just gotten crazy in my classroom ever since the arrival of our amazing Promethean boards.

This fall we found out that the whole school would be getting boards, but there was no set date.  We were told that the whole school district would have them by August 2013.  Then as soon as we returned from spring break our principal told us that our boards would be arriving in a few days!  Above is a picture of my blackboard that I covered with dry erase contact paper, the night before installation.  I stayed as late as I could after school so that I might be able to see my board being installed but I finally left around 6pm!  

This is my hallway and my room is number 12, at the end of the hallway.  I took this right before I left for the day!  I was so excited that I had a hard time falling asleep that night! :)

Yippee!  I love it!  I had a board at my old school and have missed it so much for the last 2 years!  Me and technology are finally together again!!!                                                

This board has a brand new dual user function, which allows two students to work on the board at the same time!  Here are a few of my students filling in their facts about electricity! 

I have been busy revamping lessons to make use of our new board and to activity engage my students.  In my quest I have found some wonderful resources that I thought I would share with you! 

Mrs. Shannon has a ton of cute flipchart activities that are all organized by subject.   Mrs. Shannon teaches 1st grade but these resources could be easily adapted for other grades as well!  Be sure to check her site out!

Kathleen over at Growing Kinders has a great post about calendar time and using the board allow with a calendar book as a way to actively engage students in their morning calendar time!  I am totally doing this next year!  

Thanks for stopping by, please feel free to respond and share and great technology site you use!

High School and College Student Volunteers

I love having parent volunteers in my classroom.  In fact I don't think I could have survived my first year of teaching if it weren't for the amazing parent volunteers that I had that year.  Parent volunteers can be great; they copy, cut, laminate and save me countless hours! 

Last year, I decided to try some student volunteers in addition to parent volunteers.  Through the local high school, I was able to have students come in when their classes were done for the day and work with my kiddos.

This year I have a college student who comes in every Friday during our math block to work with small groups. 

It is such a win-win!  The high school students love getting the experience of working in small groups in a real classrooom.  My kiddos LOVE having a cool high school (and now a college) student helping them in small groups.  

If you are interested in trying this, just go to your local high school's website and look up either the junior, senior counselor or if the high school has a child development program, contact that teacher and ask them to help you get some student volunteers.   In my county, every high school student is required to complete 75 hours of community service so that really helps because I can offer students credit toward thier volunteer hour requirement.

Please feel free to comment below to let me know if you have ever had high school students volunteer or are thinking about trying it out. 

Superhero Alliterations FREEBIE!

My cuties are having so much fun with superheros lately that I decided they needed to create their own Superhero Alliterations.  After learned all about alliterations and created a few using their names, we read the book, Superhero ABC by Bob McLeod!  They went crazy for this book and loved all the awesome alliterations on each amazingly illustrated page.  

  

Below are some super student sample superheros!  We took two days to complete these.  The first day, we read the book and brainstormed nouns, verbs and adjectives that could describe their superhero.  On the second day, students wrote their alliterations and illustrated their superhero.   

Act fast, and follow the link to pick up this fun Freebie from my fabulous TPT store.

Superhero centers and a sale...

By this time of the year our students are awesome at their daily 5 and center rotations!  They have stamina, and they know where to go and what they should be working on - but they still need some variety so I created these superhero themed activities to jazz up my word work centers.

This Superhero Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives unit gives students some hands on practice sorting words before they complete their written follow up.  The activity my students like best is creating their own superhero and using adjectives to describe it!   

Another fun superhero center is this Superhero Sentences pack!    My students still need practice adding the correct punctuation marks to their sentences, and this activity puts a superhero spin on things!

Both of these "Super" centers are on sale this week at my TPT store! 

Zip, zoom or fly over now and check them out!

Angry Bird Pronoun FUN!

Thanks to this great Freebie I found from Teachers Pay Teachers, my class has had a blast practicing their pronouns!  To celebrate their pronoun success they each created an Angry Bird.

 

After they created their Angry Bird, they wrote a sentence about their bird using pronouns.  Students LOVED this activity and it really got them hooked on using pronouns!

Hop over to Jamie's store or blog and check this great resource out!

 

Sweet Similes

This week we had some yummy fun exploring similes!  Thanks to a fun freebie from Amy Lemons, we created ice cream similes.

I introduced the concept with a BrainPopJr. video and then I gave my kiddos some ice cream to enjoy. BrainPopJr has a great ice cream worksheet that goes great with this lesson as well but we used the freebie from Amy Lemons because there are two versions and I love offering differentiation for my kiddos. 

While they ate, we brainstormed similes to describe the ice cream.  They did a great job, and loved creating their own ice cream cones to show off their sweet similes!

This simile lesson made my kiddos as happy as ants at a picnic and their ice cream cone creations turned out as cute as pie!

 Next we will be exploring alliteration!  Come back soon to check out our cute alliteration creations.