The longer I've been homeschooling, the longer the list of reasons gets to keep homeschooling! I am so thankful that I don't have to deal with all of these public school things anymore! Check out the 20 new benefits I found that keep me sane, focused, and driven on my path to educate my kids! I know it will encourage you, make you think, and keep you motivated on your own homeschooling journey! #homeschooling #benefits #publicschoolvshomeschool #encouragement
Today’ KISS – Keep It Simple Strategies – Classroom Management for 3rd Grade Teachers. I remember when I was student teaching, I had a rough time with discipline. I had a tendency to be nice to the kids too much. When … Read More
Ready to build your STEM library with the best picture books? Start Here! Check out my Top 10 all time favorite read alouds for elementary STEM
If you're like me you've tried a lot of different schedules for your literacy block time. And no matter what you try, it's still a major scheduling challenge. Every year I'd try a new schedule or rotation system and it never quite worked like I planned. Why does it always look so good on paper and then fall apart once you put it into use???? I'd have one group that needed more time so I'd want to keep them a little longer, but that meant that another group would have to be cut short. I also had a hard time keeping up with the students at the centers because they needed varying amounts of teacher assistance. Finally one year I came up with a way to keep my literacy block very simple. It was one of those "Duh!" moments and it turned out to be the best thing for my third graders and for me! I called this TeRC Time . . . Teacher, Reading, Centers. Basically, the literacy block is divided into two parts: Independent Reading, and Centers. The students are also split into two groups. Make sure the groups are a good mix of ability levels. Also make sure that both groups have good models of behavior and work habits to follow. Group A works on independent reading first and then switches to centers. Group B is the opposite, working on centers first and then independent reading. During the Reading part of the schedule students read. It can be a book they choose for themselves or one selected by the teacher. They can also read with a partner or listen to a recorded story. During the Centers part of the schedule students work on the other activities or written practice. The centers can focus on any literacy skills or strategies for reading or writing. Students can work independently. with a small group or with a partner. During the entire literacy block time the teacher calls small groups to meet with her. Regardless of where the students are at the time, reading or at centers, they put away their task and join the teacher at the reading table. When their time with the teacher is finished they return to their reading or center activity. While the teacher works with small groups or conferences with individual students the rest of the class is either reading or working on a literacy center task. This puts more responsibility on the students because they have to pace themselves to complete their tasks by the end of the week. If they are called to work with the teacher during their center time then they may have to complete that center work the next day. Students are also responsible for completing any assignments given in the small groups. This should always be their first priority when they leave the group. To sum it up: (click to download this graphic.) Click to download Fridays are a “catch-up” day. The teacher, generally, does not call small groups. It’s a good day for the teacher to also catch up on conferences or work with students who need reteaching of skills/strategies presented through the week. The students have the time to finish the reading and center tasks for the week. If they finish everything then they can have more reading time or perhaps play a literacy game. I hope you'll be able to use a few of these ideas to use during your literacy block time and Keep It Super Simple!
A good grade in a high school or college English class doesn’t necessarily translate into the ability to write great fiction, so it’s easy for us to mistakenly think understanding grammar isn’t imp…
KISS - Keep it simple stupid. Most systems work best if they are simple. A simple design should be the key goal.
Simple, cute printable calendar 2018-2019 calendar template. Ideal for your teacher planning binder with unique two-page spread and lots of room to write!
Good Morning and Happy Saturday!! I sure am happy it's Saturday..this was an exhausting, yet busy week! Today I'm linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching for her Five for Friday! We've been hard at work researching and taking notes for our big Endangered Species Research Project. The kids are SO Excited and get so upset as they are learning more about why these animals are critically endangered. If you're interested, you can find these note taking pages along with the booklet we plan to use to present our final project with in my TpT Store. We've also been working on linear measurements this week. Third graders are required to be able to measure object to the nearest one-fourth inch. We've been practicing a lot with worksheets and measuring things in the classroom…. BUT what better way to practice measurements than getting outside and having some fun?! I invited some 6th graders to come in and teach my class how to make paper airplanes. The kids were so excited and it was also a great way for them to practice their listening skills! We then headed out to fly our planes and measure the distance that it traveled! If you'd like to try these activities out with your students, you can click on the image below :) Be sure to follow me on Instagram or Facebook for more fun updates ;) Also got to take some time out for some fun this week! We got to meet up with some friends from Washington. They're visiting Hawaii so we met them for some Happy Hour :) She is a second grade teacher…our classes were pen pals last year! We're also continuing to work on poetry and figurative language. This is always a tough one but fun at the same time. So far, we've covered simile and metaphors, alliteration, idioms, and onomatopoeias. I'm kicking myself right now because as I'm scrolling through my photos I realized I only took pictures of our alliteration pages! Landan the Lizard lights a leaf Marry the monkey makes a monster with a magical science kit Emmeline the elephant loves to eat eggplants everyday. Ayven the alligator loves to eat apples any day he sees one. Jayde the jaguar got a job at the jungle's Jamba Juice. Pretty Pam made chicken pot pie with pickles and peas. We're also did a science experiment today. The kids were so excited learning about the scientific method. Thats my week in a nutshell! Hope you enjoy your weekend :) I'm off to finish some work I had started throughout the week…and hopefully get a new Facebook Fan Freebie posted for you all sometime this weekend ;)
This collaborative class booklet is a follow-up activity in response to the book From Head To Toe by Eric Carle.Students will write about something they are proudly able to do, and illustrate the page. The simple, repetitive text mirrors that in Eric Carle's book, and will be a classroom favorite!MO...
As with any married couple, there are times when Frank and Anita Milford don’t quite see eye to eye
In the previous post, we discussed how to make a simple neural network using NumPy. In this post, instead of writing every function ourselves, we will discuss how to make a simple neural network…
Don't Feed The Raccoon! is a fun, simple, and fast paced preschool number identification game designed to teach numbers, specifically teen numbers.
The longer I've been homeschooling, the longer the list of reasons gets to keep homeschooling! I am so thankful that I don't have to deal with all of these public school things anymore! Check out the 20 new benefits I found that keep me sane, focused, and driven on my path to educate my kids! I know it will encourage you, make you think, and keep you motivated on your own homeschooling journey! #homeschooling #benefits #publicschoolvshomeschool #encouragement
This simple engineering and design STEM challenge helps kids develop critical thinking skills while having fun!
When my daughter was about four years old, I bought her a book called The Princess and the Kiss: A Story of God’s Gift of Purity by Jennie Bishop. This... Read More
Ready to build your STEM library with the best picture books? Start Here! Check out my Top 10 all time favorite read alouds for elementary STEM
⌛️ Short and to the point; why should you buy the PDF with these Practice Tests Exams: 1. Always happy to answer your questions on Etsy and outside :) 2. Failed? Please submit a screenshot of your exam result and request a refund; we'll always accept it. 3. Learn about topics, such as: - Architecture & Design; - Class Coupling; - Code Quality; - Coding Best Practices; - Continuous Delivery (CD); - Continuous Deployment (CD); - Continuous Integration (CI); - Cross-Functional Teams; - Cycle Time per Feature; - Cyclomatic Complexity; - Definition of Done (DoD); - Documentation; - Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY); - Efferent Couplings; - Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS); - Mocking; - Scrum Framework; - Software Architecture; - Software Design; - SOLID Principles; - Spying; - Stubbing; - Technical Debt; - Test-Driven Development (TDD); - Test First Development (TFD); - Much More! 4. Questions are similar to the actual exam, without duplications (like in other practice exams ;-)). 5. These tests are not a Professional Scrum Developer I (PSD I) Exam Dump. Some people use brain dumps or exam dumps, but that's absurd, which we don't practice. 6. 305 unique questions.
PAST SIMPLE or PAST CONTINUOUS. The Joy of Teaching
The importance of a smile and how this simple act benefits our health, affects perceptions and can be used as a universal language.
Homeschooling isn't exactly easy, but public school also has its own things that irritate and exhaust me. Check out the 20 things that drove me nuts when my daughter was in public school and how homeschooling has changed and benefited our family now!
We have been busy this week reading a novel and have been using our social studies interactive notebooks so I have neglected my language arts one this week. Have I mentioned that I love my interactive notebooks and truly believe that my students are happy to have such a structured approach to learning. AND...that they have a valuable resource to refer back to when needed. I also love the fact that pages are not falling out of their notebooks or have just simply disappeared (those are some of the problems I had when using binders and having students place notes in these binders). I am a very visual learner, so I am going to include a few more pictures in this short but sweet post. I am reminded of an acronym I have been using with my students when working on summarizing...KISS It! Keep It Short and Simple. I learned of this acronym when I did a stint for AT&T before landing a real teaching job. No laughing at my horrible artwork please...it is the content we are interested in viewing! This is a notes page about the Elements of a Short Story...notice how each page is titled and dated. We start off day one and number each page. Each time we complete an entry in our notebooks, the date and title are entered as well. This is a Sensory Figure I found at Mrs. Gannon's Wordpress site. She has a bunch of pages dedicated to interactive notebooks and social studies. Remember...I am not an artist! I put many things like this in my notebook so my students can refer back to them as needed throughout the school year. After discovering Pinterest, I realized these would be considered types of anchor charts. This is a foldable created using the 12 Powerful Words. This is a list of words that occur most often on student questions, especially test. I tried to get a picture of a couple of the tabs lifted where you can see the word on top and the definition is under that flap. This is a list of sample character traits I found and we glued in our notebooks. This is a great "thinking started" for students when they are stumped. My students probably refer back to this page more than any other in their notebook. This is just a set of questions related to the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros. I found this idea somewhere on the web to create the questions in a strip that were glued to the side of the page (can be either on the left or right - on the right here so it doesn't cover up the holes of the notebook page). Students were required to answer the questions in a complete sentence - this is the page where I modeled that expectation. This just shows a page where we took notes (8 Ways Characters are Revealed) and we still had 1/2 a page leftover. So...at some point we needed to add a list of common helping verbs in their notebook. Why waste space, right? We just cut the longer list in half and glued it to this "free" space in our notebooks. Just some notes on theme, but wanted to show that when mistakes are made, we just cross them out and keep on rolling. Just a horrible graphic organizer where students were telling about different aspects of their life. This was in conjunction with reading Knots in My Yo-Yo String by Jerry Spinelli. This is his autobiography. This is a close activity on the Elements of Autobiography. It is a good idea, but is too crowded. Next year, this will be divided into two pages and have more room for students to write. This was created during the whole left side reflection/right side input side. Like I reported in an earlier post, I scrapped that idea and just use the next available page - what a great revelation this was for me!
A simple, easy-to-use guide to drawing manga that uses color to show beginning manga artists how to draw each new stroke. The ultimate manga drawing book for beginners! If you've ever wanted to learn how to draw manga, but weren't sure if you could do it, then think no more! Drawing Manga Stroke by Stroke will show you how to draw manga figures, even if you've never drawn manga before! You'll learn how to draw basic shapes and forms like hands, eyes, and hair, and then gradually you'll move up to drawing faces and body shapes. Once you've mastered the basics, you'll learn how to draw figures in action sequences like running, jumping, hugging, kissing, fighting, and dancing. Every step-by-step lesson uses color to show you the new strokes in each step. It's the easiest way to learn how to draw manga! Here's what you'll find inside: The easiest way to learn to draw manga, each lesson uses a simple grid pattern and color to show the strokes for each new step.Over 75 step-by-step lessons that will teach you everything you need to know to draw manga figures representing a variety of ages, styles, and body types.Detailed lessons on how to create emotion in faces, how to draw figures at different angles, and how to create different looks for your manga figures.Fun tutorials for drawing details on clothes, hair, hands, eyes, and much more.Expert tips with each lesson that will help you become a better manga artist, so you can eventually draw your own unique manga figures.
How do you teach kids conflict resolution skills? I follow a step by step process to build the most basic skills first to help kids work it out!
What is the third conditional in English grammar? The third conditional is used to imagine a different past than the one that happened and to express regret
Learning by doing. Kinesthetic learning. Hands-on learning. If I had to zero in on my most significant teaching philosophy, this would absolutely be it. We all know that these are the ways elementary students learn best, right? For decades, early childhood experts have maintained that children learn most effectively through hands-on learning experiences. It’s the...
