Five For Friday - 3/18/16

My favorite link up of the week with DoodleBugs Five For Friday 

Before reading this post, if you live near a Chick-fil-a, you should go buy a frosted coffee and enjoy while reading. You can thank me later for that suggestion. 

MATH

My students just started using prodigygame.com for math practice and they really enjoy it. It is set up like a video game and they barely realize it is math practice while playing. You can assign specific content/assignments for them to complete while playing the game. Students can play the game in class and at home.

My students are also enjoy these Gum Ball Addition with QR Codes during math stations. 

You can get them for yourself HERE

We had a Professional Learning Day Monday and I went to a few sessions that I really enjoyed. 

The first session was about Flexible Spaces in the Classroom and it was interesting to hear about a first grade classroom without tables or desks. Students work on couches, stability balls, hokki stools, bean bags and basically anything you find at a yard sale, because teaching and yard sales go together like peanut butter and jelly. Students complete their work on clipboards throughout the day. It was very interesting and I like the idea of having some flexible seating/spaces in the media center next year. I already have the stability balls in my class, but I'm not sure if those will work in the media center. 

I also went to a session about Versatiles and they seem so fun. It is basically a hands on puzzle self checking system and can be used in any subject. Check the video below:

What I noticed, is since they have the new ones out, the old ones are on sale in the outlet and really work just as good at a fraction of the price.

You can view the outlet prices HERE.  

We read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and then students wrote a forecast for the week. For example, Monday will be rainy with a chance of grape soda. Students really like this because they like food, so it was right up their alley. After writing about this, they typed it on google docs and then created a voki.com avatar to publish their writing. 

DonorsChoose

I had a DonorsChoose project fund this week and I'm excited to get a train table, sphero robots and legos to use in the media center next school year. 

There are lots of tips and tricks to getting your project funded. I really need to write a blog post devoted to DonorsChoose tips, but for now I will give you 5 quick tips.

1. Keep the cost low! The lower the cost the more likely it will get funded. Especially if you are just starting off and trying to become familiar with DC. Make it $300 or less.

2. Check the Funding Opportunities page for your state to see which companies/organizations are paying 1/2 off on specific projects and try to write your project for that area or content to get 1/2 off.

Do keep in mind that 1/2 offers do not last forever, they last until the funds run out.

3. Become involved in some DonorsChoose Communities on Facebook and Twitter. I run the Georgia Peaches on DonorsChoose page. 

There are MANY other pages. The main ones that jump out that you should be involved in are Caring Classrooms and Kindergarten Rocks, but seriously there are tons!

4. Donate to your own project. This may seem like a strange thing to say, but you want your project to show up at the top of the list when donors search for projects. The more donors you have the higher up you will be on the list and that is why you should donate $1 to your project and have your husband donate $1 and have your mom donate $1, etc. They can of course donate more, but at the least $1. There's even a facebook page called TeachersTradingTeachers where you can trade $1 donations with other teachers in order to up the number of donors your project has. So, instead of donating $10 to your project, you could trading with $10 and have 10 donors.

5. Before donating check for a promo code that will double your donation. At the moment you can use the code CLASSACT to double your donation (up to $150). There's nothing worse than donating $10 and realizing later that it could've been $20 with a code. Being involved in these facebook communities is how I stay up to date on promo codes.

I applied to present at the GAETC conference in November. If you are interested in applying the deadline is April 1st. You can apply HERE.

Thanks for joining me for my randomness this week!