Five for Friday- 8/19/16

Check out my Five For Friday for the week. I sure do love linking up with DoodleBugs Teaching!

Back to School!

We actually just completed our 3rd week back at school.

New Look in the Media Center

This is my first year as the media specialist at my school and I wanted to change a few things. 

I added this wonderful tapestry from society6 to add some color and inspiration to the media center. 

New labels for our computers!

A new sign to remind students to turn their books in! 

Bulletin Board and Activities!

As an introduction to the Media Center, we read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems and then students created their own comic strip about what the sneaky pigeon would do if he had your library book.

During the second week, we reviewed internet safety. I made some Internet Safety Posters as well. 

You can find them HERE. 

Co-Teach with Technology

One of the best things about my new position is that one week out of the month I get to go into classroom for Co-Teach using Technology.

This month I worked with various teachers to create blabbers with their students. I try to plan activities that go along with what the teachers are currently working on. First grade is completing an author study about Kevin Henkes so we had students draw Lilly for Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse and then had students write about what happened in the beginning, middle, and end of the story. After that we uploaded their picture onto blabberize.com and recorded each student reading their own writing. 

Here is one of the end products. 

Smore!

I've started to use smore.com to create flyers and newsletters. This site is super user friendly and extremely visually appealing to those that view it. I like that it has a view counter as well where I can see how many people have viewed the flyers I send out. I created one last week for the faculty to read about my latest co teach experience as well as changes to the media center. It's a great resource for sending newsletters to parents. 

I am currently getting working on my media specialist certification at West Georgia and I've used smore multiple times for class assignments. Here is one I recently created to introduce myself to my professor and classmates.

Click to view the flyer HERE

Changes at Home

Yes, you heard correct, my husband and I bought our first house. :) We then painted every single room including the closets a nice gray. We ended up using Sherwin Williams Krypton. It's a bluish gray. I am a huge fan of Fixer Upper and it seems like something that Joanna would use. We also refinished a dining room table and chairs, hung new ceiling fans and a chandelier. Here is a photo of the dining room. 

We also added some additions to our family in the form of cats! Three kittens walked into my parents yard where they have dogs. The dogs attacked them, the kittens survived and now we have 3 cats at our new house. We grown to love them. Even though they all want to lay on my lap whenever I am trying to work on my laptop!

Thanks for joining me for my randomness from the week!

Five For Friday- 10/23/15

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

I learned that I have quite a few of these in my class this year. :)

I used Plickers for the first time this week and it was absolutely amazing. I was able to get real time results, reteach and see improvements instantly! If you haven't heard of them or tried it, just look here- plickers

We also used Kahoot again as a review and had lots of fun with that!

I added some posters to help us with writing. 

The RACE posters are free HERE.

The Transitional Word Posters, as well as the Opening and Closing Posters are included in my Writers Workshop Pack HERE

Writing Goals!

I have ability grouped students in writing and worked with each group to set specific goals that they need to work on while writing. I have a cereal box that is re-purposed to display these goals for students to see at each group. 

I saw an immediate improvement in writing, where students were looking at the goal and then looking at their work to make sure they have punctuation, an opening, are writing using the writing lines to have legible handwriting, etc. 

 If you don't already know it, my husband is also a teacher....and a huge nerd! Why else would I have to go to Target Monday night to buy a grown man a light saber for character day the following day? I still don't understand why Einstein needed a light saber...

 They also had decade day at his school. 

We had our RESPECT Party today. Students with all their RESPECT letters for the first 9 weeks were able to attend. We watched Despicable Me 2 to go along with our classroom door. 

Some parents sent in popcorn for the movie and I just wanted to comment on how some were so clever to send in smart pop that is already popped, because it's hard to run down the hall and pop popcorn. I am going to request this type of popcorn from now on! Why did I not think of this before?

Thanks for listening to my randomness from the week!