Place Value Battleship

Today in Summer school, we played a little place value battleship! Students used Lakeshore Privacy Partitions to secretly hide their game boards. We used two 120 charts, some Target Dollar Spot erasers and some fun colorful beads to create a Place Value Review game.  Students started by setting up their game boards. They used the white chart to hide their "ships." They covered 5 numbers on their board with their erasers.

Rather than asking A16, or B7 to describe where you are hoping to sink a partner's ship, students asked by using place value clues. They would say 7 tens and 5 ones to describe 75. They would then record where they had asked on their gold chart by using a colorful bead. If they guessed a space with an eraser, they collected the eraser. The first person to collect all their partner's erasers won! 

For added Differentiation my higher students were paired together and encouraged to ask their partner by saying, "10 more than 7 tens and 5 ones" or "5 less than 7 tens and 7 ones." My higher students loved the challenge it added. 

Overall, the game was a big hit! We're definitely going to have to play it in the school year too! 

Bloglovin!

Just signed up with Bloglovin! I'm excited to be able to see all my favorite blogs in one place! Follow me at the link below!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

End of the School Year!

I can't believe that it is already Summer!  Like all teachers know... it was such a whirlwind of emotions during our last week. I was up and down and all over the place. Everything happened SO fast and just like that it was all over. I am super sad to lose all the kids in my class this year, but I know they're going to do great in third and I'm looking forward to a great new class of kiddos in the fall... Oh and summer of course!

 SUMMER!! 

So far... I've been enjoying sleeping in, reading and catching up on some of my favorite shows. I've gone to the pool, and gotten my nails done! It was a much needed break. Next week... I'll start Summer school, but I'm looking forward to a few more weeks of summer after that! 

But if you're wondering how my crazy last week went, then you're in luck! Here is the schedule below! :) 

Monday: We performed our Fractured Fairy Tale plays, and shared our Fractured fairy tale stories with the Kindergarten. It was a great end to our Fairy Tale unit. More to come on that later. ;) 

Tuesday: We had our end of the year Jiji party!! I was so proud of my class! Our class average made it all the way to 98% in ST MATH! So to celebrate we got free time to play and use any of the academic games in the classroom or on the iPad for one whole hour! It was a perfect time for me to pull down some of those bulletin boards and organize some of the drawers in my classroom that may or may not have gotten crazy during the year. A few of my girls even helped me! One little girl actually sat for 15 minutes picking out those little crayon papers out of our crayon bucket! I don't know about you, but those pieces drive me crazy. She was so sweet. It was great! 

Wednesday: Wednesday was our school's grubby day. We started by visiting our 5th grade buddies and saying goodbye to them. Below you can see the buddy cards we made them. Then we got a special end of the year cupcake treat. You gotta love the adorableness of Pinterest. I found these cute sun cupcakes and teddy gram beach cupcakes the night before and I don't know if I was on an end of the year adrenaline kick or what, but I just couldn't resist making a quick trip to the store for supplies. :)

After eating the cupcakes, we had one more grubby day surprise before we had to get to work cleaning. We played with shaving cream! We wrote some of our favorite second grade memories in shaving cream! We practiced our cursive and we wrote silly notes to our classmates. It was so much fun! 

Then we cleaned out our desks, clorox wiped the entire classroom and moved all the desks and boxes to the side. It was a great grubby day! 

Thursday: On Thursday, we had our school's field day. We played tons of games and enjoyed the beautiful sun outside! I got to kick back and enjoy my students, while the 7th graders ran the entire thing! What a fun day! 

Friday: On our last day together, we started the day off by reading one of my favorite end of the year books, "Last Day Blues" by Julie Danneberg. I gave my students their end of the year gifts and we went to a beautiful school wide Mass run by the first graders. 

 

After mass, we did my favorite end of the year activity. I've done it now for the last few years and its a great way to look back on what we've learned throughout the year. We call it our end of the year Learning Wall.

 I split the kids into groups and hand them post it notes. Each group is responsible for a different subject. Red was Math, and Pink was Language Arts. Blue/ Teal was Social Studies, the Orange was Religion and the Yellow was Science. The Purple was for other things we learned like being kind to our classmates, and challenging ourselves everyday to make ourselves the best we can be.  

I set a timer and we list what we learned this year on as many post it notes as we can in 20 minutes. It's absolute CHAOS!  But like the GOOD kind of chaos. The kind we're they're so excited and they're screaming at the top of their lungs because they're remembering things and talking about it with each other. They're writing as quickly as they can, and running to the board, while I stand on a chair and frantically stick them to the front board in our classroom. If you're trying to picture my classroom as this time, I promise we looked ridiculous! My principal even came in this year in during chaos and just laughed and joined in by cheering us on as we worked. 

But the Chaos is worth it!!!

The end result is this amazing visual representation of our year... this incredible board where they can see how their brains have grown in the last 10 months and how hard they've worked to get where they are. You should see how proud they are of themselves. It's just awesome. 

I'm not gonna lie... I get pretty excited to see everything I've taught them during the year too! Often times as teachers, we work so hard during the year that we forget to take the time to sit back and reflect on what we've done. Thank goodness we have some time during summer to do that! 

Bring on the reflection! :) 

The California Drought

Across California, regulations have been put in place to help conserve water during our current drought. I was extremely surprised to find that many of my students were not only unaware that we were in the middle of a drought, but were also confused as to what that meant and how we might conserve water. 

A friend of mine from another school shared her easy reader nonfiction article on the drought with us and we began our short study on the California drought and its effect on our state. We watched news segments on the drought and read about water conservation on the internet. We even looked at before and after images of lakes and rivers near ur in California. Below I've posted one of the amazing final products from our study. Students in groups each created a "Shadow Puppet" video informing people about the drought. "Shadow puppet" is one of my new favorite apps to use and I think it worked great for this project! 

Shapes

Over the last few weeks, we've been working with shapes! Now I'll admit, teaching 2D and 3D shapes was one of those concepts that used to be somewhat tricky for me. I felt like I was one of those beginning  teachers, that unfortunately didn't know what else to do except encourage my students to memorize the different shapes. I'd hold up a shape and say, "So this is a triangle. Got it?" and hope to God that they did get it. 

I didn't have any manipulatives or games, direct instruction or even activities that made learning shapes easier or more enjoyable. I just hoped that my students would catch on eventually. 

Now I still don't have a wealth of knowledge when it comes to shapes, but I'm definitely doing better! I've found some incredible resources and have blog stalked many amazing teachers out there in the world and have borrowed some great ideas from them and come up with a few on my own. 

Here are some of the things I use now!

1. Geoboards: Who doesn't love rubber bands and little peg boards? My kids love love love the geoboards. I use them a lot in center work. I pair them with index cards that guide my students as to what shapes they need to create, so as to keep them focused and on task. 

2. Kinesthetic shape making: We go out to the grassy ground next to the playground and create different shapes using our bodies. We work in groups to create sides and angles. We take pictures by climbing to the top of the playground and using our iPad to snap aerial views. We then use doodle buddy or a drawing app on the iPad to label the sides, angles and vertices of the shapes we made in our pictures. 

3. Shape manipulatives: I printed these amazing pattern block templates from Jessica's Corner of Cyberspace and paired them with my shape blocks for a fun center. I created a name that shape graphic organizer to record their work. 

 

http://raebear.net/goodies/patternblocks/

4. The Greedy Triangle: We read the book, "The Greedy Triangle" and use Step into Second grade's awesome shape shifter activity found here. We paired the project she created with the fun app, "Chatterpix" and made the awesome videos below. 

Chatterpix

4. Captain Invincible and the Space Shapes: We also read the book, "Captain Invincible and the Space Shapes." We took notes in our math journals and practiced identifying the difference between a vertex, edge and face of a 3D shape.

 

5. Pic Collage: Then we used the app, "Pic Collage" to create picture collages of our 3D classroom shapes. I love how they turned out! There are some student examples below.

Pic Collage

I'm so glad that I've learned a few tricks. Not only do my students enjoy shapes more, but I definitely enjoy teaching them more too! What are some ways that you teach shapes? 

Presidents!

I thought I would start off by telling you about our amazing PBL (project based learning) project that we recently finished on Presidents! Below you can see the silly presidents we created during our research portion of the project!! Aren't they adorable! We started the PBL project with anchor videos from Brainpop about Lincoln and George Washington for presidents day! I absolutely love using brain pop videos in my classroom and my students seem to love them too.

We then discussed our PBL guiding questions: What is a President? and How have past presidents influenced our country today?

We then meet in groups to brainstorm and plan out how we could find out the answers to these questions. Students in groups used the brainpop app to research what a president is, and to learn about their duties and responsibilities to our country. They took notes and we discussed their findings as a class. Students then chose presidents to research and used various iPad apps to look up important information about their president. I've included a list of some of the apps we used in class! Some of them we used for research on our president, while others were trivia and games that my students used for enrichment fun once they were done with various aspects of their work throughout the project.

•  The Presidents-Flash Cards of US Presidents
• US Presidents V1
• US President (American Presidents Life History)
• Presidents of United States by Tidels Free
• US Presidents Touch and Learn by Tidels
• US Presidents!
•  US Presidents Fact Free! The Fun History Challenge of US American President Trivia & Pocket Reference Quizzer Lite for Kids!
• Thud! Presidents FREE
• US Presidents: History Challenge Lite
• President Quizzer 

They were given a simple graphic organizer to fill out while they searched, so as to gain a more informed understanding of the life of their president. They edited their graphic organizer and created these presidents below to share their research with their classmates and our school community!

The next step of our presidential PBL project was to look into using their writing skills and technology to publish their learning. Students used the below rubric to write a presidential "autobiography" paragraph as if they were the president that they learned about. The rubric is available here. 

Finally, to culminate our project. Students picked their favorite sentences in their paragraph and we recorded their voices, reading their facts using the app, Funny Movie Maker. They used an image of their president from the internet and made it look as if their president was speaking. They turned out great! I strung them together using iMovie to create the below video. I know that my kids loved working on this project!

Where have I been!?

As you can clearly see, I am way way way over due for a blog post. It's been over a year since I've posted last! Can you believe that! I can't believe I let it get that bad! But I've missed blogging! and I'm so glad to be back!! 

Where have I been? 

I've been busy adjusting to a brand new school and taking on tons of after school tutoring hours. I've also been working on transferring my Indiana Credential to a California Credential and have been taking Blended Learning and Project Based Learning classes at Santa Clara University. I am excited to show you what I've learned and done over the past year!