Time Managment - Cell Phone

In my class last year we had a lot of transitions between teachers. It was becoming problematic at the beginning of the year getting the timing of the transitions down. I wouldn't know I had to line up my students until I saw the other classes line up in the hall. I looked for an alarm clock that had multiple alarms on it to help me out, when my son pointed out that my cell phone had six programmable alarms.

I set all six of those alarms to go off 5 minutes before we were suppose to line up in the hall. I explained the procedures to the children and I put the student who sat close to my desk in charge of turning off the alarm when it went off (they also had to make sure I heard it).

It was GREAT. All the children heard the alarm and knew they had 5 minutes to finish up and clean up. None of the other teachers were upset I was running late and the kids were happy they were never late for recess (that use to happen sometimes :)

Make sure if you are observed, and the alarm goes off, that you (or the students) explain to the observer what the alarm is for so they don't think you are getting random cell phone calls during the lesson.

Comments

Ginger Snaps said…

You've been awarded the Amazingness Blogger Award by yours truly! http://gingersnapstreatsforteachers.blogspot.com/

August 22, 2010 at 11:52 AM

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link - https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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