Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I thought these two classroom doors were too cute not to share. This is in a school with a school wide nautical theme and the top one was for Browder's Beacons and the second was for Porter's Pirates.  For the pirate one she used contact paper for the black parts and a plastic table top for the bandanna.  For the beacon one she used yellow and red bulletin board paper outlined in black electrical tape. 

I ran into this project walking the halls at one of the schools I go to. It was done in Leslie Larussas' fourth grade class as a creative writing piece. The students were to take one negative thought they had and find three positives within it.  I love love love this assignment! What a great way to teach children to turn their thinking around (I know several adults who need to do this assignment...on a daily basis :) She took pictures of the kids thinking and they created speech bubbles around themselves. She let the kids color it...which made some of them hard to read but they were all really good negative-to-positive examples.  Since I am a technology coach I looked for a way that the project could be done on the computer hence the last picture (FYI - our district is going to 1-1 iPads in grades 3-5 next year so the last project was done using an app called educreations as an example.)  It was inspired because I had just finished the couch to 5K app and was