Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

I always felt bad that I never found a way to recognize birthday's my first year of teaching (mainly because I was so overwhelmed). I fixed that the next year with my birthday wall. One of the "getting to know you" activities I have students do at the beginning of the year is put their name and birthday on an index card (the month goes on the back). They decorate it to reflect their personality and then they put it on my birthday wall under the month labels I have up (moving other cards around until they get them in date order). This gives students a chance to see who shares a birth date or month with them (and serves as a visual reminder of who has birthdays coming up for me). Last year I "celebrated" the monthly birthdays on the first day of the month and gave each birthday student an Oreo Cakester (this is when I was on a two man team). This year we decided that each homeroom teacher would take care of their birthday students with an Oreo Cakester so as to n...

I always start the year talking about safety. One of my first right hand assignments is a safety poster. This past year I also had students make safety posters for the classroom. They turned out great and stayed up the whole year (you can never go wrong with safety posters in the classroom :) I like student work much better then store bought posters and whenever I am observed one of the expectations is that we have student work posted. Having these posters up serves as both a reminder to "be safe" and as a check off on my teacher observation forms. Don't have room? See if you can hang them from the ceiling. Use a large sheet of construction paper and glue one child's poster on one side and another child's on the other....that way if they start to "spin" you always have a safety poster showing. You can also tape them on cabinets or use them as a boarder high up on the wall (just have students write/draw big so that it can be read from ground level). The f...

This was a project I did with my Girl Scout troop when we worked on our weather badge. I liked the idea and filed it away for possible use in the classroom next year. Basically we took card stock and cut it into a perfect square. We folded all the corners into the middle and wrote the most common severe weather we have in this area on three of the tabs and "emergency numbers" on the first tab. The girl scouts wrote down safety tips, associated with the various severe weather, under the tabs and listed their families emergency phone numbers. We used velcro dots to hold the tabs shut and put magnet strips on the back so it could be placed on the fridge. The Girl Scouts enjoyed doing this project. The only draw back is if you teach A LOT of students this might get expensive with the supplies but if you have one or two classes this would be a doable project. Another thing I did along the same lines is have children sketch out the interior of their home and put a giant X on the ...

This is an end of year video I made for the fourth grade using Animoto .com. I bought a subscription for $30 for the year and have made several school (field trips, field day) and personal videos. I've created links on my website and you can easily embedd codes (like I did above). You can also download your videos and purchase a high resolution copy. This year I learned how to "stitch" together several songs, using movie maker and a converter (but apparently you can use audacity as well...a free download) so the program can take more pictures in it (I used just over 220 in the video above...it can't take more then 10 minutes of music and mine above clocked in at 9 min. 30 seconds). At one time educators could get a free account so if you are interested you might want to check that out. I decided not to go that route since I knew I was going to be making a fair share of personal videos and the cost was relatively inexpensive. These are great to show at open houses, a...

This week I have my students working on fortune tellers for each of our units that we have completed (weather, astronomy, light/magnets/electricity, organisms and their environment). I am not sure all the other teachers are happy now that all the fourth grade know how to make them :) I taped a quart size baggie in each of the notebooks to put them all in. This was an "end of year" project but could easily be done at the end of each unit. I used the largest paper I could get from the art room (stay away from construction paper weight...it becomes too bulky for the notebooks...the closer you can stay to regular weight paper the better). Students had to come up with eight questions and answers related to the unit (using their notebook to come up with questions). They had to illustrate and color. Aside from the initial instruction this was a largely independent project (I played some Kidz Bop CD's in class while they worked) done over five days (one day for each fortune tel...

The decoupage notebook covers were a hit with the students this past week. What I did was run this project concurrent with the ABC book project, which eliminated a bunch of students crowding me at once with their complete notebook covers. In order to complete the ABC book within the five days allotted they had to finish 5 ABC blocks a day. Once they had completed those blocks they could start working on their book covers. I quickly had to let go of my desire to check over every child's book cover layout and offer suggestions for improvement before they glued down. If they were happy....I was fine with it. Once they completed their layout and glued it down on the black cover paper they brought it to me and they started the decoupage. I laid out the books on the floor to dry and they completed their second coat the next day (to speed up time, in some cases, I did the first coat and the students did the second coat). I am not going to lie...this was a very messy project. I had scrap...

We have three Friday's until the end of the school year and I have decided to make each of those Friday's a "movie day". This will give me an opportunity to show some science movies/shows that I was unable to get to during the year (I TiVo'd several episodes of Raging Plant, Storm Stories, etc.). There are some great "World's Greatest" videos on Discovery Streamline if you have in your school district that are approximately 1 hour long (World's Best - Swarms, World's Best - Animal Babies, etc...). I told students that they can bring in a snack and drink (unless it gets out of hand). This will help give me some extra time to grade and start cleaning/packing my classroom (I am moving classrooms this year). I will watch the program with my behaviorally challenged class but the other two will be fine with me moving about packing. If you are looking for other year end activities....try a google search....I saw several that could be modified for ...