Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving my dear bloggy friends!  No special graphics, no brilliant ideas, just a wish for you.  We all have so much to be thankful for ... my wish for you is that you are able to spend time savoring the special moments on this holiday!
Love to all,
Camille

Make a Turkey ... One Feather at a Time

I am swamped!  Assessments, report cards, special projects, just plain old survival in this crazy world and so what do I do?  BLOG!!!

Okay, this is a simple, fun family project from 2011.  (You could also do this project in class.)

Here is the finished bulletin board:

Here is a close-up:

(The hands were from a previous bulletin board that I loved and just couldn't bear to take completely down so for the rest of the year, those hands were a backdrop for everything that went up on this board.)

Family Feather Project:

I sent home a white feather cut from cardstock.  I asked each family to work together to design a feather to add to our very bare turkey.  The directions said they could use any materials they wanted to decorate the feather.  (One child used his sight word cards from our HM reading series to decorate the feather. Made.me.laugh.so.hard.  It is the feather with the red rectangles.)  We talked about how we needed all of our feathers to create the turkey.  Just one feather would not be enough.


Note: A thousand apologies for not knowing where I got the adorable turkey from.  It was a TPT purchase and students were supposed to measure the turkey, but I made an extra copy for this bulletin board.  But after searching through all of my purchases, I cannot find the original.  (Note to self: If you must purchase so many items from TPT, please keep your purchases organized!)  If you are the creator of this cute, cute turkey, just let me know and I will tell the world how wonderful you are!

Love to all,
Camille

Guess Who?

I haven't posted in a month so I think it is super ironic that this post is entitled "Guess Who?"  But the title has nothing to do with my lack of blogging.  (Although I am hoping you all remember me!)

Here is the true meaning of the title:

My students are working on their questioning skills so I pulled out one of my favorite activities to help with this:

Guess Who?

I bought this game at a garage sale for 50 cents a few years ago.  I hadn't played the game before, but I figured it would be worth at least 50 cents in my classroom.  Well, it has been worth quite a bit more than that!!  The price of the game is $18 at Target.  I am not sure I would pay that much, but many of you may have this game tucked away in a closet at home.

We play this game during our station rotation.  Here are the rules we use:

Guess Who?  A Game of Logic

1) Adult secretly picks a yellow card.

2) Children take turns asking yes/no questions to determine who the mystery person is.  Example: Is it a woman?  Does she have red hair?)

3) The adult answers each question and the child asking the question gets to “slide” down all of the people who cannot be the mystery person.  (example:  If “Is it a woman?” gets a no answer, then you must slide down all of the cards that have the picture of a woman.)

4) Continue asking and answering questions in turn.  When only one card is left, that must be the mystery person!  Compare the final card to the selected yellow card and see if they match.  Of course, they do!

5)  Prep the cards for a new round.  Once the children get the hang of it, they can pick the mystery person and answer the yes/no questions.

Challenge the children to ask questions that will eliminate as many people as possible.  Example: “Does the person have a hat?” eliminates more people than “Does the person have a green hat with a feather?”

After playing this game, the children have a much better understanding of what it means to ask a question.  Hurrah!

Love to all,

Camille  

iTalk iPads: Story Creator

I am going to try to focus on one new iPad app a week.  That will insure that I keep trying new apps, plus will help me reflect on our use of iPads.

I have a new favorite iPad app: Story Creator.  I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it!  What about my firsties?  They LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it, too!

Here is what makes this app so special:

• It is free.  (How awful that I list this first, but you all know why!!)
• It is easy to use.
• Children can create their own books.
• Drawings, photos and text are all easy to add to the books.
• Audio can be added, as in, children type in their text and then record themselves reading the text.  Then when you scroll through the story, you hear the child's voice reading each page to you.  Oh, be still my heart.  I SO love this feature!
• The tech support is phenomenal!  I sent an email to the developers asking a few questions and I received a reply.  A real reply.  But it gets better.  I got the reply within hours.  The reply contained answers to my questions.  Like I said: phenomenal support!

Here is what I don't like:

• The only way to share the created books is via Facebook.  That means we are NOT sharing our books.  But this is one of the improvements on their list for the December upgrade.  (Which I know because I received an email telling me this. : )  This same thing tends to be a glitch in quite a few apps, especially the ones that are free.  So the books will stay on each iPad and have to be shared via buddy reading or author's chair.

Here is how I unrolled this app for my first graders:

• Ahead of time I created a three page book using Story Creator.  The first page had a drawing and text, the second page had a photo and text and the third page had a photo, text, AND audio.  
• I used my document camera to unveil my three page book.  (I just placed the iPad directly on the document camera so my kiddos could see.)
• I showed my students how to access the app, how to start a book and explained each icon at the bottom.  All in all, my presentation was five minutes max.  I really try to not overdo my instructions with apps.  I want my students to have lots of freedom because then they will be much more creative.
• I let my students loose to use the app.  Some of them began to draw pictures for their books.  Other started by taking photos.  A few students began adding audio as soon as they had typed in text.  Some students discovered the spelling correction feature.  (Which can be both a help and a hindrance with beginning readers!!!)
• I buzzed around the room listening, reading and mainly learning from my amazing digital natives!
• As a few students finished books, I sent them to the office to share their stories.  They came back with HUGE smiles.
• We ran out of time or we would have had a sharing time at the end.  As it was, my students were VERY upset with me when I had them cleanup because it was time to go home.  ("What school is over?  "Can't we stay longer?  PLEASE!!!!")

That's it for now!

Love to all,

Camille

iTalk iPads in September!

Sigh ... I really meant to post a lot more iPad ideas, but using iPads in kinder and first in the Fall is so very different than using them in the Spring that I am once again a beginner.

(Background: A class set of iPads was delivered to my room in April 2012.  My kiddos already had our routines down and had so many skills that we were able to immediately start using the iPads.  Starting off the year with iPads is completely different so I still figuring this out!!  Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the iPads.  It is just that I am at ground zero in the learning curve once again!!)

My kinders are learning about patterns so we have been using the iPads to aide our learning.  The kiddos have been using the app Doodle Buddy (free) to create patterns.  Doodle Buddy allows them to paint, draw or even stamp pictures.  We have been working on color and shape patterns.  So here are some of the activities we have done:

• Students use two (or three) colors to create a pattern.  Another student has to tell what comes next.
• I make a pattern with our manipulative bears (example: blue, red, red ... abb) and students have to make that same pattern using two different colors on their iPads.
• Students use two (or three) shape stamps to make a pattern. 
• I make a pattern using attribute shapes (example: circle, square, triangle ... abc).  Students have to stamp that same pattern on their iPads, using different shapes.
• I make a pattern (example: aab) and students make that same pattern on their iPads, but they get to decide if they will make that pattern with shapes or colors or size.

What I am loving about all of this is that my students can quickly make multiple patterns this way.  They can take a screen shot of their patterns and then add it to the photo roll on their iPad.  Pretty cool! Sounds like the beginning of a portfolio to me!

Now I am off to plan for next week!

Love to all,

Camille

An Apology

Sigh ... I am one of those people that rarely listens to their instincts.  The other day I blogged about a product that I had not used, but had seen a sample of and it looked promising.  Anyone who blogged about it, got the product free.  I LOVE free!  So instead of listening to my instincts that said, "Slow down!  This is too good to be true!" I blogged about it and received it and ... it is not something I can recommend for teachers.  So I removed that blog post and emailed the company, but I still feel icky.  Like a liar.  Like one of those celebrities that advertises a product that they would never use just for the money.  (Well, except I am not a celebrity and I never got any money, just a not-so-good product.)  So I apologize to anyone who read that post and if I ever mention a product again, it will be one that I have used and LOVE!!!  I promise!

Love to all,
Camille

A Wreath for My Door

One of my goals this year is to have my students take more ownership of the room.  One way to do that is to make sure THEIR work is featured, instead of mine.  So when I saw Greg Smedley's wreath idea, I decided to have my students help me make a wreath for our classroom door.

Here is the result:

I laminated the final result so it is shiny and a bit hard to photograph.  Sorry!

Here is a closeup ...

My kinders are the green hands and my first graders are the blue hands.  I wanted to color code it to show how we complement each other.  I used the large ink pads from Lakeshore because the ink is washable and so much easier to use than paint.  BUT I love the bright colors that are in Greg's wreath.  So ... next year I may brave the paint.  Not sure yet.  Since this was my first time creating a wreath like this, I was a bit controlling (sigh ... I am trying not to be, really I am!).

These were my steps:

1) Have each student make a handprint on white contruction paper.  (I did this on the first day when they were also making handprints for their Kissing Hand puzzle.  Very time efficient to make two handprints at once!)  I lightly wrote their name in pencil on the papers ahead of time so that I could make sure each child made a handprint.  (You know how confusing that first day is!)

2)  I cut out each hand and wrote each name with a Sharpie.

3)  I arranged and rearranged the hands on a large sheet of blue posterboard.

4)  I glued the hands down and then cut out the posterboard in an appealing shape.  (Maybe only appealing to me!!!)

5) I laminated and then recut the wreath.

Yep ... lots of teacher steps!  I WILL GIVE UP CONTROL!  I WILL GIVE UP CONTROL!  I WILL GIVE UP CONTROL! (But I have to check my schedule and decide when that will be!)

Love to all,

Camille