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My first giveway!

I am having my first giveaway in my Teacher's Notebook store Lilly's Grace (after clicking on the store name you must go to the giveaway section to enter). I am giving away the Smart Board presentation "Adding er and est to Adjectives." It contains both instructional and interactive slides and is one of the prettiest things I have ever made. My students loved playing it and were able to choose when to use the different endings and explain why! If they choose a correct answer the answer will spin, if they choose incorrectly the answer will shoot out of the sorting pile and back to its spot.I love it too!
Below are some pictures of this presentation in use:

The giveaway begins tomorrow May 27th and runs through the 29th. There will be five winners! Click over to my store to enter!

Synonym Twister

My students have always loved playing Twister. Any group I have ever had over the past 10 years of my teaching career have loved Twister. About 8 years ago I started creating educational Twisters. I bought three Twister games and made a Synonym, Antonym and Homophone Twister. I would choose pairs of words and write one on the mat and one on the spinner. Kids loved it!



Now, we have Smart Boards. I love creating things on the Smart Board more than anything. It is so much fun to create and test it for myself and introduce it to my kids. That first day I have kids use a presentation or play a game is the most fun for all of us.



Over the years I have lost a Spinner or two. As I learned more and more about the Smart Board I figured out that I cold transform the spinner into what I needed.

My Teachers Pay Teachers store has a free antonym Spinner, as well as, a homophone and synonym spinner for sale, Click one of the links below to have a look!

Synonym Twister Spinner          Homophone Twister Spinner          Free Antonym Twister Spinner

Another Take on a Pinterist Idea

I seem to admire so many Pinterest ideas and for over a year now I have been gathering and gathering ideas that make very pretty boards. This last week of school I have used two of the ideas. I changed the around a bit, but my students enjoyed them and therefore were engaged. This is no easy task considering it is the last week of school and we have a Reading Counts celebration, an end of the year party, and a last day of school pizza lunch. Pfew!

Well the first idea that I want to share was an idea from my technology board.

This is from another blogger and their blog is located here :

Who's Who and Who's New
It is a wonderful resource for ideas using technology.

Another blogger did it this way;

I am not certain who the last picture came from, but they also had the QR codes leading to a blog containing the children's work. 

I love both of these ideas and next year having the children blog in the classroom is on my list of new things I plan to add to my routine.

But this year, I mixed  the two ideas and came up with these;

Or rather my children came up with these. They made self portraits and their portraits are holding IPODS with QR codes on them. These QR codes lead to messages for the new students I will have next year. This means I have to keep them safe all summer!

The messages greet my new students and tell them about the things they will like about second grade and being in my class. The children wrote about math, science, social studies, Edmodo, writing and reading. I will post a banner that reads "Welcome to Second Grade, messages from Last Year's Hagan's Heroes". I am very excited and think this will be fun for parent's to do with their children Open House. My hope is that this gives the feeling of a strong technological presence.

Next year I hope to have my students blog and call it online portfolios and use the QR codes to lead to their work for others to view. But I love the idea of messages to future students.

Any comments? I would love feedback or any ideas that anyone may have concerning these QR code projects. 

Oh yes, the other Pinterest idea I will share another day.

Learning Addition Facts

I have no magic tricks to post. I just wanted to share a little end of the school year happiness. In my neck of the woods we had many assessments. We have five days left with children and are not completely done with them. But every now and then there is a glimmering moment. I suppose as their teacher I should have focused on their achievement. I wasn't. I was focused on there beautiful smiles and sparkly eyes that came shining through the dark assessment abyss. The occasion followed a series of center games and quizzes that students were to pass to show they knew their addition facts to ten. They had the privilege of having a "pie in the face". This was really whip cream in a paper plate. As simple as this sounds, as it turns out, this is a magic potion. Have a look:

One student said "Best day ever!" I was so glad they were able to have a moment of happiness before they leave me to go on to their next teacher.

Adorable  frames by:

Edmodo

Do you Edmodo?
The 2013- 2014 school year was the first year I really used Edmodo with my students. We used it mostly for a reading response area for Science and Social Studies. We did however post math riddles to each other a couple of times and I did post the links to games I thought the students would both enjoy and benefit from.

Some of the mistakes I learned from were during the sign up process. I sent home notices and had parents and children sign themselves up at home. I had to sign up some students who would only be using Edmodo at school. Thank goodness I did. It took about two weeks to get the students all signed up. I did not know exactly what their user names and passwords were and I had to use more days for communications to parents about those things. Fortunately, I learned from signing up the students I did that next year I will sign up all of the students and assign them very easy user names and passwords that they will use with everything I sign them up for at school. Don't gasp....these are not things that contain personal information and students in the second grade really do not have anything a hacker wants to steal. The students  assisted were able to begin using Edmodo immediately.

I love blogs where teachers share what they have learned concerning technology in school so I have put together a "How To" concerning signing your students up for Edmodo. I hope you find it helpful. If you are considering Edmodo, this might help you decide.

As a teacher I was able to enjoy the knowledge and fruits of the exploration of other teachers by joining groups with teachers who shared. We will leave that for another day though.

I hope everyone has a Happy Mother's Day!