Making Magic Happen

Creating magic in the classroom does not have to take a lot. You can use what you have. I literally raided my garage to find some things from years past to create a special transformation for tomorrow. One of the things I wanted to put up, I could not even find...now I am wondering if I threw it out...and I am kicking myself over it just in case....

So we are ready for our first author's celebration and I wanted to make it special by creating an experience for my seconds. I'm not going to let the cat out of the bag yet, but maybe you can figure it out by looking at some picture clues. 

Can't wait to create a magical moment in my classroom. I'll be back to share the details of our day. What do you do to engage your students?

Pencils are Magical

Sometimes the simplest things make such a huge impact in the classroom. My class, like most,  does not like to clean up at the end of the day. Sometimes it takes so long that we end up leaving the classroom too late. One day, on the spur of the moment, an idea came to me. We have classroom supplies, and not individual supplies. We have lots of plain pencils, by no fun pencils. However, I have a stockpile of fun pencils from previous years that are just waiting to be put to good use. And so, I told the class that the group that cleaned up quickest (floor, projects, work, and table) would receive newly sharpened FUN pencils. I have never seen those students move so fast or be so thorough at cleanup time. Within about two minutes, everything was pretty much spotless and my first winning team, all smiles, was awarded the pencils to use the next day. 

Throughout the rest of the week, those pencils were switched off each day...or they could be kept by the defending team. Whichever team was the quickest to clean up got the pencils the next day. Cleanup time went from a drudgery to an exciting game where teams now work together to get it done! After a week or two, I introduced a new set of pencils and that sparked more excitement.

If you don't have a pencil stash, might I suggest the dollar spot at Target or Dollar Tree. Usually you can get a pack of 12 pencils for about a buck. My groups only have 4-5 students so I can use those packs more than once throughout the year. 

If you want some more cleaning solutions, check out my Making Cleaning Fun post over here. Make cleaning fun, ya'll!

Ultimate Engagement with Kahoot

I knew that Kahoot would be one of those things that my students would absolutely LOVE! It was chaotic in a good way, if that is even possible. My students could not contain themselves. They were just beyond excited the whole time. I am just starting to get over laryngitis and it was so difficult to be heard. I finally had to bring back the silent celebration we have used before instead of cheering wildly each time an answer is revealed. 

So here's 4 of my takeaways:

1: First, we will definitely do this again...and again...and again. They just loved it that much and it can be used for any subject area. I could see us doing it at least a time or two every month.
2: There is not a huge investment in time to set this up. It is super easy to type in some questions and possible answers. You can save your Kahoot games to use from year to year, so once they are done you will be able to reuse them in future years.
3: Some kids may not be able to handle the disappointment and competitiveness of this game. There can be some problems with some technology not working fast enough (that really upset one of my competitive students) and when a student does not win, that could set them off as well. I would still do it again, even with those challenges, but I think that if I had some students who could not handle those situations in a positive way, we would definitely need to do some prep work together about how to handle those situations that are sure to arise. 
4: It will take a while to set the students up on IPADS if you teach primary grades. My students needed help finding the website and some needed help with entering the code. They did like that they can choose a nickname to go by and they were super creative with that and enjoyed their new names.

As a side note, I did give a prize to the student who had the top score. I do not have a prize box, so I just had that student choose one of the flex seats that we have in the common area outside of our classroom and that seat became theirs for the day...BIG HIT!

So there you have it! If you want to try it out for yourself, sign up for a free account here. 

Kahoot!

This weekend we played Kahoot at an evening program for our church. It got me thinking about how fun it would be to use in the classroom. This year we have 1:1 IPADS and so it is possible for us to play as a class. I just set up for first game, a math one. Can't wait to surprise my class with this engaging way to review what we have learned this year so far in math. Have you ever used Kahoot in your class? I will check back in tomorrow night to tell you how it all went. Stay tuned! If you want to create a game of your own (over any topic) for your own class follow this link. For now, I will leave you with this great reminder. 

How will you create happiness in your classroom tomorrow?

Communities

The classrooms at my school are organized into pods. In my pod, we have grades 1-3. Kindergarten is in another pod, but also moves to ours for some activities. Within our pod, we have a rotation of yearly themes. This year, our theme of focus is community. Each classroom can take that focus in any direction they choose. My class has begun by studying the different types of communities: urban, suburban, and rural. We have been creating representations of the different types of communities using different art methods. 

For our Suburban art activity, each student created trees in green and also fall colors. Each student also created a house. Afterwards, we rolled out a long piece of paper and each student claimed a space. Their job was to turn the individual houses into a community project that showed a suburban neighborhood. They had to place their houses and trees in their space and could add grass, a road, clouds, etc. I am loving how it turned out overall...despite that fact that we ended up with three suns....live and learn. Next time I do this project, we will discuss ways to be more successful and only include one sun. 

For the rural area, we did a directed drawing of hills. On each hill, students were to create a pattern of stripes, swirls, circles, or whatever their heart decided. Once the landscape was done, we added fences, a farm, and animals on top of the hills. We simply colored these with crayons. We focus a lot on quality of work at our school and because of that, we will be redoing some of our farm pictures to up that quality. It's a process.

Our final community is the urban city. We looked at some pictures of big cities. We talked about the shapes we saw. We discussed the different types of buildings. Then we drew our own cities. Afterward, we got out the watercolor paints and the details came alive. I am loving these. Most of my friends did an amazing job!

Next week, I hope to wrap all of our community learning up and move on to something new.   

Math Fun with Balloons

The kiddos in my class keep running across the balloons I had in my closet and were wanting to break them open and take one. I keep telling them that I have them for activities. So last week I was trying to think of a fun and easy way to use them. That's when I had the idea that we could use them to practice the money skills we have been working to master. I gave each pair of students a balloon. They had to try to keep it up in the air and each time one of them hit the balloon they would say the next number that you count when counting by 5's (nickels). If they dropped the balloon, they had to start again. After a couple of super-engaged minutes, each pair got a chance to tell me their highest score. Then we switched it and did the same thing counting by 10's (dimes). To say they had fun was an understatement. I held onto the balloons for a couple of days. At the end of day two, I gave each student their own balloon which had some coins inside. They had to pop the balloon and then  they used an exit ticket to tell me which coins were inside, the value of each coin, and the total of all coins. It was quick, it was simple, and sometimes the simple ideas are the best ideas. For less than a buck we practiced skills we needed to in a fun way and got students laughing, interacting with each other, and totally engaged. What's better than that?