Christmas Tree Geometry Craft

Hi again. I found a cool craft on DLTK if you need something last minute for this week. It is a Christmas tree that students make from different geometric shapes. This is so good for the lower grade levels working on shape recognition all the way up to 5th grade where we are finding the area of triangles to lines of symmetry.

Click here for the Christmas tree craft.

Enjoy!

Acuity and Happy Holidays

Hi everyone, the Christmas party was fun this afternoon. It's so much fun to get together with everyone outside of school, even if we do talk about school a lot.

I also wanted to share some Acuity stuff, and it's not a secret by any means. Some of you all may already be doing this. If you log in to your Acuity account, you can view how your class did by standard and even by indicator. Then there is an option to assign work to students by indicator or standard.

It does take some time to do this, but I think it is really worth it. Then if you have a period per week to devote to it, you could take your class to the computer lab and students could do an Acuity assignment or two. They log in to their accounts and the assignments are under the Study button.

My kids actually like doing their acuity work when we have a chance to get it in. For students in special education, the computer will even read the problem aloud so you can hook up headphones to their computer when they work.

Just thought I'd pass that along, it's another great way to use our computer lab if you have the time.

Happy Holidays

Holiday Stuff

Hi everyone, just wanted to pass along a couple of things here as we get closer to the holidays. I know a lot of us use The Polar Express across our curriculum in a lot of different ways. The iCats have posted a link to a website with a video of Lou Diamond Philips reading the Polar Express. I have checked it out, and it looks really well done. It comes with an option for captions, so students can even read along with him. There is also an activity guide for teachers that can give you ideas of other things to do with your students to go along with the book. Check it out, I think it's worth a look.

You can click here to go to the iCats website

or

click here to go directly to The Polar Express

It looks like this is a website that is updated pretty frequently with new books, so you might want to check back every now and then.

Standards Help

Hi everyone. Since it is so important for us to be aligning our instruction with state standards I thought I would pass along this tip for using the DOE (Dept. of Ed.) website.

The standards section on the website gives you so much more than just a printout of the standards. Now, the website offers resources for each indicator of each standard.

The link below will take you to the selection page to pick which grade level and subject you want to view standards for. Pick the grade level and subject and then click search. Once that is selected it shows you each standard.

You can then click the + icon on each standard to show the indicators for the standard. Then for each indicator you can click Resources to see a list of sites/information to assist you in teaching that indicator.

This way, if an indicator isn't covered in your textbook or FOSS kit, you can see other ways to get the information across to our students.

Click here to go to the Standards section on DOE

And if you haven't taken time to go through the DOE website before, there is a lot of information and the site is easily navigable with the menu tool bars on the left.

Astronomy Website

Hi everyone, I thought I would post this website on the blog. It is an astronomy website that operates a lot like Google Earth if you are familiar with that program. It might be something you enjoy looking at in your free time, or it could be something older students explore on their own if they have time at a computer station.

The link below is to the download site. Simply follow the instructions for your particular computer and enjoy.

Click here to go to the download site