Wordless Wednesday {August 6th}

Hey Y'all!

Wordless Wednesdays with Miss Decarbo at Sugar and Spice is one of my favorite parts of the week. It may very well be because not only can I share something from my week quickly and easily, but I can also manage to read through so many other bloggers posts and see what is happening in their worlds!

I have to share what I FINALLY got in the mail this week....

I am obsessed with my planner from Plum Paper Designs! It keeps me sane. What do you use to help keep you organized?

Math is Real Life { August }

It's the first Wednesday of August (though I wish it was still July!) which means I am linking up with four amazing blogs ( The Teacher Studio, 4mula Fun, Teaching to Inspire in 5th  , and Miss Math Dork ). 

Though this project started MONTHS ago (okay fine, almost a year ago) it's finally coming around to being completed. Last October, I started to write grants to get a learning garden at my school. To do this, I not only needed to be an excellent writer (I'm kidding... kind of) but I also had to do tons of estimation. Both of the grants that I applied for needed a budget, this meant thinking of every single thing that our garden would possibly need, deciding on they size of raised beds we would build, determining the volume of the beds and how many cubic feet of soil we would need, the list goes on and on. We got the beds built...

and then hit some snags when it came to doing the rest of it. But I can FINALLY say, that next week we are getting back in there and getting it all finished! Benches will be built, a shed will be installed, soil and compost will be ordered. I'm so excited to have this done so that all of the students can use this garden to help make their learning real and let them know that math is real life!

Tech Tuesday: Padlet

Hey Everyone! 

Today I'm in a Math Institute with my county. We are delving into our new curriculum guides and learning about our new math series Expressions. I must admit, it is better than what we had, but i'm so bummed that we didn't choose to adopt Investigations. 

Yesterday, during my Monday Made It, I mentioned that I plan to be doing the 40 Book Challenge with my students this year. In order to collaborate with the other class at another school that will be doing it as well, we will be using a website called Padlet. Padlet is a great website and resource to use for collaboration within your class or with others. 

Your first steps are to go to Padlet. When you get there you are going to see a screen that looks like this:

One of the best things about Padlet, is that you don't even have to create an account. This way, your students can easily create these on their own. You can also go ahead and create an account which is nice when you are wanting to be able to use all of your padlets in one location. If you want to create accounts for each of your students and need help with having email addresses for each one, feel free to hop on over to my blog post about using one gmail account for multiple student emails. 

These padlets are extremely easy to create. Honestly, there is no tutorial needed! Click the modify Padlet button on the sidebar and you can then : change the wallpaper, the layout, the privacy, if you choose to receive notifications, and you can change the web address of the wall. This is the one of the pages I plan to use for the 40 Book Challenge with my students. Eventually, I plan to have tons of responses on here, but this is the page I will be providing with my students at the beginning of the year. Head on over to check out our Fantasy Suggestion Padlet page. Feel free to play around with it while you are there. I plan to recreate it for my students come fall.

How could you see yourself using Padlet in your classroom?

Monday Made It: {August 4th} and a Freebie!

So this was an extremely busy weekend. My little sister from my sorority got married! I wish I had actually gotten some pictures this weekend, but somehow I didn't seem to have my phone with me. Thankfully I was in the bridal party, so I'll have some great pictures soon. Now that I feel a bit more like myself (there was a lot of sleep and recovery that needed to happen) it's time to link up for Monday Made It!

On Sunday, I had to recover from the long days before and I conveniently received The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller in the mail. I was exhausted and planned to read a chapter or two and then take a nap, but I couldn't put it down! I read the entire thing on the spot, what a great read. It definitely inspired me to look at how I was teaching reading. I immediately got on Amazon and ordered Reading in the Wild. Thanks to Amazon Prime, anything that I had planned to accomplish tomorrow will no longer happen since I will be spending the whole evening reading. This year, I plan to do the 40 book challenge with my students. I had read about it on a few other people's blogs, but now after reading about it I know that it is my plan this summer. This challenge inspired my Monday Made It for the week!

I had talked to a colleague in another building about doing the 40 book challenge with her class and our classes keeping in touch. If you don't know about the challenge, students are required to read 40 books during the school year that come from different genres. Students will track their books as they read throughout the year and will complete the different genres. I want to do as much celebrating as possible with this, so I plan to have a display in my hallway with each of my students names, a place for them to share what they are currently reading, and a place for their badges. Each time they complete the number of books for a genre, I will give them their badge to hang outside. You could also use them on their notebooks. Click on over to my TPT store to grab the freebie here! 

Our school does not have a color printer, so although I plan to print them in color, I did not want to have badges that were too heavy on the color since I will be the one printing them all. 

My colleague and I also talked about how we want our students from our separate schools to share book recommendations with each other. We will be using Padlet with our classes. Have you heard of it? If not, stop on by the blog tomorrow to check out my Tech Tuesday on using it! It's so easy and you are going to LOVE it! 

Tomorrow also starts a three day math professional development for me on the Expressions series. Does anyone use it? Thoughts?