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? 

Technology Tuesday: Haiku Deck and a Freebie!

Happy Tuesday everyone!  I hope everyone is enjoying their last few weeks before school starts, though I hear that some people are already back?! I can't believe it! Anyways, it's time for another Tech Tuesday. I know that  I have mentioned this one multiple times in the past few weeks, but I just wanted to take a minute to fully talk about it. It is so amazing that it definitely deserves its own post. 

Haiku deck is a presentation software. It can be used on computers, ipads, and iphones. Our school does have an ipad cart, so I was lucky enough to use it over the summer with Haiku Deck. Now that school is back in session, I probably won't see the ipads as much so I will be using this program with the laptops this year. 

First things first,  you'll need to set up accounts for your students. If you need help with this, feel free to check out my post on using one Gmail account for student emails.  Once you have them logged in you will see this screen:

Click the "Create New Deck" button on the right corner of the screen. Then your new deck will pop up. A deck is like a presentation. In the top left hand corner you can rename your deck. Then if you look on the left side you will see the four different slide formats. 

It's extremely simple from there. Your students just insert the information they want into each slide. There are a few options for customization, but not much. Once they enter in their information they can find images or take images for their background. Just click on the picture button on the left hand navigation bar. 

Underneath of the picture button is a button to choose different font arrangements. 

There is also a section for notes for the presenter. Make sure that your students know that they will be the only ones able to see that. Apparently, you can link an iphone to the computer to be a remote for the presentation too. 

You can also change the font. There are six different free font packs. On the ipad, a lot of paid packs come up as well. 

Finally, the two things that I had to learn the hard way with my kids was the  importance of telling them to click the new slide button for each slide (in the bottom right hand corner). I thought it was self explanatory but one student didn't quite understand. Also, if you are using the ipad app you  need to SHARE the deck to save it. When you click on the box with the upward arrow in the upper right corner, a box  will come up that lets you share it privately so you can access it from any device. (We learned this the hard way a few times...)

This app is awesome for kids though! To help you use it in your classroom, I went ahead and created a basic planning page to help you. Click here to go to my TPT store and download the  Freebie. It's really basic so that you can change it to fit your needs. 

When explaining to my students, I had them all come to the rug and demonstrated with one ipad while they watched. The third and fourth graders got it with no problem... well practically. :) 

In case you haven't used Haiku Deck, you've got to try it! If you have, how do you use it in your classroom?

Happy Teaching!

Success in Secondary Linky Party!

I'm feeling quite ambitious today and am spending a relaxing evening at home after going to opening night of my school's musical (and it was amazing! More to come about this later this weekend).  Found 4mula Fun today and am already obsessed! So many great ideas that I need to borrow!  While there I read about their Success in Secondary Linky and couldn't resist. :)

It's nice to find some cute stuff for the older grades. I teach elementary talented and gifted so I teach higher material but with younger kids. Obsessed with her products... my TPT "to buy" list is getting way to long now!   

If you are a Virginia teacher you may find my SOL checklists helpful. Currently I have them made for second through sixth grade standards in math. My goal this summer is to get them for the other subjects as well. I am obsessed with mine and have shared it with other teachers at my school and they love it too! I must admit that I created it to be used from the beginning of the school year, but I restarted mine at the end of the year. I like it to do quick checks with  my class and see what skills we still need to work on. In honor of this being a secondary linky party, feel free to grab my sixth grade checklist below(Click the picture)!

Also, if you are looking for some practical uses for dividing with decimals, check out my Great Toilet Paper Debate activity. We all know that the big word floating around the teaching world is rigor. That being said, we need to find real world applications for math. Honestly, I just wanted to know what brand of toilet paper to buy. But somehow my question turned into an activity that allows students to do internet research, lots of computation, and finally some problem solving and critical thinking to make a real world decision about what brand of toilet paper they should buy. Check it out below!

Time to get some shut eye for this girl. My big is graduating with her Masters in Special Education tomorrow! It's going to be a busy day celebrating her accomplishments!

Happy Teaching!