A New Year!

I'm so excited to be teaching in Vernonia this year!  Ready for school to start tomorrow!

And then. . .

Well, we have made it through the year!  We have learned a lot and had a lot of successes!  We found out that these kids LOVE coding!  Seriously, I was so surprised by this!  I couldn't believe how long and hard they would work on coding with The Foos, Fix the Factory, Scratch Jr., and Kodable.  They were great about helping each other and really working together to solve the puzzles.  We also had great fun sharing what we had learned with Piccollage, Sock Puppets, and Telestory.  We loved review games with Kahoot!  We also really learned a lot about taking notes this year.  We used Popplet very successfully to do this.  However, Notable was a lot more difficult for many students.  If I had the year to do over again, I don't think I'd mess with Notable.  Popplet just made more sense to how my students are used to doing things, probably because I use a lot of webs in class.  Notable was just a little too free form.  If I did use it again, I'd start with it and do more explicit teaching with how to use it.  Overall though, it was a great year and we really learned a lot!

Early Release

Don't forget school is out tomorrow at 11:20 a.m.!  Happy summer!

It's EPIC!

We have been having a lot of fun reading on the iPads using Epic!   It is free and has tons of books the kids love.  They can read on their own, or there are several stories that have audio!  It is great!  It really has increased our choices during Read to Self or Read to Someone time!  We are loving it!

We love coding!

We have had so much fun coding this year!  I can't believe how into the various apps the kids have gotten!  They just can't get enough.  In fact, at least once a week, we use our math center time just to work on coding.  They are getting to the point that they know WAY more than I do.  When they have questions, they ask each other- which is awesome!  I love how they are working together to solve problems.  Even if they think they are playing!  :-)

Note Taking with iPads

We have been hard at work finishing up reports on how the Earth's surface is changed by different forces.  This means erosion, earthquakes, and volcanoes.  In order to prepare for our reports, we've done a lot of reading, checking out information on the web, and looking at charts we created in the classroom.  We've seen so much information that we realized we needed to organize it somehow!  Yay for note taking!  We started using Notability in the fall and many 2nd graders are still overwhelmed with all the possibilities.  So, they had a choice of using either Notability or Popplet.  Slowly more pairs are choosing Notability.  After we took our notes and did a little more research, we were able to see our notes while we wrote our reports.

Presenting. . . .Telestory!

I know, I'm way behind the times.  But I just heard about telestory right before Spring Break.  So, we HAD to try it when we came back to school and were getting ready to share about our time away from each other.  The kids did a great job and came up with some great presentations.  We had rock stars who went to the beach, newscasters who played with friends, and spies who got to stay up late and sleep in.  I love seeing the creativity the kids put into their work when we use the iPads!