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!

Do you Nearpod?

One of the great new apps we have been playing with is Nearpod!  It is wonderful!  The kids have the presentation right in front of them, which makes it so much easier to pay attention and learn!  It is even interactive, so kids can respond to  questions, take a poll, or even a quiz!  We used it today to learn about erosion.  This was a lot of fun, since we could really see the pictures well on the iPads!  We will be using this app quite a bit more!

3 -D Shape FInding

We have just begun studying shapes and geometry!  This is always one of our favorite math units, it has so many fun activities.  We talked about different shapes and decided which were 2D and which were 3D.  Then today, we used pic collage to take pictures of different shapes and label them.  It was so fun to see what the kids could find in the classroom!  They are great at seeing shapes everywhere!

IntergratED

If you have been following my twitter feed, you might have noticed a flurry of tweets going out about all of the new tech ideas I am learning!  I was lucky enough to attend the OETC IntegratED conference in Portland the last 2 days.  Oh wow!  I do not EVER want to miss this conference!  I have gotten so many great ideas that we are going to be trying in the classroom!  My two favorite new apps are Adobe Voice and Nearpod!  Can't wait to start trying these out!

Tech Classes

We are lucky enough to have a half time teacher dedicated to teaching technology to our students!  She comes in once a month for 3 days to teach us something new and wonderful.  Then, we get to keep using it in the classroom!  This month she came to teach us about telestory!  We had so much fun creating our own newscasts!  We will be using this a lot to share about what we know.

Authentic Writing with Twitter

We are really working hard recognizing how important writing it.  We are discovering all the ways we need writing everyday.  One of our favorite ways is using writing to communicate.  We have written notes to each other, thank you notes to some classroom visitors, and have even started exploring writing on Twitter.  We have had several different students take turns photographing what we are doing and writing a tweet about what is going on in the classroom.  Once I have approved it, we send the tweet live.  We even used Twitter to send a thank you to the Cornelius Fire Department for their great visit - and were SUPER excited to to get a reply!  Follow us @MrsSchlegelRoom

Spelling Practice

We are becoming active users of Spelling City!  Once the words are uploaded by me, the kids can go on the app and start practicing spelling words!  They can play games and even take a spelling test!  Once they have passed the test, they can go on to practice the challenge words for the week.  It is a lot of fun and we are becoming better spellers in the process!