Five for Friday - Show - Not Tell, Using Padlet and More

Happy Weekend!

I'm excited to be joining Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday this week. 

Here's a peek at our week:

Do you do Guided Reading?

I love these short reads from Scholastic.

There are leveled, and a variety of text types is included at each level.

Check them out here.  I am in no way reimbursed by Scholastic for this link - I just like these sets.

We're working on writing realistic fiction stories right now, and one of the lessons this week was on Show - Not Tell.  I loved this freebie idea from Deb Hansen.

Night Noises is a great mentor text to use with this lesson, too!

We are studying simple machines in science, and on Thursday we used the free Epic Books app to find related vocabulary by analyzing text features.

Then students took snapshots of the text features, cropped the photos, and added them to a Padlet page.

Padlet is a free online bulletin board!

So, on to the next subject area!

We are telling time in math, and we used Mega Math for a quick, fun review of elapsed time.

We get the Mega Math games with our Harcourt math series.

In this photo you can see that each child was given a time card.  The pairs had to measure the elapsed time between the times noted on each card.

You can never get enough practice with elapsed time!

We watched the Kid President's video on "Twenty Things We Should Say More Often".

Then students used a sentence stem to write a quote they thought they should use more often.

The quotes look really nice on the front of each student's desk!

This post was all over the place with content!

Hope you found something inspirational!

How was your week??

Lego Wall

Hi All -

Recently a Lego Wall was installed in our library/media center.  It is a part of the developing MakerSpace in our library.  If you are not familiar with MakerSpaces, these are areas in classrooms or schools where students are encouraged to use creative and critical thinking skills to build, design, tinker, make messes, explore, collaborate, problem solve, and more. These spaces may or may not include technology tools.  

Our building engineer built the backboard and shelf for the lego wall.

Our media specialist asked for lego donations for the wall, and she also wrote a local grant to add to the donations.

We currently have Ozobots, Spheros, and BeeBots in our developing Maker Space.

Here is a photo of some students using an Ozobot to work on computer programming.

Does your school have a MakerSpace? Please leave a comment to share what you might have.  We would love more ideas for our MakerSpace!

For more on Maker Spaces, check out this article from Edutopia.