A Collaborative Project In Writing

Last year, a few teachers decided to try to teach a Procedural Writing Unit at the same time.  The special thing about this project was that the teachers were not all in the same building, or city, or town, or province, or country!  Mrs. Soltauheller teaches in Northern Vancouver Island, Mrs. Kolb teaches in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, Ms. Lirenman teaches in Surrey, British Columbia and I teach in Windsor, Ontario. We began planning at...

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Global Read Aloud 2012

October 1st marks the first day of the Global Read Aloud Project.  The Global Read Aloud project is meant to make the world a little smaller for our students and to look at all of our shared experiences.  Students from around the globe will be reading the same book and sharing their thoughts, predictions and ideas with each other.  My class is beginning to share predictions on Monday with Mrs. Lirenman's class from Surrey, British...

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Primary Blogging Community

With the Primary Blogging Community starting this Monday, I wanted to do a little explaining on how this little project has become a bigger project.... At the end of August, I was partaking in my usual Sunday night ritual (participating in #1st chat on Twitter) when the conversation went to blogging.  Many teachers wanted to connect their classrooms with other classrooms from our 1st chat community. I volunteered to do some thinking about it and to start something.  I put out a Google Doc and asked for interested primary teachers to sign...

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Math Stations

We officially started our math stations this week.  The past couple of weeks we have been going over procedures and have been exploring all the math manipulatives in our classroom.  We have created our Math Norms together and I am happy to say that most of the children know them by heart! Math Norms 1. Be kind and share. 2. Use quiet voices 3. Use math talk (patterns, shapes, problems). 4. Take turns. 5. Put materials away neatly. Math...

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Creating Videos With the ShowMe App On the iPads

Today we read "Splat The Cat Back to School, Splat!" This book is great for introducing or doing a quick review of rhyming, since cat and Splat are in the title. I  did a review of the word family "at" with my students.  Students were then partnered up and were asked to pick a word family and create a video to teach  younger students what a word family is.  Each pair of students were given an iPad and I gave them a quick tutorial on how to use the ShowMe app because I have 8 new students that were not in my class last year....

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First Day of School!

We had a very fun and exciting first day back to school today!  We started the day with a cute clip from the movie "Finding Nemo". We talked about how many of us were very excited about school and couldn't sleep very well last night (me included).  We also talked about how a lot of us were feeling a little bit nervous about our first day back.  This discussion led us into our next activity.  We talked about the "First Day...

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How To Set Up A Primary Paperless Classroom Using iPads

As I said in my previous post, my husband @mrwideen and I have figured out a way to send assignments, worksheets and activities to my grade 1 and 2 students using the iPads without having to sign my students up for email addresses or by using an exterior community website like Edmodo.  The following is a step by step tutorial of how we set up my classroom: 1.  Sign up for a classroom Dropbox account.  After signing up for...

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The Primary Paperless Classroom

A new school year brings new aspirations, my hope this year is to become a paperless classroom.  Well, not completely paperless.  Let's face it, in a primary classroom, children need manipulatives and they need tactile stimulation.  However, I want to use less paper in my room.  Students can record their learning in many different ways other than pencil and paper.  Last year, my students showed me many different ways they could record their learning.  A few of my favorites were:  wallwisher.com as a substitute...

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