Task Box

Matching People to Settings

For one of my Special Education classes, we had the assignment of creating a task box to send into a real classroom. It took me forever to come up with an idea that I really liked, and that I felt wasn't too boring or unimportant. 

So finally it clicked, why not make a task box that has the kids choose the right clothes for the right type of event or weather? Bingo! This will help with life skills, using context clues, and fine motor development. But how to do it? 

It took me a while to make these materials, but I'm pretty proud of them! I did make them using PowerPoint, Paint, and I used clip art and these adorable little characters I found through lots of google searching. I wish I could find the original person who made the characters, but there were a lot of people and sources who used them and made them their own. Here's a little snippet of what they look like:

I made 7 different settings including the beach, Fall, rain, Spring, Winter, school, and Summer. Each setting has two characters, and the characters are as diverse as I could make them. Here's a snippet of what the characters look like:

I printed them out, cut them out, then laminated, and cut them out again. I hot glued magnets to the backs of the characters and to the middles of the settings. I made pictorial instructions as well. 

Here's a download for the materials if you'd like to make them yourself. It includes the instructions as well.

Matching People to Settings

Hope this helps and you can use my ideas!

Keep on, Teaching on,

Charity

Centers

Spring Themed Math Center Ideas

Number Recognition

Long time no see! Sorry I've been incognito, but I have finished up my hectic spring semester and a May mini semester. Now I have a "break" from school for a month, and then right back at it with two classes in July...along with a cruise...along with moving to a new apartment...pray for my sanity in that month! Let's get into my post.

Recently I had to design three center activities in a Pre-K classroom. I chose the number recognition guideline, and since it's spring time, I decided to make it a spring flower theme!

 

My beautiful presentation of my 3 activities!

Like I said earlier, they are all about number recognition and these activities can be used in the beginning and the end of the school year. I had my students at the end of the spring semester, so that means I didn't really have to explain each center in intense detail. But they were still challenging and engaging enough for the kids to not get super bored!

My first one uses play-doh! I made play-doh mats with flowers on them. The number in the center of the flower is how many leaves they need to make for that flower. I provided different cut outs and tools so that each child can make their leaves however they'd like.

Here is a close up of the instructions I included with the activity.

Materials for activity 1:

  - Basket or container for the materials

  - Play-doh mats (I found clip art flowers, put numbers on them, printed, and laminated the paper.)

  - Play-doh and tools

   The second activity is a basic match the numbers to the amount of dots. I printed and cut out pictures of flowers and leaves. Each flower has a number on it, and each leaf has dots on them and they are glued to a clothespin. Since it was later in the year, they could match the leaf to the correct flower pretty quickly. So I had them put them in numerical order after they finished matching!

A close up of the instructions I put with the activity.

   Materials for activity 2:

     - Basket or container for the materials

     - Flowers (clip art flowers, put numbers on them, printed, and laminated the paper.)

       - Leaves (clip art leaves, put dots on them, printed, laminated, and glued to the clothespins.)

    The third activity is similar to the first activity. I made "vases" with numbers on them, and made "flowers". The kids had to put the right amount of flowers in each vase.

A close up of the instructions I put with the activity.

   Materials for activity 3:

    - Basket or container for the materials

    - Flowers (clip art flowers, printed, laminated, and glued to pipe cleaners - looking back at this I wished I had glued them to popsicle sticks, so do that instead!)

    - Vases (clip art vases, put numbers on them, print, cut, laminated - separately from the background paper!!, and glued to laminated construction paper.)

   So there's my pre-k/kinder number recognition activities! Hope you enjoyed them, and use my ideas if you'd like just give me credit!

  Keep on Teaching on,

   Charity

Word Study

Matching Games

So for one of my classes, we have a reading student and we have to write lesson plans to do with them. In those lesson plans, we always have to have a word study activity. I've done word ladders, actual word sorts, then I saw a matching game. Ding Ding Ding! How could I not have thought of that?! Sadly the one I looked at wasn't on the topic my student was struggling with. So I decided to make my own, but this is where I got the genius idea from: http://thisreadingmama.com/digraph-sorting-picture-cards/ 

This is a screen cap of mine, my student needed more practice with the long and short vowels. So that's what I did, I also added in words that could have long a sounds but they weren't just "silent-e" words. 

My student loved doing these, and we made it little competition between him and I. He "beat" me ;) I didn't do a straight up matching game, more of draw the finding card and then find a match that way. You could just do a sort with this idea as well.

I also made one for r-controlled vowels, a word only one which is easier and a picture only one which is harder. You could just merge them together though! 

You can make your own from scratch, use my idea (please give credit), or search Pinterest (give those people credit too, it's the nice thing to do). These took me like 20 minutes maybe just because I had to think of words and pictures for each, and then I still had to cut them out. I also recommend to print these on cardstock or get them laminated! I plan on eventually laminating them, but I'm lazy...

Anyways

Keep On, Teaching On,

Charity

Technology Teach

I was gonna start this post out with this cute topic sentence, "Get out your computers and get ready to visit these sites and download these apps!", but then I realized this is a blog...online...and you are already using you computer, phone, or tablet to read this. SO instead of starting it off with that catchy sentence, I decided to explain why I chose not to start with it...such a great idea :)

Anyway, for one of our class assignments we had to find websites or apps that could be used in the classroom or just used by teachers. I thought to myself, "What a great idea for a post!" 

I've divided them into two categories: Websites and Apps, and I've briefly described what each of them are and how they could be used to alleviate some teacher stress!

Starting with the Websites:

• www.abcya.com 

This is a website that has tons of educational games, and not boring or lame games! Games that kids actually want to play and they are learning something! I've seen this used during Daily 5 in the 1st grade class I'm in, and the kids seem to really enjoy it. It's easy to navigate, bright and colorful, and there aren't any nasty adds that pop up. This is a free website (score!), but you can pay for additional things or to be add free.

• www.jeopardy.rocks

  

  This is a website that is obviously a giant modifiable jeopardy game. I think it's much more appealing than the old traditional classroom jeopardy game, plus its easier to access than lugging in a huge TV cart and hoping that it works! This is also free! Teachers add in questions, change the amounts of "money" earned, and add in the amount of teams.

• www.socrative.com

This is a website that allows you to make quizzes, and not just any quizzes. They have four different categories/formats: regular quiz, space race, quick question, and exit ticket. I have personally participated in the space race version, and it's a pretty fun way to add some healthy competition and learn at the same time. As a student, you do have to download the app or just "log in" as a student, but both the website and app are free! Is it obvious yet that I love free things?

• www.kidblog.org

This one is exactly how it sounds, a blog but kids get to write in it. It's a safe blogging environment, allows students to learn how to positively use social media, and you can connect to other classes around the world. What more could you ask for?! This is also free, and you have a class log in and then a student log in. This way if one student is in charge of a post, another student can't access it and make any unwanted changes.

• www.getkahoot.com or kahoot.it (for the students)

This is another quiz and survey making site, and is pretty similar to Socrative. Students or players just have to log in to kahoot.it, create and nickname, and start playing. No extra app necessary, just access to the internet is all that's necessary....and can guess what I'm gonna say next? It's....FREE!

Now Apps (I only have a few, sorry!):

• Remind - www.remind.com

This is an app that teachers download, and they can keep parents and students updated on what is due, picture day, etc. I've actually been in a college class that used this, and it was a lifesaver! It also free...

• Class Dojo - www.classdojo.com

This is a behavior tracking app. This is usually displayed on the projector screen in a classroom, and students can see the amount of points they have. Parents also have access to it. It can be really successful in classes, if used right. I've seen and heard some stories about teachers using it in their classroom and students just not caring if they get points taken away or not. So its a controversial app in the teaching field, but that decision is entirely up to you! Oh yeah, and its free.

• Educreations - www.educreations.com

Now this is a cool app! Students and teachers can use it, and its freeeee. Teachers can use it to make tutorials or examples for problems (it's kind of like an online whiteboard), so that if students need a refresher, they missed a lesson, or parents are trying to help their kids out but don't know how to do it can access it.

There you have it, a list of websites and apps that teachers can use in and out of the classroom. I hope to use them one day, and I hope you learned something new! Thanks to my classmates for showing me these awesome websites and apps.

Keep On, Teaching On,

Charity

Word Ladders

What are Word Ladders?

Word Ladders are a great word study activity, and are pretty easy to make! They can be used to help students understand that they can manipulate letters in words to change them into different words, teach rhyme, word families, spelling, and more. I definitely recommend doing this as a guided activity at first or else the students don't get the meaning behind doing them. 

Word ladders can be a great morning work activity, teamwork activity, or review activity at the end of the lesson. I originally got the idea from a professor last semester, except he made his for older students who had a better grasp on spelling. His also had directions on what to change the next word to, but his words in the word ladder wouldn't stay in the same word family either. Since my student was much younger, I chose the word family route.

Here are some pictures of what mine have looked like. 

Since my student was so young we did it as a partner activity and with a whiteboard, this is so we could erase and add letters to the words and see how the words changed throughout the process.

 

 

There are various ways you can tweak these to make them appropriate for your students. My student and I really enjoyed working on them together. You may use my work, but please give me credit!

Keep On, Teaching On,
Charity

Posters!

POSTERS!

As you can tell by the title, I'm a poster enthusiast and I'm going to talk about two posters that I have made. One is a Writing Process poster and the other is a Reading Strategy poster. I made them both for my Literacy Block and I'm pretty proud of both of them! I love, love, love posters and the possibilities of what you can display on them are endless. I personally love posters that are interactive and go along with your class theme. 

Feel free to take my idea and modify it to make your own. If you copy it down word for word, you could always give me credit or tell your educator friends about my blog!

This first picture is my Writing Process poster put together and the second one is of it being taken apart. I have a thing for puzzle piece pattern (I don't know why), but when we reviewed the writing process it came to me like one big puzzle. Each stage was a piece and when you find all of the pieces, and voila you have a completed puzzle/story. So as you can tell by the pictures, my poster can be taken apart piece by piece - literally. I intend to use it to teach the whole process, but then when my students begin writing, I will only put up one piece at a time. For instance, if my students are at the Revising stage then only four puzzle pieces will be up. I plan for it to be a reminder of what they should be doing at that certain stage and as writing tracker. I also thought it'd be a neat idea if each student had a small version of this and they could track the process independently, but that would depend entirely on your students.

What I used:
- Basic white Dollar Tree poster board
- Ribbon (I'm a crafty person, so I used what I had leftover from a previous project)
- Velcro (for easy removal of puzzle pieces - get the kind with adhesive it'll be easier!)
- Paint (I painted the title portion just because I messed up, so this was just to cover my mistakes!)
- Markers
- Clip Art (I think I'll end up remaking it and put actual pictures of what each stage looks like)

              

This is my Reading Strategy poster. I decided on the connection strategy, and then I wanted to do a theme. I originally wanted to do a detective theme, then a scuba diving theme, then an octopus, then finally decided on an under the sea/fishing theme (I like the ocean, if you can't tell). So with that theme swimming - ha - in my mind, I came up with a rough draft, a catchy title, and started drawing! Since I was doing a cutesy theme and not a step-by-step poster, I wanted to make it easy for ELL students to understand as well. So I decided to make each fish have an object that represented each type of connection (e.g. the book with the text-to-text fish), and for the students who need a little nudge I added sentence starters. Looking back, I wish I had made the sentence starters removable so that later on in the year I can take those off and not have my students use them as a crutch. I got the basic idea for this one off of Pinterest, just search making a connection poster and tons of them will pop up!

What I used:
- Basic white Dollar Tree poster board
- Printer Paper (I drew my fish on this, outlined and colored them, then cut them out and glued them to the poster)
- Crayons (I laid one flat to make the background look extra oceany)
- Markers (for outlining, I like the way it looks with outlines)


And that's my poster post! Hope you liked it and it sparked some creativity in you to make some posters to decorate your classroom (or for an assignment like I did)!


Keep On, Teaching On,
Charity

Hello fellow education blog hoppers! I'm Charity Thurman, an Education Student at Sam Houston State University. My teaching career hasn't started yet, but I'm getting my toes wet with content methods class and then student teaching next spring. I'm nervous about student teaching, but very very excited to teach!

I've been thinking about blogging for a while now, and just decided to go ahead and do it. So don't be too critical when it comes to my postings please, I'm still learning :) I hope to start posting some lesson ideas, materials I've made, and maybe an occasional post about my journey of becoming a teacher.

I love this quote and strongly believe in the power of education!

It's currently 9 pm and I've got a lesson to finish up, so this is all I got for now!

Keep on Teaching on,
 Charity