Now, admittedly, I am not expert when it comes to video recording.  Generally, I take small snippets of my classroom or whatever on Instagram and am done with it all.  But with this "distance learning" thing upon us, and in my efforts to keep the love of reading alive for my students, I have been forced to learn how to use some basic video recording technology. Daily, I read a book aloud to my students.  There have been many authors who have given permission during this shut down to read books aloud to students via video as long as those read alouds are locked down to some extent (meaning, not just free and clear on youtube for anyone to see.)  So each day, I choose a book that I know has been cleared. Then, I sit down with my computer and open QuickTime.  This application was already loaded on my Mac when I bought it.  It is a super easy video recording method.  I press "New Movie Recording" and the little box pops up.  I press record and......

Teaching about the Water Cycle is something that I do year in and year out, so each year I try to do something new and different if, for no other reason than to keep my own brain active and engaged. This past year, I combined the science of the water cycle with narrative writing and technology and, dare I say it, came up with a winner! Of course we started with learning all about the Water Cycle during science lab.  You can see some past science lessons here   and how I incorporated the Teach Me Something projects into those lessons to get the kids creatively thinking about the way the water cycle works h ere. Once the kids knew all about how the water cycle works, I asked them to apply that knowledge by writing a narrative.  They were to pretend that they were a water droplet making their way through the various stages of the water cycle.  Within the context of a fictional narrative, they needed to include all of the science words that we had learned up u......

I am a sucker for inventive publishing.  I mean, who wouldn't love taking a 5 paragraph essay and writing the final draft in a cool and different way?  I do that all the time in my class.  So when it came to publishing this year's biography writing, I just couldn't let them write a simple essay and draw a picture.   Now, if you have followed along with my in the past, you know that I have creatively published this biography before.  I LOVE doing these Hanger People biographies but I felt like this year, since we are so into Google Slides and using our chrome books (which I have a class set of thanks to DonorsChoose.org !)  we could take these biographies in a different direction.  So instead of the hanger people this year, we created magazines. To begin, we of course started with the writing.  Being 5th graders, I knew that if I just told them to write a biography, they would be lost.  So instead, I helped to scaffold the writing for......

I like to have the kids write historically from the perspective of someone who was at that event.  Meaning, when I want them to write about, say a battle of the American Revolution, I don't just have them list off facts, I like them to take on the persona of a person who witnessed the battle and is telling the story. Such was the case when I had my students learn about the battles this year.  I had them research the battle using this form here .  It was basic, just asking them to fill in the blanks on basic information about the battle itself. Then I had them create a postcard (I used this template in google slides...though if you have no access to tech you can print it off and have them handwrite it.)  They wrote a first person narrative in letter form to a relative explaining the details of the battle they researched.   I asked them to make up an address and create a stamp. This could be any sort of picture they thought would make a good stamp dur......

I tend to get bored when I do things over and over each year in the same exact way.  I know many of you feel the same way, right?  Well, when we got to early colonial life, I wanted to keep with the same basic idea of what I had done in the past but amp it up.  Since we are so into stop motion in my room right now, I thought I could take a lesson that I had done before and add in the tech twist instead of the paper and pencil style we had done before.   We began by discussing what life was like for the early Pilgrims in Plimouth Plantation by reading Sarah Morton's Day and Samuel Eaton's Day.  I have an entire  class  set of each of these books, thanks to my  colleague, so that made the reading part very easy.  When we finished reading, the students made a flow map of each of the children's day.  I asked the to really think about the chores and tasks, making note of each.   I then gave each student a non-fiction sheet with......

I am always looking for ways to integrate tech into my math lessons.  For some reason, I find that particular subject so just hard to use tech in a way that the kids are producing versus consuming.  So this unit, as we embarked on composite volume, I found a way to have the students use Google Drawings and Google Slides to create their own composite volume figures and, ultimately, create an interactive bulletin board that will give all the students practice finding the volume of composite figures. My students had been practicing finding the volume of composite figures for about two days.  They basically just were using worksheets from the math book and I felt that they were ready for a bit of a challenge.  In the past, we have used Lego bricks to practice with additive composite volume (see that post here )  But this time, I thought we could change it up with tech. We broke out the chrome books and the students opened to Google Drawings.   Drawings is ......

I was lucky enough to receive some stop motion animation cameras from DonorsChoose.org to use in my classroom.  I was so very excited to use them, so I immediately opened the packages and began exploring.  I was loving what was happening with my camera, so I began to research ways to teach my students whole scale how to do stop motion.  Since I only had 4 cameras, I wanted a way to be a bit more whole group with my lessons.  So I posted on Instagram and a few people mentioned using Google Slides as a way to teach stop motion.  My kids are very familiar with Google Slides, so I was on board immediately! To be honest, this was WAY easier than I thought it was going to be.  Here are the basic steps I taught my students. 1.  Open up a Google Slide. 2.  Insert clip art or a shape.  (I showed my students using a plain square from the shapes tool.) 3.  Duplicate the slide. 4.  Move the shape just slightly. 5.  Dupli......

My students do a lot of work on the Google Apps and other online platforms.  A LOT.   And while that is all fine and dandy (believe me when I tell you that I wouldn't have it any other way), it leaves my bulletin boards a bit, shall we say, lacking. I mean, I can print things out to post on a board, and I do.  But when the students are using an amazing interactive program like Thinglink, which requires the viewer to click on various items the student input, a flat 2-D version of it, without all the interaction, just doesn't show off how awesome the final product really is.  Or when they create a multi-page Slide presentation with links to outside websites, a printed version just doesn't translate well to a bulletin board.    Something invariably gets lost when it goes from computer screen to printer paper.  Additionally, because the kids are doing so much online, it just isn't feasible, or preferable, to print every.single.thing out. So, while my ......

I have made a concerted effort to get away from reading logs in my classroom.  I know, I know.  So many people use them and love them, but honestly, I just didn't.  Years ago, I did get away from the "mom sign this" reading log by creating a more content based log (that I still use as in class assignments) but that just wasn't working for my students anymore.  Tracking them down on a daily basis to see if they did their reading wasn't creating readers and it wasn't making me very happy as a teacher.  I created my Reading Bookshelf (that I LOVE LOVE LOVE, and highly recommend to all of you...not that I am biased or anything.) but I found that I just wanted a little bit more formal information from the kids.  So this year, I played around with Google Forms, and came up with something that I am really happy with.  Since it was working so well, I thought I would share with you.  The first thing I did was create a very simple Google Form to c......