Graphing Motion Stations

I am hooked on Mad Science Lessons' products on TPT.  HOOKED!  He gives me exactly what I need when I don't have time to do it myself.  Eventually, I will learn to stand on my own and create incredible station labs for my classroom too but until then...

When introducing a unit, it's always nice to let them explore and do some experiencing themselves.  Station labs are perfect for that.  The students go through the following stations:

• Explore It
• Research It
• Illustrate It
• Organize It
• Write It
• Read It
• Watch It
• Assess It

I have found that these have helped my kids immensely in getting familiar with a topic before I even have to start doing the teaching.  Even better, they are responsible for their own learning.  That's what my classroom is all about.  

I ordered those stands online for about a dollar apiece from a restaurant supply store.  There are the best for stations.  So who is a seller on TPT that you are obsessed with?

Winning the Pencil War

Every teacher understands the frustration of pencils.  You want your kids to do their work, but you want them to have their own supplies.  There are always those kids that don't have pencils though.  Unfortunately, with my kids, pencils during the first semester disappeared all the time.  I tried multiple things.  Leave a shoe, take a pencil for you definitely didn't work for me because I didn't have time to keep up with it.  Kids would take pencils out of the classroom constantly.  I found that I was going through 50 pencils a month.  Seriously, that is ridiculous.  *New teacher prob!*

I found something on Pinterest that has saved my life in regards to pencils.  You can see that link here.  The basic idea is that the kids take a pencil off the board, but no one gets to leave the classroom until the pencil is back.  I have mine near my door in a place I can see from any point in the classroom.  I have found that once students know that no one can leave, they tend to make sure the pencil gets back one way or another.  I have had the same five pencils for over six weeks.  I just recently replaced them with mechanical pencils now that the system is working.

In the idea on Pinterest, they used a ribbon to hold it up.  I just used the command hooks meant for hanging picture frames.  Those are life savers.

Do you have any tricks for keeping the pencils in your classroom?  Please share in the comments below.

Store Officially Opened: Freebie

The time has come for me to start, finally, posting products.  I might be about to fall head over heels into failure but I'll do it with all I've got.

So without further ado, here is my freebie.  My kids tend to struggle with average speed so I make lots of practice sheets.  And the link is to one of them.

So if you need some extra practice or some homework, here ya go.  Just go here to buy.

That Time I Met Bill Nye and Other TCEA Adventures

As a science teacher, I have found that there few science heroes out there that my kids admire.  One of the few that is out there is Bill Nye.  I don't know about your students, but when I let the kids know we are watching Bill Nye, I am met with excitement that I hope my principal always is magically drawn to and thereby thinks of me as a fabulous teacher.

Anyway, I digress.  Bill Nye just happened to be the keynote speaker at a technology conference I managed to luck into.  I was beyond thrilled to just get to see him in person, but then I got to meet him!  He was so patient to go through the throng of excited people that he made a difference with.  So let's pause and admire the not-so-fabulous-quality pictures below.

So besides having the pleasure of meeting Mr. Nye, the conference was so much fun.  My brain hurts from all the information that I learned or tricks that they had showed.  I'm going to share a few of the apps that I am now using on my iPad or websites I'm using.  You might already be using them, but if not, check them out. 

1.  Haiku Deck: I have found that I am using Canva and Haiku Deck together.  I make the pictures on Canva for a few slides and then put them in for Haiku Deck.  Powerpoint can be complicated for kids to figure out.  I have found that Haiku Deck is great for making presentations without the kids having to figure out the whole Powerpoint system.  Plus it looks good, keeps the kids from being too wordy, and it will help younger students understand the concept of Powerpoint when they get older.   

 2.  Canva:  Seriously this bad boy is gorgeous.  I have had so much fun making things on here.  It has so many templates for you to use that take absolutely no time at all to create gorgeous things.  There are a ton of free options for you, but there are also items that you can pay for if you want to get super fancy.  Plus there is a design school for you, and there are teachers that have provided lesson plans that they have used Canva for. 

3.  Hopscotch:  As a teacher that loves technology and is always trying to find ways to make her kids more tech savvy, I have found Hopscotch to be incredible so far.  The kids learn how to make their own games and animations by looking at how they are programmed.  If you want to start teaching younger kids how to code, this is a great place to start.  It is easy for the kids to use.  I would definitely have it installed on my class iPad for kids to play around with.  

4.  Kahoot:  I am only on my second year of teaching so I haven't gotten all the neat tricks.  I do love technology though so I am working on using it whenever possible.  Kahoot is this amazing tool that I am going to be using as much as possible.  It works better if you have a campus that encourages BYOD, but my school has a class set of iPads that we can check out.  This one is nice because you can do it on any type of device because it's a website, not an app.  You create a quiz or survey, they link in to the quiz as a class, and they each answer the question individually.  It shows the class how they did as a whole, but it doesn't say who got it wrong.  It's a good way to see how they rank as a class for understanding.  

Hope you have found something useful.  If you have any questions about how to use anything about, shoot me an email and I'll help you out.  

HELLO WORLD.

This is the first post for this blog.  Really I should come up with something mind-blowing to say.  In my mind I imagine all the awesome feats this blog will accomplish over the years, the lives touched, the inspiration shared, the collaboration accomplished...  That would be the dreamer in me.  Let's face it, this blog doesn't even have the about me section completed.  The blog has yet to find its purpose, its niche, or even more important *for you realists* it still hasn't found it's readers.  It is currently followed by one person, and that one person doesn't count, mostly because she's my mom.

Let me clue you in as to why I would have spent so much time building a website, which I actually love, even when I have no clue what I'm doing.  Back in college, I got started in the wild world of blogging as a reviewer for publishers in that crazy genre called young adult or YA.  I loved blogging. The writer in me just loved sharing all kinds of things and knowing that some people were just bored enough to read it.  

Teaching, as most know, is a tad time consuming *understatement of our lifetime* so most of the time I have little time.  Reading books for publishers on a schedule just didn't work anymore.  Looking back after my first year of teaching, well into my second, I feel that now I miss blogging.  I miss writing and the collaboration.  So I'm going to dive back into blogging, into a brand new pond of education blogging.  That is both terrifying and exciting!  

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to begin sharing what I do in my classroom, activities, and management systems.  I use technology heavily in my class, and let's be real: there is not much out there for middle school science blogs.  I really hope you are willing to hang with me.