Sunday, September 28, 2014

TPT Sale

In honor of my new blog design, I'm throwing a sale for my 12 top selling items on TPT. 10% off any of the following 12 items, from now until Wednesday, October 1st! I hope you'll stop by, and while you're there... Follow my Shop!




Tuesday, September 23, 2014

New Blog Design Giveaway!

Can I tell you how in love I am with my new blog design? Megan at A Bird in Hand Designs, created this beautiful new blog layout just for me and it's wonderful! I love every single inch of it!

Soooo....

In honor of my gorgeous new blog, I'm hosting a giveaway!

$100 worth of gift cards to Amazon, Erin Condren, Apple, and Target. You have nine opportunities to enter the drawing. Share this post with a friend and help me get my blog out there!

The giveaway ends next week! So get in there quickly!

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Sunday, September 14, 2014

EngageNY & flipped videos

I finally feel like I'm in the swing of the school year, as we're coming up on week number 4. My kiddos and I are settling into our routine, and math has been a huge adjustment for us all.

Since we're now officially using the CCSS in our district, we're expected to teach it, even though we don't have adopted textbooks for the new standards. The biggest area of concern was obviously math. The CCSS has completely different standards then we've been using, so we needed to figure out a way to teach these new standards without new textbooks.

Enter EngageNY. If you haven't had a chance to check out the EngageNY website, I highly recommend it. They have both Math and ELA resources for students and teachers.

My district gave teachers the option to try out EngageNY's math program as a supplemental program, in place of our state standard textbooks. And let me tell you, it's a whole new ballgame!

EngageNY is split into 6 "Modules" or chapters, with anywhere from 15-30 lessons, depending on the topic. The lessons are so comprehensive, and include so much information, the students (and teacher!) is learning in a new way. I've never found myself studying up on what I was teaching for math, so much! It's been an adjustment, but I can honestly say, my kids are getting it. It's taking them some time to get used to a new way of thinking and explaining mathematical concepts, but they've been such excited learners.

To help my students ease the transition to these new math concepts, I've been using the app Explain Everything to create videos.  I'd used Educreations in the past, and I do like the fact that's free, but can't even tell you how many times I was in the middle of recording the audio for my video and I would misspeak, or cough, or just plain mess up, and I'd have to rerecord my entire audio. Frustrating!

Thankfully a colleague introduced me to Explain Everything, and I haven't looked back. It's very similar to Educreations, but gives you more flexibility in how you create your videos, adding in pictures, the color scheme you want to use... and best of all... you can edit the audio, and simply erase that one part where you messed up! And it's only $2.99. Worth every penny if you ask me.




So I've been creating videos for the lessons, to help my students as they work on their homework, so that they can watch and re-watch as much as they want. And the feedback I'm getting from my students and their parents, is wonderful. I love being able to "flip" some lessons for them.

I'm not ready to completely flip my math program, but this is definitely the first step!

Do any of you flip any of your lessons? Have you tried any of the EngageNY lessons? What do you think?





Monday, September 1, 2014

Currently

I'm linking up with Farley over at Oh' Boy 4th Grade, for another one of her monthly "Currently" linky parties. How cute is this month's design?! I love the little campers at the bottom. I may not like camping in a tent, but campers are such a fun little trip!




Listening
Confession time... I never made it all the way through Breaking Bad. I know, everyone raves about how great of a show it is, and I had watched season 1... and then I just stopped. So I'm jumping back on the bandwagon and diving in. I'm rewatching season 1, since I don't remember a whole lot.

Loving
I'm a total comic book movie nerd. I've seen all of the Marvel movies and so today to celebrate Labor Day I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy. It was really good! Funny and action packed all at the same time. A great way to spend 2 hours.

Thinking
School. Does any teacher not constantly find themselves thinking about school? I'm starting a brand new math program tomorrow and in all honesty. I'm kind of nervous. It's so different than anything else I've ever done. And I hope the students enjoy it.

Wanting
I'm greedy, I know... but I'm really enjoying this 3 day weekend... Can't we have 1 more?

Needing
My kitchen is pretty bare, and I really should go grocery shopping. But it's almost 100 degrees outside, and I really don't want to go. I'll make do with the basics I have.

3 Trips
My next big trip is Iceland. I'm hopefully heading there in November, and I can't wait to see the Northern Lights. The impending volcano is not helping my plans, however. I also would love to go to Australia, but I need to save up more. And lastly, if you know me at all you know I'd love to go to Scotland. Truly beautiful.