My Favorite Teaching Ideas of 2015

This was my month long project to add technology to my reading center/stations.  The kids love listening to each other read.  

I just loved the focus on kindness and giving my students had during Advent with our Advent Angel.  

I can not say enough times that Christmas Card exchange with other classrooms is a wonderful experience.  This year I added using Google Earth to the lessons.  My class did well in the Social Studies test.  They had a good understanding of the vocabulary needed in the unit.    

 I love Story Maker at ABCYA.  My students were able to apply a lot of the computer skills while creating their turkey books.  

This lesson was my first attempt at using qr codes.  I can not how much fun my students had doing this spelling activity.  

Our prayer rocks have enhanced our prayer time at the end of the day.  Lots of time the students pick a work that represents what we are taking about that day.  It is a nice way to wrap up our class time together.  

This was not my idea however it has worked out for me.  I always called this the "Unfinished Pocket."  But my class was calling it the "Catch Up Pocket." So I gave in and renamed it.  It is important to see what work the students still need to finish each day. I send home all unfinished work on Fridays.    

I went back old school this year and wrote my poems on chart paper. Love this idea....we are reading the poem more as a class and I notice the students reading the poem more as they wait for me to begin a lesson on the carpet.  

 Love...Love...Love the writing folders.  The students are using them as resource to find unknown words.  We even added a list of juicy words.   .  

I loved this art project last year.  I do want to add some kind of writing to the activity.  I have more ideas here on the link.

 This was another great idea that made a great first day of school and lead to some good discussion.  I had my 2014-2015 class put together a book to tell the new first grader what to expect during the year.  It had illustrations and photos.  I thought is turned out cute.  

A cute last minute idea I threw together was to have the class make an ornament to remember their first grade year.