is offering another FREEBIE!

I can't resist! I just have to give away another freebie! These Green and Blue Polka Dot Frames are too cute! You get four frames, one with a transparent middle, one with green, one blue, and one white middle. These would be great for stationary, letters, lesson plans, TPT creations, or flashcards. Enjoy!

posted a great freebie to TPT!

For those of you selling on TPT, creating your own lessons, units, etc., or if you're looking for some new scrapbooking designs, check out my latest Colorful & Black Dots Backgrounds and Frames on my TPT store! The best part is they are FREE! If you download these images, please leave me feedback, and follow my store. Enjoy!

made another set of sight word flashcards.

My Polka Dot Sight Words were going over so well on my TPT store, I decided to mix it up and create another theme. Check out my new Splatter Theme!

This is a set of 220 Dolch word cards. It includes 5 sets of cards, each on a different color, splatter-themed background.

- Pre-primer Sight Words (word cards, 4 blank cards)
- Primer Sight Words (word cards, 4 blank cards)
- First Grade Sight Words (41 word cards, 7 blank cards)
- Second Grade Sight Words (46 word cards, 4 blank cards)
- Third Grade Sight Words (word cards, 7 blank cards)
If only I had a class to use these with this year! :(

teaches with Wordle.

If you’re familiar with the website, Wordle, then it should be no surprise to you that this powerful teaching tool has managed to hold a permanent spot on my list of Top 10 Favorite Sites to Use With Students. I first learned of the site a few years ago while attending a workshop on Web 2.0 in the classroom. I’ve gone to this site for personal use, for educational purposes, and have even used it to advertise for Tanya Rae Designs!

Here is a Wordle I made for my son, when he was born. It sits on his bedroom dresser.
(Personal information is blackened out.)



Wordle is amazingly simple to use and can work magic in your classroom. It’s basically a word cloud, where the more you type a word, the bigger that word gets. You can edit the font, style, order, layout, and color, and can print out the final product.

It’s a great way to preview, review, or display vocabulary and spelling words. I’ve always used it with my fifth graders to have them summarize a text - with the biggest, most important ideas being the biggest words in the Wordle. It’s great for any poetry unit, or for reflecting. For example, after a field trip, I had my students create a Wordle to represent what they learned and what they thought of the experience. There are so many more ways to use it. But my two favorite ways take place at the beginning and end of the year.

Before school starts, I always make a Wordle about myself. I include things that I want the students to know about me, and then I hang it on my door, or even frame it and put it on my desk. During the first few days, I have each student make his or her own. They can hang theirs on lockers, desks, glue to their notebook cover, folder, or display on a wall. They LOVE this!

At the end of the year, I do something a little bit different. I take the students to the computer lab and have them each log in and open up Wordle. I instruct them to type in their own name fifteen to twenty times (cut and paste works wonders for this). When they’re finished, they and stand up and rotate one computer/chair over, sit down, and type one (positive) word that describes the person whose name is repeated on the screen. We continue rotating and typing until each student has typed one word on every other student’s Wordle. I make sure to type something on each student’s computer, as well. When they get back to their own computer, they hit ‘Create’ and can play around with the colors and fonts, etc. They can then print out their Wordle.

Their name will appear the largest and if several students in the class type the same word, this word appears larger than the others. For example, if there is a student that everyone knows as being helpful, that word will probably be the biggest. It’s great for the students to see what character or personality trait they possess, stands out the most. You do need to talk about being appropriate and positive. I even go over a list of possible character traits or adjectives with the class before doing this. Otherwise, you’ll have those students that just go around typing the word, ‘nice’, on everyone’s computer.

If your district doesn’t allow the students to print in color, have the students choose a bubble-letter font and print in black & white. They can take them home to color, if they would like.

Another tip is to have the students type in Word and copy and paste into Wordle. I recommend this because once you start typing in Wordle, you can’t save and come back to it later. You can save the text in Word, however.

How to Use Wordle:

1. Write some text in a word processing program.
2. Select all of the text and then copy it to the clipboard.
3. Go to wordle.net.     
4. Click on ‘Create your own’.
5. Paste the text.
6. Click ‘Go’.
7. Edit the layout, font, color, etc. with the appropriate tabs.
8. Use a screen capture tool to save the wordle, or click ‘open in window’ and print.

Oh, and by the way: here's the Wordle of this post. I set out to write about using Wordle with students. Looks like I've succeeded!

 

finally learned how to add a direct link in a comment box!

I have to take a moment to send out a huge THANK YOU to Kristen from Ladybug's Teacher Files for posting a tutorial on how to leave a direct link to your blog in a comment. I've been reading so many blogs lately and I keep seeing these direct links, wondering how in the world everyone is doing it.

So I did what I always do when I want to learn something like this. I googled it! But, I all I really found was  a tutorial that might as well have been written in another language because after step one I was utterly confused. I now realize that it was my search terms in google that yielded such unhelpful results, which is crazy to me! Let me explain...

When I was teaching 5th grade it drove me nuts when I saw students look for information on google by typing in something like this...

 

I don't know how many times I would model for them, the "correct way" to search in google, or any other search engine. I remember sounding like a broken record, "Don't type in an entire question. Just type in the key words!".

 

Well, this time I have to eat my words, because when I typed in "how to leave a direct link to your blog in a comment", guess what? Success! TBA's post was the first on the list, and by far the most simple to follow.

 

Anyway, I guess it doesn't really matter how I found it, I'm just SO glad I did! Go ahead, go to her link above and learn for yourself. When you're finished, come back and test it out by leaving me a comment with your direct link. And be on the look out for mine because a commenting I go! :) Now, to figure out how to add a signature to my posts. Hmmm...what to google...

posted an amazing science unit to TPT!

After over 8 hours of being hunched over my keyboard and computer screen, I've finally finished my latest TPT unit! I am extremely proud of the amount of time and care I put into this 43-page unit before publishing it. I really hope that someone out there finds it to be as amazing as I think it is.

I had tons of success with this unit when I taught fifth grade and I'm pretty sad that I don't have a classroom to do this with this year. In fact, this was one of the top favorites, acording to my end-of-year survey I always had my students fill out. Stop on by my TPT store and check it out!

teaches with technology

As educators, we are constantly learning. We learn from our interactions with students, parents, community members and faculty members. We learn everything from classroom management techniques, to RTI procedures, how to stay up-to-date with changing standards, to the first and last names of hundreds and hundreds of students. And I don’t know about you, but doesn’t it seem like every other year there’s another training to go to in the use of a new Teacher’s Edition to our text (which I hardly use anyway)? Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE to learn! I mean, I am a pretty big advocate of learning, after all. It’s just that there is SO much of it that needs to be done!

Sometimes, I wish our brains came with USB ports. When we ran out of space, we could just plug in an external hard drive and begin filling it up with more information. I would be the first in line to get my hands on one of those, let me tell you.

Being a teacher has always been a tough job, but as the amount of information that exists in the universe increases each year, so does the amount of pressure on teachers to teach and students to learn. According to Richard Alleyne, Science Corresponded for the The Telegraph, the growth in the internet, 24-hour television and mobile phones means that we now receive five times as much information every day as we did in 1986. Every day the average person produces six newspapers worth of information compared with just two and a half pages 24 years ago – nearly a 200-fold increase!

These days technology, alone, seems to advance at the speed of light and let’s face it, there is no possible way teachers can stay up to date on EVERYTHING tech related. But, there are tons of amazing tools and resources floating around in cyber land, just waiting to be put to good, educational use. I have always believed that if you teach in a way that gets your students excited and enthusiastic, the learning targets will pretty much look after themselves. Using the internet in the classroom is one of the best ways to bring out that excitement and enthusiasm in classrooms today.

I’ve decided to begin a series of posts to share some of the ways in which teachers and parents can incorporate the internet into the classroom, or their child's learning at home. There are hundreds and thousands, if not millions (okay, maybe not millions) of amazing, quality websites that teachers and parents should know about and should be using right now. My goal is to share some that I have personally tried and tested.