Great Math/Reading Ideas

If you are looking for great math and reading ideas and games for your students, look no further. Mary Pitner from Pitner's Potpourri has tons of them. I am a huge fan of her ideas. I know my students will love them too. All she asks for in return is a comment. How awesome is that!

Donors Choose, Newspaper, and Camera

I finally have entered my first project into the Donors Choose website. I wrote about the project that I started with my students that I had last year. I have never seen students so interested in writing about topics before the newspaper project. It all started when I had my class write thank you letters to the local community college journalism department. They and other area organizations had donated hats, gloves, and many other winter items to our school due to the high poverty level in our area.
The journalism department contacted me and said that my class was the only one they they had received thank yous from and wanted to know if I was interested in starting a classroom newspaper with their help. So over the course of the second semester, the college students would come in and help the students with learning about brainstorming newspaper article topics, narrowing down topics, writing sentences properly, and more.
I am really excited to see the students delve into research, interviewing and writing. It will also be really cool if we have the camera, battery, and case funded so the kids can have their own camera to use. Last year, the students had to be supervised using the camera because it belonged to the college journalism department and we could only use it when they were with us. 
 Here you can see our first issue and second issue.

Great Car Activities

Check out these cute activities from Ladybird Ln. These would be great for keeping kids busy on car rides. She has the step-by-step instructions on her website. These look like great learning tools for young children too.

Second Week Starting Tomorrow

Monday, tomorrow is the beginning of our second week of school. I have a great class of third graders. Last week when we were talking about writing, I read to the students a great book Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude. We talked about how different people can write about one topic in many different ways. The boy and girl in the story saw writing a fairy tale story so completely different, but in the end it all fit together. It really helped the boys and girls become really excited about writing this year. We had a great start to the beginning of an exciting year.