Homeworkopoly Game!

I found this neat game called Homeworkopoly on teachnet.com blog. It looks like it would be a lot of fun for students to play. The game board is 35 inches square so it is big enough to use on a bulletin board. Here are the instructions on how to use this game!

Homeworkopoly Instructions

Homeworkopoly is a fun way to encourage children to do their homework! Here are some basic instructions, but feel free to use your own judgment and change things around to suit your class needs. We have tried to leave off negative things such as “Go to jail” in order to keep this experience as positive as possible.

In order for a student to play the game, he or she must complete their homework from the night before and hand it in to the teacher. This is how the student moves around the game board. If the student does not have their homework finished, they don’t get their chance to shake the die and move for the day (with exceptions, of course). Throughout the year, day by day you keep the game going. By starting at the beginning of the year everyone gets into it and by the end of the year everyone is doing their homework regularly. Listed below are detailed instructions for Homeworkopoly…

Setup

1. To make game tokens, print off our education clipart, write a student’s name under the picture, then pin on the board. Rolling the die before starting will spread students around the board, if you like.

2. Game pieces may be tacked directly to the board, or outside the board to preserve the playing field.

3. Depending on what version you have chosen to print off the web site, you may need to write in the street names. This can be fun for your students as well. If you choose to laminate the game board pieces you could let the children rename the streets periodically.

4. Using one die will slow their travel around the board.

5. Print the “Chance” and “Community Lunchbox” cards and cut them out. There are extras if you have other ideas to use for them. Just write them in! (If you have business card holders, these would work great for holding the cards up on your bulletin board for easy access.)

Getting Started

1. When a student brings in any homework from the night before, have them go over to the board, roll the die and move. Each student will do this in the morning when their homework is handed in if they have done the assigned homework.

2. The students will continue to do this throughout the year. It never has to end.

3. Deal with special spaces as the students land on them.

4. Having a rotating “Game Show Host” to keep check on the board as students move will make your job easier.

Special Spaces

* MYSTERY PRIZE – When a student lands on this space, they can pick a prize from a pencil box or maybe the teacher could have little grab bags with the mystery prize in them.

* BRAIN BINDERS -Printable, foldable paper puzzles that range from very easy to very challenging.

* GAME SPOT – The game spot is used for playing games from your own classroom.

* FREE HOMEWORK – The student gets a free homework pass for the night when landing on this space. (Usually not a problem with happening too often, if so, check it out. Watch closely when moving around the board.)

* TAKE A SEAT ON THE BUS – When a student lands here, they go to the yellow square diagonally across the board and sit there. When on this square, the teacher can have this student read to the class aloud, do problems on the chalkboard, or pass out milk, for example. These are just a few examples of what the student could do, feel free to use your own ideas.

* GO – When passing go, the student may receive a little prize, such as picking a piece of sugarless gum or little trinket out of the pencil box of goodies, whatever the teacher thinks is an appropriate prize.

There are game boards to download on the blog, one has street names already printed on there or there is another one without street names where you can put street names from your town on it. There are Chance Cards for you to download and use, too, there are also blank ones for you to make up your own cards. This game is one that I plan to print off and use!

Kappa Delta Pi!

This has nothing to do with our class but I wanted to write about it anyway. I was invited to join Kappa Delta Pi a few months ago and lastnight I went to my installation. I am very excited to be a part of this wonderful organization!! It was awesome to see two other people from this reading class being inducted into KDP, too!

I look forward to being involved in this wonderful organization. I feel very honored that I was even invited to join. Dr. Landry said that they only take the top 10% from NSU students whereas the KDP admits the top 20%. This is a real accomplishment for me because when I first came back to NSU in the fall of 2010 my gpa was not even at the 2.50 it needed to be for me to be admitted to the teacher education program. Luckily, I was able to get academic forgiveness so I could wipe away the bad semester grades I had from my first time at college. I am happy to say that since I have been back, I have made A's in all my classes and my gpa is 3.30 right now!! I feel proud of myself and I hope I continue to do well and serve as an example to others that no matter how old you are or how poorly you did the first (second, third, etc.) time you came to college; you can still succeed if you put your mind to it!

I also want to thank you Mrs. Massey for being a wonderful teacher. I appreciate that you have been so flexible with assignments. I have turned so many things in late this semester and that is not like me! You have been one of my most favorite teachers here!  You inspire me to be a better person and I hope that I can be as wonderul a teacher as you when I get my own classroom. Thank you for being there for all of us especially since this has been a rough semester for many of us....

Banana Bucks, Six Thinking Hats, Facebook and Books!

On teachnet.com blog, I found this neat idea to use in the classroom. They have designed money called Banana Bucks that you can print off and use with your students as a reward. Some of the ways you can give your students the money as a reward for are: Good behavior; Meeting expectations; Achieving goals; Good attendance and there are more on the list but you get the idea. Of course, you can come up with your own as well. The students can spend their money on the following ideas: Extra recess time; Extra time at the computer; Messenger of the day and there are more on the list. You can also come up with ideas for them to use to spend their money on. I like this idea because it is not giving students candy, stickers, etc. just for making good grades or a 100 on a test. You can come up with all different kinds of criteria for them to get the Banana Bucks because not all students are going to make good grades on tests, etc.

On teach net blog I found a neat idea to use with students in the classroom. It is called Six Thinking Hats and you can use it in almost any problem solving activity that might be encountered in the classroom. There is a white, red, black, yellow, green and blue hat. I would make the hats and laminate them then place them all at the top of chart paper. The white hat is where you list the facts of the problem. The red hat is where you state the emotion(s) that stems from the problem. The black hat is where you list the negative aspects of the problem. The yellow hat is where positives of the situation are examined. The green hat is where you list creative ideas that come with seeing the problem in a new light. The blue hat is where you sum up what you have learned. Hopefully this helps eliminate the problem. I love this idea and plan to file it away for future use.

On the Road to Teaching blog, they have a post that lists five tips to avoid Facebook and other social media pitfalls. I think this is very relevant for us because recent news events telling about teachers losing their jobs over what has been on their Facebook accounts. Here are the five tips:

1.      Learn about your Facebook and other social media privacy settings. Be very conservative and constantly ask yourself if you want certain information in the public domain.

2.      Be a smart producer.  Don’t post comments, pictures, links, etc. that your mother/father would find offensive or upsetting.  Chances are that your (future) employer would find them offensive as well.  Assume if you are applying for a job that the human resources and/or principal will review your online profile.

3.      Inquire about your school district’s social media policies.  More and more districts are outlining appropriate behaviors in the social media world.

4.      Set boundaries of who you want to befriend on Facebook.  Some of my high school teacher colleagues refuse to allow any student to be their Facebook friend.  Others, say only students that they had strong relationships with AND have graduated are allowed.

5.      Assume administration reads your content. Really?  Do principals have the time to review your Facebook profile and read your teacher blogs?  The answer is mixed.   Some principals regularly check their teachers’ blogs to inquire about comments about students and the school, and assess the school’s overall climate.  Don’t assume because you have an alias the administration can’t connect the dots between you and your blog.  Be sensible about your content.

On Two Writing Teachers blog, they talked about three books that I want to find and read. They are Chloe Instead by Micah Player, No Bears by Meg McKinley and Larf by Ashley Spires. The first two books they give writing workshop ideas for you to use. These books are all new ones published this year. I am a book addict so I love finding out about books that I can use in my classroom. I definitely want to pass on my love of reading to all of my students!

Comments for Report Cards & Progress Reports, Poetry & More

On teachnet.com blog, they have a list of almost 300 Comment Ideas for Report Cards & Progress Reports. This would be an awesome list to print off and save for use in our future classrooms. They also have a post that has a lot of Ice Breaker games for students to play at the beginning of the school year. They look like they would be a lot of fun for our students! They also have an activity to use in your classroom called Attendance Chart. They tell how you can turn your absences into a learning experience. This would make a neat math activity!

On the Road to Teaching blog, they have a post telling you what to do you if you are applying for a teaching job at an unfamiliar school.

 If you have only a day before the interview they offer you these tips:

a.       Conduct online research of the community. This will give you an idea of the socio-economic and ethnic background of your students.

b.      Visit the school’s website. Read everything but especially the school newsletters so you know what is going on at the school.

c.       Review the school’s test scores. This will show you the strength and areas of improvements in student achievement.

If you have several days before the interview, they offer these tips:

a.       Do everything mentioned above.

b.      Send an email to your teacher friends, tell them you have an interview, and ask them if they have any insight on the school where you applied.

c.       Go to a café near the school. Observe and occasionally talk to some of the people there.

d.      Drive around the school and the local community. This will give you an opportunity to find the school prior to your interview.

On the Two Writing Teachers blog, they have a post titled First Attempt at Poetry. Ruth (one of the bloggers) and a teacher named, Lori, launched a poetry unit of study in Lori’s kindergarten classroom. They wanted to see if the students could write a poem. Ruth read them a poem called Pencil Sharpener by Zoe Ryder White. In the poem it talks about how it sounds like bees are buzzing inside the pencil sharpener. Lori sharpened pencils while the students listened to the sound of the sharpener. They asked the students what else they heard when the pencil sharpener was going. Some of the responses were, “It sounds like rushing water. It sounds like a rusty old car. It sounds like a song is in there. Sh-sh-sh.” They have posted a couple of the students poems and a video of one little boy’s poem that they taped. This is a neat idea and I can’t wait to do something like this in my classroom!

Over on the Answer Sheet blog, I read a post called 10-year-old: “I want to know why after vacation I have to take test after test after test.” The writer of the article is Carol Corbett Burns, a principal at a school in New York. Her ten-year-old neighbor said this to her, “  I want to know why after vacation I have to take test after test after test,” she asked. “I know what math I’m good at. My teacher knows the words I can’t spell. My mom knows I’m a fast reader…. So what’s the point?”

Carol didn’t answer but asked a question of her own, ““Why do you think the tests are important?”

The ten-year-old answered, ““No idea,” she said, “but my teacher says that we need to do good on them. She’s nervous about us taking the tests. Now here’s what I think. I am supposed to learn in school, right? But either you are test-taking or you are learning—can’t be doing both at the same time.”

Carol says that the little girl is right and I think so, too. We are pushing these tests so much that students aren’t learning all they need to know. I know I have said the same things over and over, so if you would like to read the whole story you can here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/10-year-old-i-want-to-know-why-after-vacation-i-have-to-take-test-after-test-after-test/2012/04/10/gIQA1sOz8S_blog.html#pagebreak

Printables, Books, & Resources

I found several interesting things on the teach.net blog.  The first one is a teacher resource website called North Star Teacher Resource. They have bookmarks, number & alphabet lines, printer paper, awards & incentives, bulletin board display items, and lots more. There website address is www.nstresources.com. I am going to save them to my favorites because I plan to order some items from them. I especially loved the bookmarks!

Some printables from teach.net include: a Classroom Display Alphabet, it available in 26 different fonts. You can print them out and decorate them or since they are outline only letters; you can let your students color and decorate them on the first day of school. You can then hang them up on the wall for students to use. Oversized Playing Cards- you can print these out and use them for math activities. Printable Certificates & Awards- there are a lot of these to choose from. Just download, print out, and fill out the information. These are awesome! There is also a Awards for Everything post, that gives ideas to use for basic certificates such as Certificate of Appreciation. This blog has a lot of neat ideas for new teachers to use!

On the Road to Teaching blog, they posted about a new Learning Management Software that is FREE for teachers called Canvas. It has rich features around common teaching tasks – grading, communicating, calendaring, creating assignments, etc.  Canvas has the potential to reshape how you organize, communicate, deliver curriculum. The person who posted about this said they used to use Blackboard but now uses Canvas. To find out more information about this site go here: http://www.instructure.com/  It looks interesting and something that I might try out when I get a teaching job.

On Two Writing Teachers blog, they talked about some books that I would be interested in reading and using in my classroom. The first one is called Nasty Bugs. It is an anthology of bug poems edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins. I am not a bug person but I think students would have fun reading the bug poems and then making up poems about bugs on their own. We could then have our own classroom anthology to put in our reading center for students to read over and over again.

The next book is called Ladybugs by Gail Gibbons. Here is what Ruth (one of the bloggers on Two Writing Teachers) had to say about it “The thing I’m most excited to share with them [students] are the rich diagrams. There is more than just labels on the diagrams. Some of them include sentences with key points, pronunciation guides, and specific titles”. I think this book would be a great addition to my classroom.

The last book is called Peas on Earth by Todd H. Doodle. It uses a simple play on words to portray the basic concepts of peace, harmony, getting along with all kinds of people, and being green in a manner that young kids will grasp. And it will resonate more as they grow older. Adult caregivers will chuckle over the peas/peace references while young children will relate to the important messages about our earth and those of us who live on it.  The artwork is colorful, charming, and perfect for the board book crowd. And, as an added value, there is a simple pop-up at the end of the book. It sounds like a cute book and I want to read it!

Over on the Answer Sheet blog, I read a post called Report: Test-based incentives don’t produce real student achievement. The report says that incentive programs for schools, teachers and students aimed at raising standardized test scores are largely unproductive in generating increased student achievement.

The report said that standardized tests commonly used in schools to measure student performance — including high school exit exams and tests in various grades mandated by former president Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — “fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways,” according to a summary of the lengthy document.

The researchers concluded that the effects of incentive programs tend to be “small and . . . effectively zero for a number” of such programs.

Other studies in the past year have also cast doubt on the effectiveness and reliability of the value-added method of teacher/principal evaluation, which takes student test scores and puts them into a formula that is supposed to factor out other influences and determine the “value” a teacher has brought to a student’s learning.

The method often ignores outside-school factors that can influence how a child does on a test, including lack of sleep, hunger and illness, but even formulas that are said to take these into account are not especially reliable, some experts have said.

I don’t know what else I can add to this. There are a lot of us who know that standardized testing is not the best method to measure students’ achievement. Until the policymakers figure this out, we are all left to suffer the stress of high-stakes testing!

Teacher Feedback, Activities, and Books

I found this interesting post on the Road to Teaching blog. They were talking about how rare it is for K-12 schools to seek feedback on teachers. They state that students know effective teaching when they see it. I think this would be a great idea to use with students in 5^th-12^th grade to participate in teacher feedback. I especially think that high school subject areas teacher get into ruts; they teach the same curricula the same way every year. I can only imagine how boring that would be for the students who fail the class and have to take it again!

They offer four different ways to get student feedback and they are:

Exit Slip: They can be given out at the end of each day/activity/unit. The students can describe what they learned, what they still have questions about, and suggestions for future lessons. Using this student feedback, teachers can reflect and adjust their practice to better meet their students’ needs.

Interviews: Interviews can be formal or informal. Teachers can ask their students how they feel the class is going. What instructional methods/activities do they learn best from? These direct questions usually elicit some interesting student responses.

Focus groups. Teachers can use this strategy by first having students write down their individual thoughts about the topics they teach and then proceed with a class discussion. Ask the students for their suggestions and maybe what they are concerned about. Teachers can use this activity to demonstrate that everyone has a role in their own learning.

Surveys: Teachers can make one of their own or find one on the internet and tweak it to their needs. These would be good to use throughout the course, grade, unit, etc. This will give teachers ongoing feedback on student growth and allowing them to make necessary adjustments of their teaching practice.

I found a lot of neat ideas to use with your students on teach.net blog. There is a post about making your own kites and they list a website that helps you craft some. There is a weather activity for the month of March and it also includes web resources for you to use. There are a couple of ideas for you to use to play April Fool’s jokes on your students. There is a Clover Match game that can be played on your SmartBoard and tells you what website to go to let your students play the game. There is also a President’s Day Pop Quiz that is a free printable you can print off for your class. I know there are probably lots more ideas from this blog, but this is all I am listing from it for now. I will definitely put this in my favorites so that I can use ideas from it for my future classroom.

Two Writing Teachers blog has posted a couple of books that sound very interesting. The first one is Hugo Cabret that one of the authors read to her young son. She got it for him for Christmas; she said that she likes to move through books quickly but her son likes to read them slowly and savor them. Once they finished it, he wanted to recommend it to his friends, so he wrote a letter to his friend Mimi (there is a copy of his letter and the translation on the post).  The other book is a book of poetry titled The Arrow Finds It Mark: A Book of Found Poems. It comes in handy with April being National Poetry Month. I will have to find copies of these books and read them!