Land Bridges

My eighth grade US History class is studying explorers and early civilizations. As a close to the unit on early civilizations, I gathered supplies and my classes proceeded to make land bridges - Berengia. I purchased pie plates from the local Walmart. I had lots of clay left over from a previous project and I divided the class into groups of three and gave each group two colors of clay.

They used the map in our text as a guide and they flattened and sculpted the clay into their rendition of the continents. After arranging the continents, they placed them in the pie plates. I borrowed a sno-cone machine and crushed a lot of ice. They covered up their continents with ice making sure the bridges were well covered.

The project went a lot quicker than I had anticipated. We had to wait a little bit to put them in the freezer and that allowed the ice to begin to melt. When they froze, we a great ice age replica. Today, I took the projects out of the freezer and was able to slide each project out the pan. They looked like stain glass.

This allowed us to look at each project and see the arrangements of continents. We were able to critique the projects as a group and discuss any problems we saw as well as compliment the designs of their classmates.

It was a nice beginning of the year project. I arranged the groups randomly and they had to learn to work with new classmates. Next year, I will divide them into groups of two instead of three. The work would evenly distributed with partners.

Reading Like a Historian

I was flipping through the Teaching Channel two weeks ago and came across a video of an inquiry based classroom. I loved the environment and knew with Tennessee's leap into Common Core it would blend perfectly with my teaching technique.

The teacher used curriculum from Reading Like a Historian and I knew I needed to try it in my classroom. For the first two days of class, I integrated the intro materials with the beginning of my back to school curriculum. The second lesson involved creating and writing an autobiographical book. I had run across a bound book project on another blog (one I can't find now) and I changed the lesson up just a little to use the bound book.

My students wrote their autobiographies and interviewed people about events in their lives. I have finished reading all of the books and they did an excellent job. I asked them to use as much artistic talent as they had after I explained that my talent lie in stick people but I could color with the best of them.




Here is a sample of one of the books. I learned so much about my students and I loved this lesson as an introduction to my students. I have made instant connections with them.

Liebster Award

I am so excited to have Julie from The Pencil Monkey nominate me for a Liebster Award. I'm very flattered and I've found so many blogs this summer by following other bloggers nominations.

To accept this nomination I must do the following:
1. Link back to the blog that nominated me
2. Nominate 5 - 11 blogs with fewer than 200 followers
3. Answer the questions posted by my nominator
4. Share 11 random facts about myself
5. Create 11 questions for my nominees
6. Contact my nominees to let them know I nominated them

Here are my questions from Julie!

1.  What is your guilty pleasure when you are not teaching?

Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby Ice Cream!

2.  Who is your hero or role model?

My education role model was my senior English teacher, Mrs. West. She had high expectations for everyone in her class, but she knew how to let you know individually what she expected of you. 

3.  Where do you see yourself in five years?

I see myself right here in my school. I love teaching in my high school. The only thing that could change that would be putting a middle school. We are a 7-12 school and I can see so much growth happening over the next few years.

4.  What is your favorite part of your day as a teacher?

I teach history and run the computer lab. I love doing enrichment with computer apps in my lab. I love see kids learn a new skill and then apply that to the content in a new way. It is very exciting. 

5.  What would your students say about you?

That I'm tough but fair and I can be a little wacky and unexpected in the classroom. I think nothing of stopping and pulling a brain break out when I see them start to melt. They just don't expect things like that in their classrooms.

6.  If you could buy one resource for your class what would it be? Why?

I really want a document camera. I love to use primary sources and photographs in my history classes and I really think students need to see those larger than life.

7.  What is your biggest strength?

I use a lot of technology and diverse teaching methods in my classroom.

8.   What is your favorite pen or pencil?

Pentel in green or purple ink and Sharpie Pens

9.  If you could take your class anywhere on a field trip where would it be?

I love national parks. So, I'd probably take them on a tour of Gettysburg or the National Mall.

10.  What is your favorite book?

I really don't have a favorite book, but I have favorite series. I love the mystery writer Dana Stabenow and her Kate Shugak series set in Alaska.

11.  One random item that you can't live without as a teacher.

colored pens

Here are my nominees:

http://teachunscripted.blogspot.com/

Gina at http://allthingsalgebra.blogspot.com/

Amber at http://shutthedoorandteach.blogspot.com/

The Group at http://booksinthemiddle.wordpress.com/

Lisa at http://artclasswithlmj.wordpress.com/

Here are my questions for my nominees:

1. Tea or Coffee?

2. Why did you begin your blog?

3. What is one goal you have for your classroom this year?

4. What is your favorite thing to teach?

5. Mac or PC?

6. What is the most prominent color in your wardrobe?

7. Does your classroom have a decoration theme?

8. What was your favorite class in college?

9. Where would you like to travel most?

10. Do you use foldables/interactive notebooks in your classroom?

11. Do you eat the cafeteria lunch?

My eleven random facts.

1. I love to do needlework. I cross stitch, quilt and last summer I taught myself knitting.

2. This summer I crossed Acadia National Park off my bucket list of national parks to visit.

3. In 2011, I traveled to Alaska on a mission trip. It was fabulous and I would love to go back.

4. If I go back to Alaska, I want it to be on a cruise.

5. Over the summer I went really all out girly and had manicures very two weeks. I never do that!

6. I have scripture verses hidden in spots all around my classroom for me to see throughout the day.

7. I have a screened in porch that I love to sit on but hate to clean. :)

8. I have two kitties, Asher and Puff and they are spoiled rotten.

9. I volunteer with BellyRubs Bassett Rescue. I transport bassetts and occasionally foster them. I love their arhooos, wrinkles and ears!

10. I have a fish pond with 20+ goldfish/koi. They've had babies and I'm scared to try and get a count of those.

11. I want to retire in Guatemala working with friends at a boys ranch they are building!

Thanks again Julie for the nomination!!!

Bell Ringers

In the past I haven't used bell ringers, but after watching my colleagues I decided they would make a great addition to my classes.

Today, I've hunted for a few PowerPoint templates. Then I spent a couple of hours taking standardized test prep questions and made a couple of units worth of bell ringers for my 7th grade geography class. I still need to do the same for my 8th U.S. History and 9th World History.

One of my fellow teachers shared that she covered every standard with bell ringers for her students. I've decided to mix standardized test prep questions with content driven questions. I'm still trying to decide if I want to incorporate them into our interactive notebooks.

Speaking of notebooks, what do you do when you find a box of envelopes that have sealed themselves because of the humidity? You cut in them in half and make pockets for your students' notebooks! I found a box today and most were completely sealed. Normally I would have thought "what a waste" but not today. :)

I also walked into my computer lab today and found a wonderful surprise. They had moved in all my new computers, unpacked and installed them! They even fixed mine! I know they have more programs to load, but I'm just excited to see it finished.

Let the Planning Begin!

I am very techy and I haven't carried a planner in years. For years, I carried a thick planner with everything under the sun in it. Then I met the Palm Pilot and fell in love and even convinced my non-tech mom to carry one. It had all my contacts, calendars and needlework inventory in it.

Unfortunately, smartphones/laptops took over and Palm Pilots were out marketed by Blackberry. My first smartphone was a BB and luckily I could transfer everything over and from there my planners were permanent history.

This works really well for my real life but it doesn't really seem to work for my teaching. Last summer I saw these cool personalized planners, but I'm really frugal and just wouldn't purchase one. I thought about making my own and in some ways I did. I pulled my attendance book apart and my lesson planner, three hole punched them and made an organizing binder.  

I'm really horrible about not putting things in my planner. I tend to pull things for the week and have them stacked on my desk or in my classroom closet (really a converted office). This summer I kept following even more middle school bloggers. Miss Math Dork blogged about making her own planner and I was ready to follow her lead. Then something awesome happened, she put her hard work to great use and offered her planner on TPT store, totally personalized!

It took several weeks before I decided to have her plan one for me. But I really couldn't resist. She was wonderful to work with, I picked out colors and fonts and in just a little while, my planner was ready for me to have it printed. She even included a link to a coupon site for the printing. :)

Printing was easy. I uploaded my file to Office Max and made decisions on binding, paper and printing styles. My local store was really quick. I received an email in hours telling me it was ready for pick up. Unfortunately, they made a mistake and printed it one sided and on the wrong paper weight. So while I had lunch and did the grocery shopping they reprinted my planner.

It turned out to be a happy mistake, they discounted the cost and gave me the extra planner for free! I hate to see things go to waste, so at the moment, I'm uncoiling the binding to pull the pages apart. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them but I am seeing the months added to my bulletin board. :)
   
Please excuse the picture layout, blogger isn't friendly tonight. If you like the planner, check out http://www.missmathdork.com/ you won't be sorry.

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Planning for the New School Year

The school year is just a few short weeks away. I began planning before the year was finished last year. I keep reading blogs about organization, INB planning, and general teacher interactions. I have a long list on TPT that I want to purchase and my new pencil sharpener arrived this week!

I plan on going to my room tomorrow to start getting some things ready. I am teaching world history this year and the curriculum is new for me. I have a huge textbook to look through and the standards are changing next year. This isn't a tested class and I'm finding the current standards vague and loose. Which is ok, I will have a lot of leniency to pull in art and music appreciation as I teach different time periods.

I'm happy to be teaching the "new" for me class because in 2014-2015 Tennessee social studies standards change, this course will move to seventh grade. I will then be teaching it on that grade level. So I feel like I'm getting a head start on the new standards. The draft standards are out and I will be able to use those as a guide for this class.

My INB planning is going well. I'm hoping to get the first four weeks set in my 7th and 8th grade class. I won't be using them in world history. But I will be incorporating foldables and a lot of the same type materials. My goal is to have things planned four weeks out and I have been pulling scope and sequences from several other school systems. I don't think we've used a standard S&S for social studies on our system. I know we use pacing guides/ S&S in math and language arts.

I really work more at home during the summer and I had planned to spend more time in my classroom this year. But I classroom computer quit working the first week after school ended. IT hasn't fixed it yet and it's just been easier to do things on my personal laptop. I've gotten into the habit of saving everything in Dropbox so that I can access all of my new material. I find that I have too many flash drives and never have the one I need on hand. Dropbox is a life saver!

I welcome suggestions or tips on organization. Please feel free to follow me on Pinterest.