0 Spooky Tell Tale Heart Lesson for Halloween

' I've been planning for WEEKS and stressing out just to make sure I could do this lesson on Halloween. Things got a little derailed when we had an unexpected 'weather' day Tuesday due to the hurricane that didn't really hit us. But I was still able to do the lesson today on Halloween. For the last three lessons we've been reading Edgar Allan Poe poems and studying his life. Today we read "The Tell Tale Heart" and watched a short You Tube Video that went long with it. The website  Knowing Poe has a great interactive audio along with text for this story. The students followed along and listened to the story and did 'sticky notes'. The...

0 IPad Apps for the Classroom

Today was a professional development day and I was able to play around with my Ipad and test out different Ipad apps to use in the classroom. Our grade level has a cart of Ipads to sign out, and the sixth grade in our school is actually getting 1:1 Ipads. I'd love to get 1:1 Ipads someday but right now it's not a reality, so I have to make do with what I have. Here is a list of the ones I found most useful: Voice Thread: Voice thread allows you to record voice and make notes about a video or snapshot. It really doesn't do anything that amazing, but it's the creative ways teachers are using it that makes it cool. I plan on having students take...

0 Peer Conferences: Are they worth it?

Today we did peer conferencing in class with the narrative essays the students have been writing. Many times I've done peer conferences and realized after the lesson that it had absolutely no value and was a complete waste of time. The students are not teachers. Sometimes they don't give the best advice. Sometimes they give REALLY bad advice to each other. For example, after peer conferencing in a lesson last year, a student showed me her paper. She asked me if the word 'I'm' needed to be capitalized because her partner had told her that it wasn't. Every time she had used 'I'm', her partner had drawn a big slash through the capital I......head...

0 Teachers Pay Teachers Experiment

Many people have mentioned to me over the past couple weeks about the teacher who became a millionaire by selling lesson plans online.  When I heard about this, I immediately thought about Teachers Pay Teachers. I know about it from doing this blog and visiting other blogs where teachers link to their TPT accounts in order to sell products and the ideas they have on their blogs. I have never been one to actually pay money for lesson plans for worksheets, as I really prefer making my own stuff. I will occasionally download stuff from TPT when it's free or really inexpensive (only if I REALLY want it).    I figured I might as well...

0 Amazing Common Core Standard Checklist!

I can't really take ANY credit for this amazing idea I'm about to share....it was ALL my co-teacher's idea. I asked her permission to post it because I am obsessed with it. My co-teacher was wondering if there was a way to track how many times we had hit each standard in lessons, as well as pay attention to those we focus on more than others. We were looking for a simple document with all of the common core standards but couldn't find one. Then she came into my room with this outrageous creation: It's kind of hard to see but she cut out the list of standards for each category (reading literature, reading informational, writing, speaking,...