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Student Treasures Publishing

Student Treasures Publishing is a great start for students to learn about the different aspects of writing a book. Students will learn about authors, illustrators, the publishing process, title pages, dedication pages, and much more. Student Treasures brings the process to life for students. Students can write and edit their own page of the book, along with drawing the illustration that goes along with it. They must then decide who to dedicate the book to as a class, and create a title page, and a cover page. The students really enjoy the process and love seeing the finished product. They also have opportunities to purchase copies of the book. Below are books from each of my first full three years of teaching.

First Grade Turkey Recipes

First Grade Ghost Stories

If I Were an Astronaut

I highly recommend Student Treasures for any class. It is great if you are looking to purchase a book for every student, or just a couple for your classroom or the school library.
                                                                                                         
   

Random Student Questioning and a Forgetful Teacher

I always keep a cup of popsicle sticks in my classroom with a student name on each stick, and I will draw a stick to ask a question. We all know how that works, it's a great tool to use. The problem I have is that I always set down the cup of popsicles sticks somewhere and I can never find it right at the second I need it, or, it is always across the room and I have to hold up the question and walk around six desks to find my cup of popsicle sticks. Well I have solved my problem of forgetfulness this time around.

I have taken 4 cups with all student names in each cup, and hot glued a cup on each wall of my classroom. This way, no matter where I am standing when I decide to throw out a hot question, I can always make sure my questioning technique stays random. This is somewhat funny but I am excited to try it.

Here are some pics.

My blog has officially moved to this site :) It literally took around 15 hours or so of work for me to figure out how to set up and transfer all of my material over to BlogSpot. Soooo.. Why did I switch?

Good question.

There was one thing that BlogSpot offered that Weebly.com could not bring to the table. That is: an email subscription form so that all of my readers could subscribe and receive email updated every time that I make a post.

Now, the form is at the bottom right hand side of my page. You should soooooo go use it because I have worked my entire weekend away setting this up so you can have it :)

Important: All updates will not be sent to your inbox. All updates will go to your clutter folder, so check that out every once and a while.

I have already found some things that I like about BlogSpot, so I think it will be a good switch in the long run.

Parents, the class website is still up, it will not have a blog from here on out. Everything else still works and will work just as it did. Homework will continue to be added as the snow continues to fall.

Another IPEVO Wireless Interactive Whiteboard Video

This is the video that sold me on getting one. I LOVE mine.

 

Do Ink Green Screen App!

This app is incredible. I have had so much fun using it so far. It takes a few minutes to figure out, but after about thirty minutes of playing around on it I feel like I have it under control.

I used green bulletin board paper for my green screen and hot glued it to the wall.

Next, I went to google images and took screen shots of images I wanted to use for my demo presentation you are about to see.

I downloaded the $2.99 Do Ink Green Screen app and I was ready to roll.

The online tutorials on YouTube are great. This video that I made isn't a tutorial, rather than just a start up video to help you get the wheels turning on the strong capabilities of this app.

Expeditionary Learning Fellowship

The Expeditionary Learning Fellowship is a tremendous opportunity to participate in professional learning and construct engaging science inquiry based lessons build around the natural spaces in our area. I will be helping develop these lessons with science teachers within the KVEC region and they will be constructed around the NGSS Evident Statement templates that will be aligned directly to the KSS.

KVEC is piloting an exciting new initiative this spring, Expeditionary Learning Fellows, which provides teachers with a tremendous opportunity to participate in professional learning and construct engaging science inquiry lessons built around the natural spaces in our area.  These lessons will be developed in collaboration with select teachers within the KVEC region and will be constructed using NGSS Evidence Statement templates to ensure congruency to the Kentucky science standards.

This is an awesome opportunity to get out in the woods and streams of Eastern Kentucky.

This fellowship will last until December and will be my third one of the year! Super pumped!

KEA Fellows Made a Difference Today

Today was an awesome experience. All of the KEA Fellows chipped in some cash as we went to local grocery stores in Frankfort to buy groceries for customers of our choice. It was a heart touching experience to say the least.

I'm so happy to be a part of this group of Fellows this year.

IPEVO IW2 Wireless Interavtive Whiteboard

This thing is awesome. $120 for an interactive whiteboard. My review:

Customer support, ease of use, shipping time, website tutorials, and durability are all great.


Key points to remember: It does not require Wi-Fi.. and, its wireless. It can easy be moved from classroom to classroom if you wanted to share or use it from presentations at PD's.

email me any questions at john.watts@letcher.kyschools.us

Haloween 2015

Bossy R Music Video

This is becoming a yearly thing for us, and the kids love it. I used the same directions as last year, same software and everything. Next year I am thinking about using Windows Movie Maker though, just because I have heard great things about it.

Classroom Design Fellow

Spending $1000 in a classroom sure didn't take much time. Below are final pictures of the classroom. Also, big thanks to DonorsChoose.com for helping us get a 40" flat screen for the classroom.
The "wobble chairs' are actually ERGO Seats and they are amazing. A set of six ran us around $400 but they are research based to improve focus and they really work well.
The yellow chairs (18) were a huge improvement in my opinion. They are much easier on tile floors.


As shown in the pictures from the last post, we made our own dry erase table tops. Those have come in very handy.
I still have a few essays to write to complete the fellowship, along with a training and a presentation in Pikeville. It has been a great opportunity.