Creative Engineering and Ten Frames in a FLASH!

Happy Sunday everyone! I have two apps for your this evening. The first, a creative engineering app highly recommended by my 10 year old and the second, a great app for kindergarteners and beginning of the year first graders to practice their subitizing in a flash!

FlatPack Interactive created Ball Fall Down (FREE!) and it tests your creative genius as you use levers, balls and other objects to construct a marble run of your own design. You can test and adjust your creation as you go. It's challenging and a lot of fun.

The second app is called Number Flash (also FREE) and flashes various configurations on two 10 frames. You can choose how long the image stays on the screen, as well as how large of a number is shown. The student then chooses the number they saw. The app gives the amount of time it took (you can see who really KNOWS and who's counting) and gives the number of correctly answered questions.

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

APPitic

APPitic is a site that acts as a directory of apps for educators of all grade levels and subjects. APPitic houses an unbelievable list of apps that vary by subject and skill. It is run by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADE) who have tested these apps in many grade levels and classroom settings. (I'm a MAC girl, so I'm loving the fact this has been put together by ADEs!)

When you visit the site, you can search by theme (subject areas, skills, etc) or specialized topics such as Special Education, Bloom's Taxonomy and one just for TEACHERS!

This site even walks you through how to build your own app list for sharing. My plan is to begin creating lists I can share in lieu of our failed Appy Hour. How could you use APPitic? If you've got an idea, let me know!

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

My Happy Place

We finished the final MEAP tests in 4th and 5th grades today...YAHOO! For those of you not in Michigan, the MEAP is our state assessment. We've been testing for two weeks and are finally done.

This means I can get back to my normal intervention schedule with my kindergarten kiddos! The kindergarten classrooms are my happy place. Being a former kindergarten teacher, I love being able to work with these little sponges whenever I can.

The kindergarten interventions begin as soon as the teachers complete their beginning of the year assessments the first week of school. Our district began this new system last year and it has worked very well. For the first week, our kindergarten students only attend a half day. The teacher's other half of the day is spent individually assessing their new students. As a result, they get to know their students, spend some quality one on one time and I get their data by the second week of school. This means the alphabet recognition interventions can be started during the second/third week of school.

We follow Richard Allington's philosophy that all kindergarten children know ALL 52 letters by Halloween. This means daily intervention by the classroom parapros or myself, and bi-weekly progress monitoring. We're making progress, but still have some kiddos I'm concerned about. So, last week I sent progress notes home to parents with a mini ABC book to trace with their fingers while saying the letter name, and made a cute "I Have, Who Has?" game for my awesome kindergarten teachers to use with all of their students. You can grab yours by clicking on the picture below.

Hope you enjoy the rest of your week. For all of you 3rd, 4th & 5th grade Michigan teachers, do a "Happy Dance" to celebrate the end of MEAP!

It's Appy Hour!

I think EVERY teacher in our building has downloaded and regularly uses the MasteryConnect Common Core app. Moving between grade levels the way I do, this app has become invaluable to me. Well, these wonderful app gods have created another app just like it for the Next Generation Science Standards. Like their CCSS app, this one is also FREE. Click on either of the icons below to grab yours.

         

IXL is great site for math practice. They have now created a great app that covers over 1,500 math concepts and skills for grades pre-k through 6th. You can grab this free app by clicking on the icon below.



 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Standards Based Grading and a Freebie

This year our district decided to move to Standards Based Grading (SBG). For those of you unfamiliar with SBG, this means our students are no longer given grades, but their academic performance is based on their mastery towards a standard. Student's assessments, performance tasks and other activities are marked as either below standard, working towards the standard, meeting most of the standard or mastery. At each grade level, our teachers are able to speak specifically to a student's academic abilities.

For each of the types of student work, teachers look at between 1-3 standards for each of these tasks. This means we are looking at each unit and each assignment within the unit and asking ourselves, "what is our purpose for this assignment?". Our kindergarten through third grade teachers are realizing that they have essentially been doing a version of SBG, but are now having to tie everything they want to assess to a standard and record it in an electronic grade book...this is the tough part for them. Our fourth and fifth grade teachers who have used an electronic grade book forever, are struggling more with the idea of not giving a letter grade. There is a lot to SBG. I will keep updating you on our progress as we go; we are just starting to wrap our heads around the whole concept now.

So the freebie below comes from working with our kindergarten teachers as they began looking at tying an assessment to two of the Counting and Cardinality standards they have been practicing. Enjoy your copy of Design A Monster by clicking on the picture below. Students roll a die, count the dots (many are subitizing...they love using the word!) and then record the number next to the eyes, nose, mouth,etc. The teachers have also turned this into a center by leaving dice, a monster outline and some playdough nearby.The munchkins use the playdough to form the eyes, nose, mouths, etc.

Enjoy the rest of your week!

I'm Back!!!

I cannot believe that I haven't posted anything since April! The craziness of master's classes, the end of the year, a final master's class and summer baseball got the best of me. But....I'm done with the extra classes! All I have to do now is pay the State of Michigan more money for a certificate I have to print (ahhhhhh!)

My goal is to post twice a week. We tried to start "Appy Hour" last year in our building. However, it got started with a lot of other things and lost momentum. So Sundays will be Appy Hour at It's All Elementary. The middle of the week post will be dedicated to planning, instruction or resources relevant to your practice.

So, this week's Appy Hour app is:

Math Dictionary for Kids App

This app won the Teacher's Choice Award and is a great homework helper, or in class resource. It has great visual examples and the definitions are easy for students to understand. The app costs $2.99 through the app store, but is worth the money. Click on the icon below to see the description from iTunes.

Have a great rest of your weekend!