51 Followers!!!

Wow, I never thought I would get to 10 followers, let alone 50+! Thank you all for putting up with the fact that I am rarely posting fun or fresh ideas this year! I feel like I want to share original ideas, but to be completely honest with you, I am one of those teachers who borrows great ideas from other, more creative teachers.

We have our testing the week after next, so today was spent planning for some fun activities that will help the students review, without completing changing our instructional time (we are not allowed to "cease" regular instruction in order to review). Since I have been using Math Stations all year, that is the format I am going to use. I will even have time to continue with our "regularly scheduled" standards :) Heaven knows, we are nowhere near through the 4th grade curriculum in March. EEK!

I am excited, though, that after March 23, the stress of testing will be behind us and we can focus on having fun while learning. I took a brief course about using Gaggle (email, message boards, homework drop box, digital locker, etc) in the classroom, and my students are itching to get to use it on a regular basis. They were my guinea pigs. I set up message boards for them much like the ones in my some of my graduate school classes. THEY LOVED IT! The interactions and collaboration were better than anything they had ever done. They were polite and respectful, but willing to debate the topics.

Thanks again for visiting my little blog :)