Make a Flake

Here's a fun activity to celebrate the Winter Solstice~

MAKE A FLAKE

caution - once you cut one flake - you will want to keep making more!!

Five Quick Classroom Management Tips

Quick read article from Edutopia ~ Five Quick Classroom Management Tips

I work with a lot of teachers and I have seen these strategies used successfully and seen the problems that ensue when classroom management isn't under control.

#1) Use a normal, natural voice

#2) Speak only when students are quiet and ready

#3) Use hand signals and other non-verbal communication

#4) Address behavior issues quickly and wisely

#5) Always have a well-designed, engaging lesson

Team Maker

Team-Maker is a simple and handy random team generator that lets you create teams quickly and easily. 

Features:

Cut and paste a list of names into the online box.

Choose the team names to generate, or add your own.

Nine random groupings are available to choose from.

Decide the number of team groups you want.

View the results  immediately on screen, or in a new tab.

Export the list into an Excel (CSV) file for additional uses.

Works extremely fast.

Event Scheduling online

Here are two handy online tools to make scheduling events easy! 

Sign Up Genius

To Schedule Parent Conferences

Doodle is an online tool that scheduling meetings and other appointments. It's simple, quick, free, requires no registration and is a great way to manage your parent conferences. Attached are direction for teachers to create their own Doodle schedule (survey) and a set of directions to send to parents (how to) so they can schedule their own appointments.

Teachers Pay Teachers

TeachersPayTeachers is the world's first open marketplace
where teachers buy and sell original teaching materials.

Here's an interesting site where you can find teaching materials. Some are for sale, but many are available for FREE.

You can browse the lessons by Grade Level, Subject, Lesson type, or Price.

and if you want to make some money of your own - you can try selling some of your own lesson plans :-)
 Kindergarten Teacher earns $700,000 by Selling Lesson Plans Online

Bedtime Math

It's called Bedtime Math, but don't let that dissuade you. There is a new math problem posted every day and each scenario has three levels of difficulty for the problem! I have thought of a few ways that you could use it ~

* use the problems in your classroom every day for some quick and easy mental math work

* do the problem in your classroom, then post it to your classroom web page and have your students challenge their family to do it at home together

* share the link with your families in your back to school letter or and back to school night to let them know that it's important to do math at home every day, in addition to daily reading time

* have your students create daily math challenges for your classroom or for your 'buddy class' of you have one

from the web page ~"Bedtime Math isn't an official “curriculum.”  It’s just a fun chance for kids to do math in their heads, so someday when they’re shopping and everything’s 20% off, they can figure out the sale price before the store closes."

Bedtime Math

Watch Know Learn

Do you have visual/auditory learners in your classroom?

Watch Know Learn

Free educational videos delivered over the Internet. Viewed any time, from anywhere.

"The Vision behind WatchKnowLearn is simple:

We believe that everyone should have the same opportunity to learn. The best way to make this possible, we believe, is to organize into one, super directory the hundreds of thousands of good videos currently available on the Internet. To make this a reality, we invite teachers, instructors and educators to suggest videos for inclusion into our directory, and then to review, approve, and assign those videos into appropriate categories using a wiki framework and philosophy. The videos are the highest quality found on the World Wide Web, cover all major educational topics from elementary to secondary schools (or age range 1 – 18), and are Kid Safe!

WatchKnowLearn has indexed over 33,000+ educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 3,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom and to students at home 24/7. Users can dive into our innovative directory or search for videos by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. Our Web site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. We have had a tremendously positive response from educators to the website. If we continue to work together, we can create an incredible, free, educational resource for students across the world."