It's Not Good-Bye, It's See You Later

It's not good-bye, it's see you later...I can't believe that we had our "last class" in Adult Learning last week.  Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to our last class celebration this week.  I have conferences that I need to prepare for this upcoming week.  I hope everyone has fun, and good luck to everyone next semester!  And now, to wrap up this semester, all of my projects are complete! :)  Corstina, Shane, and I are finishing up our wild card project.  We are using Pearltrees and Powtoon, to tell about coding.  Everything is looking good so far!

The End is Near...

Believe it or not, we only have two weeks left! I knew that this semester was going to fly by, because it seems like everything flies by anymore.  With that being said, it feels nice to be on top of things since there is such little time left.  I really worked on things each week as the semester went by, which was great, because now that the end is near, it's nice not to have to cram everything in at the end.  I'm now finished with all of my attribute slides, my attribute lesson, and I am in the process of updating my weebly.  If you click on the link, you can check out all of my work this semester.

Busy, Busy, Week

What a busy week that just passed.  I was busy preparing for an observation, getting ready for parent visitation, and working on my grades.  On top of all of that, it must have felt extra long because of the short week we had prior.  However, now I can say short observation check, parent visitation check, grades check.  Even though American Education Week is technically this week coming up, we had our parent visitation last week.  When the parents visited, I did a reading lesson in which we used the iPads.  We used Nearpod for a lesson on nouns.  The entire class was on task and engaged in the lesson. Nearpod is definitely one of my favorite apps to use in the classroom!! We also did a math lesson on finding missing parts of ten and a social studies lesson on leaders.  For that lesson I read Duck for President, which is a great story for this time of year or for February and President's Day.  Then, we talked about and wrote what we would do if we were president.  I had some very creative answers from I would go to meetings all day to I would make China part of the United States to I would have a giant pool with a water slide.  Oh how I love first grade!! :)

It's All About the Test

Some of you may have heard my new favorite song by Meghan Trainor All About the Bass.  Well I was thinking about it and teaching has become all about the test which brings me to my post for this week.  As a first grade teacher, my kids do not have to take any state tests, however we are still feeling the effects of "it's all about the test."  We are encouraged to get our kids on the computer as much as we can since when the PARCC comes around they will be expected to take the test on the computer.  We are also encouraged to use the PARCC vocabulary so that they can be exposed to the type of questioning and vocabulary that they will be eventually be seeing on the PARCC.  Thankfully, in first grade, we can still add some fluff to our lessons, and it's not ALL about the test, but I know in the testing grades it really is ALL about the test.  I found this interesting article from The Press of Atlantic City that talks about how the convention this past week was focused on the test.

Candy!!

Considering Halloween is tomorrow, and Halloween candy is one of the best things about Halloween, I figured it would be appropriate to talk about candy!! And for those of you who didn't know, my family owns a candy store, which just so happens to be my summer/Christmas/Easter job.  Our store is called Giambri's Quality Sweets, and it's in Clementon, NJ.  We make everything from chocolate covered pretzels to lemon sticks to candy canes.  Each year, we have our customers vote for the candy cane flavor of the year.  This years flavors are: Blood Orange, Cookies & Cream, Cake Batter, Irish Cream, and Strawberry Banana.  Click here to go vote! The deadline is November 1st!

Week 8 Already!

Can you believe we are approaching week 8 already??  Time sure does fly when you are having fun.  Everyone has been doing a great job facilitating the attribute lessons.  Kirsten and I are scheduled to facilitate on the 3rd, and the bar sure has been set high.  That's one of the great things about this program, everyone works so hard, that it gives you that extra push to go above and beyond in your own work.

At work, we are getting ready for Halloween, and the kids are getting excited.  My team and I are going to be Thing One, Thing Two, Thing Three, and the Cat in the Hat.  It should turn out cute! And not to mention it was a quick and easy costume!  We bought red shirts, printed out the Thing One, Two, and Three graphics, and we are going to pin them to our shirts.  I'm not sure yet if we are going to go all out with the blue hair!! I'll keep you posted!!  If you haven't thought of something yet, Pinterest is full of ideas!

Nearpod

One of my colleagues introduced me to this great tool- Nearpod.  After checking it out, I can't wait to use it in my classroom.  Basically, it is a tool that lets you share a "powerpoint" presentation on your student's iPads or computers.  Once they sign into the session, you are in control of their screen.  When you advance, their screen advances to the next slide.  It also has the option for assessment and allows you to see student responses right away.  She has already used this tool in her classroom, and said that her student's loved it and it was a great way to check student understanding.  I'm looking forward to the weeks ahead when our iPads will be ready and I can try it out in my classroom. :)

Rewards vs. Punishment

As I was reading for this week, I noticed that one of the tips for trainers of the Functionalistic Theory was trainers should not punish learners who fail.  After reading that, I thought to myself do some trainers really punish learners who fail?!  I guess that was the teacher in me, because I immediately thought of my students, and I thought how could someone punish them for failing.  As a teacher, when a student fails, it reflects on me, and I would never punish a student for failing.  I would do everything I could to help them to succeed.  Then, after I thought about it some more, I had to tell myself that we are talking about adult learners and not children.  Even still, I don't think that adults should be punished for something they failed. However, in the workplace, if you fail to meet a goal, or you fail to do your job correctly, something needs to happen.  And that raises the question rewards or punishment?  I came across this article that discusses reward vs. punishment and what motives people more.

October is here! Believe it or not I heard someone say the other day that there's less than 90 days until Christmas.  There's actually only 80 days left now!  I found this cute website, that counts down to Christmas.  It even tells you how many seconds are left.  When you think that we only have 80 days left, that sounds so crazy since school just started and summer just got over, but before we know it, Christmas will be here.  As I've gotten older, I've realized that time really does fly by.

This Picture Says it All.....

Well now that we have our first few weeks of the semester in, and our deadlines are just around the corner- that's how I'm feeling right now.  Add work, buying a house, and planning a wedding into the mix and I'll just say I'm really glad I'm in the midst of a long weekend right now! :)  Okay that's the end of my rant.  On another note, I discovered a great tool this week.  Thanks to Dana and Shane who used this tool in their project, Kirsten and I discovered Powtoon and we used it in our root tracing project as well.  It is really a cool tool (and it was fairly easy to use!), and it's something that I think I'd be able to use in the classroom also.   It would definitely be a tool that I could use to keep my kids interested in what they are learning.

Welcome Back!

I am officially welcoming myself back to the blogging world (as you can see my last post was from 2011 when I was taking my very first MAIT class!).  Since then a lot has changed! I'm now working on my 6th MAIT class-yes I'm taking it very slow!! We've also switched from using Wimba as our virtual classroom to Blackboard Collaborate.  Since then I've become very comfortable learning from the comfort of my own couch! :)