Funbrain

http://www.funbrain.com/

This is a website that my son loves to play on. It's an interactive site for kids where they can choose to do activities in a variety of content areas.

Any opportunity to get a 10 year old to practice something educational...count me in!

Winding Down

Well, we made it through our full week in practicums. Hope all of your lessons went well. I focussed on sequencing and locating title and author with my kindergarteners. I also had them link events in a story to real life events. I was extatic to see that all of the students that I assessed made improvement and were able to do tasks that they were unable to do on the pre-assessment. Even the little girl who was too shy to even speak to me during the pre-assessments made some improvement! Since my focus was on Thanksgiving, on Thursday I had the kids make turkeys and on the feathers they wrote four things that they were thankful for. They were so cute! They were all excited to share things they were thankful for and were excited to take them home to share with their parents.

I would consider my week in kindergarten a success, even if I did feel like I wanted to pull my hair out some days! Takes a special kind of person to be a kindergarten teacher...

Article Reviews

Teaching with technology isn't as scary as some might think. It isn't necessary for teachers to know every single feature of any program or tool they wish to use. They really only need to have practiced and mastered basic functions in order for them to be able to use them successfully in the classroom. It is also important that technology be integrated into the goals and lessons that are planned instead of planning lessons and goals around the technology.

According to the National Educational Technology Standards and Performance Indicators for Teachers, effective teachers should be able to engage students in discovering and exploring real-world issues through the use of modern technology. Teachers should also be able to design lessons that implement technology. Teachers themselves should be able to demonstrate some fluency in the systems and software they are using and be able to teach students how to use them as well. Teachers should be continually improving their knowledge of technology and how they can use it in their classroom and be able to share that improved knowledge with their students so as to make them more technologically savvy.

Today

Ok...so we are supposed to post something about something that happened to us durning our practicum...here goes...

This afternoon we had a sub because all of the kindergarten teachers were in a grade level meeting, so I taught for the entire afternoon. I even used some of the vocab techniques that Mr. Smith has taught us. Certainly not the first time I have taught, but the first time I have taught a whole day (well, a whole kindergarten day...3 hours). It went pretty well. Kind of a warm up for next week's sub for a day...

Movie

Here is the video that Emily and I made. Enjoy!

New Website

I found this website when I was searching for sequencing activities to do with my work sample. It has pages that you can download and print.

http://www.dltk-teach.com/

Fun Interactive Website

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com