Guided Reading

I need your help! Can you suggest some books that are good for 3rd grade reading groups/ guided reading? Our school raised some money for a leveled library and I am drawing a blank on what I want! Please comment with your suggestions!

I will be back later with how we are integrating technology with these books!

Sale

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I even hope you were able to find some great black Friday deals. I did! I wanted to let you know that you can visit my store Monday and Tuesday on Teachers Pay Teachers for the big sale! My store link is here!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all are enjoying this fun time right before Thanksgiving and before the craziness of the holidays start. Today I wanted to share with you what we are now doing for homework. All of my kids are taking their ipads home now and I think that it makes sense to have them use them for school while they are there. I came up with a new homework idea. Each night there will be a spelling and math app assigned then the parents have to sign that it was completed. Here is an example:

I think it should go over well with the students and I hope it will go well with the parents too!

I also just listed a Colorado Freebie to go with my Colorado unit. You can get that here: Landform 
Powerpoint. Happy Thanksgiving!

Elections

As I sit here and watch the debate I thought it would be fun to talk about teaching about the election. I really have enjoyed educating my students about this important current event. It really has been fun to have discussions with my students about this. I even remember way back to the Clinton/ Bush election when I was their age and I loved the school wide election we did. Now one of our standards is civics and government so I have been doing a bunch of teaching about this subject as I mentioned in my last post.  Here are some resources for you about the election:

Scholastic

School House Rock Electoral College

If you have a Discovery Education membership they have a wonderful series about the election. Just search election 2012.

I am currently building voting booths in my room for our class election then for our mock presidential election. I did create a few fun election day or election week activities and you can find those here.

What are you doing to teach about the election? Do you have some great sites to share? Please comment below!

Government

I have been gone for a while! I have been super busy and tired since the babies are coming! One of the things I have been working on is this new unit! It is in my tpt store and integrates all sorts of technology! Please check it out here!

itunes U

This year the majority of my courses are on iTunes U. I really like the program but it is a bunch of work.  My teammate and I share the responsibility and both plan different subject areas. I do reading and social studies.

If you are interested in seeing what we are doing you can check out my courses. You will need itunes U in order to open it. It will open on an iPad, iPod, or iPhone (if you have the iphone 5 I am jealous!)

Reading
Social Studies

If you have any questions about using this at your school or would like more info let me know!

Lets Talk About iCloud

So my computer crashed and I lost everything!!!!!!!! (If you wanted my freebie sorry its gone!) I  was optimistic enough that I thought macs didn't crash. THEY DO!!!! I am cranky about it! I don't back up stuff. I know that I should but I don't. Now they have this great thing called icloud. If you haven't synced to the cloud you should. I put like five things on the cloud and guess what they are still there! GET THE CLOUD and back up. My sad sad lesson learned!

I will rise above and I will give away freebies again soon. I might even remake the other one. Other projects I was working and mentioned are you guessed it ....gone! I am currently working on a government unit. Yup government exciting stuff! If you have a fun idea about teaching government I would love to hear it! Comment below we will be working on it until the election.