Five for Friday

I'm excited to have the time to link up with Kacey's Five for Friday.  I always love seeing what everyone else is up to!

#1-Like some of you, we've been out of school most of the week because of the snow and ice!  We had about 5 inches when we woke up on Tuesday.  My boys were thrilled to see that much snow (remember I live in NC) and we had a blast playing in it!  This break has really been a blessing.  We've enjoyed so much family time together...lots of snow play, board games, Legos, and hot cocoa!

#2-So all this free time also left time for some crafts.  I am a little behind on getting some Valentine's stuff up!  I have seen lots of cute pennant banners made with old book pages so I created this one to put on the mantle.

Then my little fellas wanted to get in on some crafting action.  I had seen the most adorable owl craft on a blog called Happy Clippings and knew we just had to make some!  Here are the finished products.  My littlest dude needed quite a bit of help (aka Mommy cut most of it and he glued) but my older guy got creative and wanted to add a mustache and what he called "Angry Bird eyebrows" to his owl (love his creativity).  I made a few more and they are hanging in our kitchen.

#3-I mentioned earlier this week that I had been neglecting my blog because I have been really trying to focus on my faith and family above all else.  One thing that we've started with our boys is a daily devotional.  It is called Jesus Calling and it is amazing.  I read from the book, my hubby reads the corresponding scripture, we talk about it all, and then each pray.  This time has really helped focus our family...I highly recommend it!

                                                       

#4-I did have school one day this week and I posted about using the website Today's Meet.  There is a tutorial if you want to check it out.  Just click on the pic below:

#5-Finally, since I've been home all week and my boys still take naps, I've had some time to work on a few new things to use with my kiddos.  I am really excited about my patterns pack called What's My Number? and would love to give a copy of it away.  So I'm going to do my first Pin it to Win it!!!

1.  Pin the What's My Number?  A Patterns Pack image above on Pinterest.
2.  Leave a comment with your email and the URL after you have pinned the image in your comment.

I will choose a winner using a random number generator and will announce the winner sometime during the Super Bowl (because I only watch for the commercials, haha!!!)  Thanks for entering!

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Tried It Tuesday {Today's Meet}

Hey y'all!  It is been a hot minute since I last blogged.  I have really been trying to focus on my faith and family first so this little blog has certainly been neglected.  But since we had a "snow" day (with just a very light dusting so far) and there's no school again tomorrow, I figured I'd pop on here really quickly and see how y'all were doing.  Also, I wanted to share a little something that I tried yesterday so I'm linking up with Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper for her Tried it Tuesday Linky Party!

                                           
A little over a week ago, we had a Professional Development session on Writing in Math that was really useful and meaningful!!! (Hopefully, I'll share some of it with you later...with pics!)  One of the tools that the presenter used to facilitate the meeting was called Today's Meet.  Have y'all heard of it?  It's basically like an online "room" where people who know the specific URL can chat.  Well, I don't know about y'all but while I use technology daily in my classroom, I definitely can stand to be more interactive with the use of techno.  So I thought that this Today's Meet site would be a great way to interact with my kiddos and for them to engage one another.

Our standard for literacy this week happens to be RI.3.1-Ask and answer questions (referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers) so I thought it would be perfect to have the kids generate and submit questions to our Today's Meet "room" about the Declaration of Independence text we're reading this week.  (The kiddos can answer others' questions too if they want.)  For privacy purposes I have kept off the student names and the name of our "room" but here's a little screenshot of how it looks.

You can definitely see that we need to work on proper punctuation and capitalization when typing but more importantly I can quickly see who can successfully create text dependent questions about our selection and just get general insight into what they are thinking while they are reading.  I can even print a transcript of all of the comments to keep a written record of their work.

If you are interested in using this tool, it is so simple to set up a "room."

So to have encourage you to check out this super easy tool, I created a "room" at www.todaysmeet.com/onehappyteacher.  I'd love to hear how you could use Today's Meet in your classroom!  See you there!

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