Plickers and Design!

Looking for a new quick formative assessment option? Have you heard of Plickers? I was at the SAIL 2015  conference in Florence, AL in July when I first heard of these fun tools. Plickers are a free printable set of numbered symbols. Each student gets a unique Plicker number. If you look closely, you can see the letters A, B, C, and D at the top of each side of the design.

Click on the Picture for More Info

Teachers download the Plicker app from iTunes or GooglePlay and load questions with A-D answer choices. When the teacher asks a question, students decide on an answer and hold up their choices. The picture above shows C as the chosen answer. The unique symbols keep student answers cryptic and private. Once all students hold up their answers, teachers use the app on their phone or iPad to scan the room and record the results. The results are shown on a graph for immediate feedback and stored under the student names for teacher review. Get your own Plicker set here.

 Here is where fun started! We were first led to create a design on a paper square. 

Can you tell what it is yet?

Do you see my name (Aimee)? We folded our squares in half three different ways, three times, one time then open, another fold and open, then a final fold and open. Our square papers now had three fold lines through the middle. We folded our papers into a small triangle and wrote our names in block or bubble letters then folded and rubbed the back until it transferred a mirror image onto the clean side. We continued this tracing and rubbing transfer process until our paper was completely covered in our name designs. Then we were able to color our designs, add a border, and tape it to the back of our assigned Plicker symbols.  

Now we had beautifully unique designs to add flare to our Plicker squares!

On the last conference day, we put all the Plicker square designs together and made a quilt pattern. Look at all of the one-of-a-kind squares!

This would be such a neat idea to make as a class. Other ideas: I could see the design lesson being incorporated in teaching geometry, symmetry, or you could even choose a vocabulary or key word to build your design.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I'm so happy to have my new class/teaching blog! Follow my journey as a teacher in an arts magnet school in Alabama. You'll see classroom adventures, new ideas, freebies, and more. Click to follow me!

PBL? Connections? Start with interests....and a Freebie!

I absolutely believe that people learn best through real-life, hands-on experiences. How does a nurse learn to care for the sick? A nurse can pass every medical exam with flying colors but if he/she isn't able to have compassion at a patient's bedside, make instant life-or-death decisions, or learn the correct way to put on a pair of surgical gloves, then that nurse just isn't going to be successful.

As a teacher, my best teaching skills haven't come from hours of lectures and acing assessments, they have come from being in the classroom, hands-on with students. Children are no different. Children need relevant, applicable learning situations. They need to be taught inside the action and feel like part of the experience with personal responsibilities connected to their learning. Teachers have a duty to create classrooms full of research-based, engaging strategies where students are able to take ownership of their academic growth. Agree? Yes! Absolutely, and lucky for us, this amazing strategy already is a thing and has a name, "Project-Based Learning." In PBL classrooms, lessons are guided by student input and projects are ongoing and applicable to each child's growth. This is what I believe in and what I strive to achieve in my classroom. However, it's one thing to want something and another to put it into action.

Graphic Source

I began brainstorming and working on this in my Kindergarten classroom. See what I thought were project-based learning blog posts here and here. Although my students grew and learned a lot from these lessons, they were mostly whole classroom projects rather than actual project/problem based experiences. I also realized throughout the course of the year that while these whole class projects were wonderful, building a PBL classroom is a process that must evolve as your children come up with new ideas on their own while exploring different learning topics. So, there is sort of an artfully calculated spontaneity to PBL that teachers should strive to harness. I decided to keep scanning articles and blogs to find new and better ideas for this year's venture to 2nd grade and while doing so, I came across this Edutopia article on Student Engagement, by Rebecca Alber. In it Rebecca explains that teachers should get to know their students through interest inventories and then, "as their teacher, research any unfamiliar TV shows, films, singers, or video games that multiple students mentioned. Then ask yourself, "How might I integrate these interests in my daily lessons and units?" This made so much sense to me that I decided to make my own interest inventory to give the first week of school. You can pick up a free download by clicking on the picture or by going to my TpT store here.

I plan to use this to find interests my students share. I want to know what lived experiences I can build off and teach from and what new experiences we can create in the classroom. With this information, I can develop, as educator Lisa Delpit coined, "culturally responsive teaching" and use it to allow students to make deeper connections with their learning. I will be able to familiarize myself with students' entertainment and pop-culture interests and build driving questions around these things. Knowing about the interests that drive my students will help me guide and plan situations in which students become part of and want to take responsibility for their own learning. In turn, I also find out ways to motivate individual students and I, essentially, become the hippest teacher around...isn't that the real goal, anyway?

A Long Journey to Blogging

Blogging was not my original idea, but once I heard about it, I knew it was for me...eventually. The idea to blog came about during a year of unemployment. Well, semi-intentional unemployment, anyway...let me explain. My teaching career started after being hired in after school care, summer schools, extended sub positions, and then teaching 3 maternity leaves in the same school system back in 2006, 2007, and 2008. I gained a lot of valuable experience during these times but finally landed my own 3rd grade classroom in the summer of 2008. It was great; it was grand; I thought I knew it all and this would be a breeze...but, I soon realized I had a lot to learn. I did take the opportunity to learn every chance I got, though. I learned from other teachers, professional developments, webinars, seminars, parents, and students, but mostly I learned from the experience of being responsible for my own students' success. They were going to sink or swim depending on whether I sank or swam or not so...I learned how to swim.

3rd grade was the best! I taught for two years and then had some personal life tragedies and changes which led me to move to a new place--the wild open west! I visited some dear friends in Idaho for a summer, taught for one more year in Alabama, and then moved. I sent out resume packets and filled out online applications for weeks before moving. By the time I got there in June (after a 2.5 day almost nonstop roadtrip), I already had an interview lined up and had completed all but one form toward receiving my Idaho teacher's license. I interviewed the morning after the drive and they called me back within an hour to offer me a position as a 1st grade teacher. I was ecstatic, feeling capable and proud knowing that this venture was the correct path for my life. After teaching for two years in Idaho, I met the love of my life (who is actually from CO, but that's another story) while serving (on the side) at the local bed-and-breakfast. We drained our Idaho retirement accounts and moved back to Alabama jobless and uncertain of what the future might hold.

My talented husband was able to land an amazing job in his field about 4 months after we moved here. I, on the other hand, had what felt like interview after interview that summer all to no avail. I began to panic. What we had saved through our retirement accounts was not going to last much longer. I started looking in every direction and it was in one of these routes that my sister-in-law suggested blogging. I liked the idea but didn't know it to be lucrative at all so I let it go. I subbed in every school system around while serving at Red Robin and beginning school to complete a second Bachelors degree. Then in May, two days after our wedding day and almost one full year after moving, while in DFW airport waiting on our connecting flight to Maui, HI for our honeymoon, I got a call from my favorite school to substitute in offering me a job as a Kindergarten teacher! I was once again ecstatic knowing that every bumpy step and struggle along the way had again led me to exactly where I was supposed to be. It was just a few days after accepting the job that I officially began blogging. (It's actually much easier to blog when you don't think of it as a duty from which you're trying to make a career.) I started blogging with MrsScrivnersKinderGardening.blogspot.com (Check it out here.) for fun and my blog has now evolved into "Scrivner's Class". This journey has absolutely shaped my teaching style and career and has molded me into the person I am today. I'm so grateful to have made it this far and am excited to see where the rest of this journey will take me.