Friday, January 10, 2014

Mixing it up in Math

Thought for today... necessity is the mother of invention  finding very odd and specific apps. Every Friday we mix it up a little during math when our amigos from the dual immersion class come and join us for math games. This week I found a really fun, and engaging math game at Teacher's Pay Teachers  Color By Sum: Winter Version


To play this game each pair of students needs three dice, but I have a love hate relationship with dice because they... are loud, can be thrown at other people, roll away and need to be chased, tend to end up at the bottom of a tub or drawer where I can never find them when I need them, and throwing dice is a little boring! I also don't have enough for 19+10= 29 kiddos to use at once. So I decided to hunt up an app for rolling dice, and I found a great one Dice Roll Free! We just love it, because you can roll from 1-6 dice at a time, it doesn't add the dice up for you, AND you have to shake the iPad to roll the dice! It's simple, fun, and just right for us!


First you shake,shake,shake the iPad (the kids loved this part)!


(Just a side note... these two picked each other as partners. She speaks mostly Russian, he speaks mostly Spanish. LOVE it)


                                                                                      Then, you add up all three dice.

 Next you color in the section on your paper with the answer in it (if you have it).


Whoever colors in all their sections first wins.

They could have played this game for hours. I doubt we'll ever use regular dice again! They were so much more engaged then they normally are with dice games!


Wednesday, January 8, 2014

New year... New iPad Magic

Hello boggy friends :) I've decided to write shorter more frequent posts. These long weekly ones are going to drive me crazy. Here we go...

Today was our first day back and the kiddos were so excited to have our little family back together. All the iPads came back in one piece(kudos to my kiddos and parents for taking such good care of them). Their little minds were ready for something new so we jumped right in to Schoology. Let me say that I LOVE SCHOOLOGY, and so do my kiddos. I had to force them to go to lunch and recess because they just wanted to stay and post in Schoology some more.

It took us awhile to get the app downloaded and everyone logged in because it's a new log in combo, but I showed a couple people how, and before long everybody was logged in. 

 All logged in and ready to go


Pipgeek in action


My right hand girl  "Miss. H" showed our new friend (first day with her iPad)  how to download apps. She also got her all set up and logged into Schoology.  What would I do without my Pipgeeks???

Earlier this week I set up a group for us in Schoology and added all my kiddos. Then I posted a  fun question on the main page for them to answer, and a  reader's response question on our discussion board.The question was "Who do you like better, Jack or Annie? Tell why! (We have a slight obsession going with the Magic Tree House books)

They jumped right in to posting, and simply fell in love with it. I have never, never seen them this excited about ANY  kind of writing! 




Here is a screen shot of some of their comments... remember this was their FIRST experience with this program. None of them had ever seen it before!



Their writing here has such voice and expression. I was impressed! It's just a few words each, their spelling and punctuation are't perfect, but I can tell you this... it sounds just like them. They were less than happy when it was time to go to lunch, but luckily our awesome teacher librarian, (former blog name "Mr T") Mr. Chop chop (don't even ask) joined our group, and posted a new question for them, to answer later in the day!

Click here to learn more about Schoology: https://www.schoology.com/page/15668739

For right now we will mostly be using this for reader's response, and math writing, but that is only the beginning of what we will do with it! Stay tuned to folks, thanks for joining us on our journey!

P.S. Please don't tell the kiddos that they were writing today ;) they think it's just fun, not actual school work, and I want to keep it that!