1. Read Across America
Erin is excited to announce to all of you what is currently being called the "STEM Bookshelf". This website is a place for teachers to go for quick and easy ways to incorporate 21st Century skills, such as collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking as well as incorporating the Pennridge Design Loop into students' everyday activities. The site will continue to grow over the next year!
This week, I'd like to focus your attention on the page titled "Read Across America"! You will find engineering design challenges, and coding activities. In addition, you'll find ways to include Dr. Seuss into your literacy rotation with QR coded read alouds! You'll find 25 ready-made slides that can be scanned and will read the text to your students. These presentations will show some texts that students are not familiar with, and will also give students the opportunity to listen to texts that are above their level!The goal of the site is to take so many of the wonderful ideas that are out on the internet, but put them into one quick and easy location for Pennridge teachers, in hopes that it saves you time!
2. Directed Drawings- The Lorax
Lorax directed drawings using Skype have been a big hit in the district! Let us know if you'd like to Skype too. We have a frog and leprechaun drawing option, as well.3. Colleague Corner
For the months of February and March, we will be posting some quotes from some of your colleagues about Seesaw. Many teachers have enjoyed the PD in your PJ's offered each month, and teachers have been asked to respond to the prompt "tell about something you think all teachers should know."- You can remove an activity and archive it, so it doesn't show up anymore in the feed, but will stay in the students' journals. I like having that option because the class journal gets very full quickly!
- I may begin to attach our homework sheet to an announcement each week so parents can easily access the HW page, even if they lose it!
- If you have not yet used the calendar view to see student's work on a particular date or have your students go back to comment on something from a particular date, it is a game changer! (see icon on right)
- I want to use Seesaw to drive my parent-teacher conferences in the future. Instead of compiling the folders, papers, and journals, I plan to have my kids post more of their work onto their Seesaw portfolio. I want to use this online work during conferences to provide work samples that the parents have already had access to. Lastly, I'd like for my students to complete a goal-setting activity on Seesaw. That way, I can not only share what my goals are for the student, but what their goals are for themselves as well.
