2016 y la pared de palabras...

So it's been a while since I've blogged but I have been excited to get questions and comments from teachers periodically asking about the Spanish word wall post from a couple of Summers ago. Specifically, I've had some requests to sell the word wall cards from the blog.

I'm happy to say I've updated them and opened a Teachers Pay Teachers shop where you may purchase them if you're interested.  The cards are available in different sizes and formats.  All sets are available in blue, red, and green coded versions to go with any language coding system you may use in your classroom.  I also put a few freebies in my shop so please stop by!  You can find it @:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Dual-Language-Diva

Here are a few pics of this year's word wall as I prepared it for the school year. I added some "o" words as a sample. The set of small word cards comes with a blank page of cards so you may add your own student generated words to your word wall.  The large vowel cards are a freebie and are available with a black background, as shown, and also on a white background. I chose to use the posters of "letras tramposas" for the tricky letters and skipped giving them their own individual taped spots to save space but you may choose to give each letter a space and use the posters elsewhere.

              

Well, that's all for now. Thanks for visiting and hope your school year is going well!  

Verano y la pared de palabras...

      So I am finally done with school (teaching)for the year and a couple of PD type things and have a little time before my Summer class begins. I absolutely adored my little friends this year and miss them already!  I expect great things from all of them and wish them well as they start a new page in first grade.  I am excited to spend some quality time with my own three loves and though it seems like this Summer break is filled with PD opportunities galore, I'm hoping to balance some family travel and fun in here somewhere, too!

     Happily, or frighteningly, I am only two classes away from being ABD.  The D will be the most challenging as I am going "mixed methods."  Because when writing one dissertation is just not enough, let's just write two and combine them.  Easy peasy, right?  I guess I'll find out! ;-)

     But enough about that.  I keep meaning to post pictures of my Spanish word wall and I finally put some new ones and a brief explanation under the El salón page.  Tab on over there to see them.
¡Feliz verano!



Plan-o-rama!!

      What a fun and productive day planning with Taylor!  After a little lunch we filled our crisp new plan books in with important dates for the year and color coded them for our color days schedule.  We even got the first 16 weeks or so of Math planning fleshed out.  Too bad some of it will change for the Common Core Standards.  It looks so good pencilled in there!
     I am getting super excited to begin the school year now that we have some planning done.  I know it will come soon enough and then I will long for more carefree Summer days with my girls!  This is what happens when worlds collide.
    Now I look forward to meeting with the Dual Language team to plan some more.  Any others out there doing some Summer planning?

   Happy Thursday!!

Summer planning...

      Excited to be meeting with my K teamie, Taylor, tomorrow to get a little Summer planning done.  We start early in August this year so it's not that far away on the calendar.  I'm actually part of two teams: one is my school grade level team and the other is my Dual Language team.  I'll be meeting with them a little later this month.  The kindergarten Dual Language program has grown to a team of five this year in our district.  I can't wait to meet my new teammates!  Are other teachers planning already, too?

      Working on another getting rid of some clutter at home today.  When did I become such a packrat?!?  Oh yeah, when I became a teacher.  Suddenly, the most mundane of objects: empty Pringles and coffee cans, old film canisters, produce baskets, all became objects of my desire to recycle into games for centers, manipulatives, dice cages and more.  Great intentions but I collected a few too many for the reality of time I had to work with.  So, I'll get rid of a bunch of them and make space to collect again as I know that will be the cycle.

       The best thing to do would be to just collect them as I need them, make the projects and not have extras, but I know myself a little too well.  I will need to remind myself constantly to break this habit.       Wonder if other teachers out there have this same thing going on or if it's just me?  Hmmmmm.  Something to ponder for today.
   
Happy Summer planning!

Summer Sunday..

   Woohoo! Finished Summer classes on Friday.  Really enjoyed my tech class! Started this blog as result. Thanks, Dr. Dennis Lundgren!!  Just a couple of assignments to get done by August before starting Fall classes.  Got to keep the forward momentum going!

   Going to enjoy some quality Summer family time while I can and take baby steps toward getting ready for my new students.  Even though we are on break, I can never seem to stop planning during the Summer.  I have a few friends who do the same thing (Hmmm, OK, maybe more than a few). I guess it's a teacher thing!

    As I mentioned before board game organization is one of my Summer goals.  Also thinking about name work centers as those are some of the first ones we focus on at the beginning of the year.  Here's one I made for Rainbow name writing.  Hope it is useful!

Click here for this center!

BTW, just noticed a greatonline deal for Groupon on Vistaprint. It may only be limited to Illinois but I thought I'd share anyway! Here's the link:

http://www.groupon.com/deals/vistaprint-chicago-4?c=all&p=21

Happy Sunday!

Happy 5th of July!!!

Happy day after the 4th of July!  Had a great time celebrating with the family yesterday. Hope you did, too!
   
    Today we got into a little of the nitty gritty of bits, bytes and servers.  Interesting stuff but so much information if you think about it!  We also learned about Wikis and how great they are for collaboration.  A good resource for maybe fourth graders and up the grades from there.  All very useful but I think I'll just stick to this blog for right now. Don't want to take on too much, too soon.  Tomorrow is our last day of tech class. It went by faster than I'd thought and it got me to blog (finally!!!) so I'm happy to have taken it.

    Took a couple of minutes to look through my board games today. I'd like to make some new ones for this school year and revamp some existing games.  Here's one I made a while back that I still use. It's a basic beginning syllable rec game but I hope you enjoy it.

 Grab it here!

¡Hasta mañana!

Chapter 8

Lots of great resources today!  We discussed Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World by Heidi Hayes Jacobs today. We attacked it as a jigsaw activity and it is such a thought-provoking book.  Too bad we only had one day to delve into it.  If you haven't read this book: YOU SHOULD!  Emily and I (thanks for being my partner, Emily) discussed chaper 8.  It focused on the importance of recognizing that our students will come to us teach ready.  As educators we need to embed technology across the disciplines to make students more media literate (as they come in with a fund of tech knowledge already). They need to learn netiquette and the permanence of the internet and how to critically process all of the information they are exposed to in order to filter for credibility. They need to become critical thinkers and consumers in an information stream that is fluid.   Kind of like with this quote:

We alsoused a video from a series I really like to illustrate how quickly tech is changing and making information literacy so much more important (click on the link below to view):

Did you know 2011--Social Media

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_RU5OCYYYw&feature=related

This is a link to a prior version which also has a lot of interesting information:

Did you know? - 2009

On another note we also used a website called "Tagxedo" to create a word cloud.  It's a more spiffy (yes, it's 2012 and I used spiffy in a sentence) version of Wordle.  We chose and apple to represent education. The words are key points from our chapter:

You like???   Make you own @  http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html

Phew!  Lots of stuff to ponder for one day. Happy 4th of July!!!!!