Month: September 2012

Kindergarten Number Activity

Even if/when I am on top of my lesson planning, I feel like my more creative or DIY ideas come to me during my walk to work the day I am teaching that particular lesson. I mean, this happens ALL THE TIME. Anyone feel me on this?

And such was the case today. My kindergarteners have been learning the numbers 0-9 since the beginning of the year. Now, they are trying to match the symbol of the number, with its word form. They are also learning phonics and how to blend letters together and how to stretch words apart, etc.

Yesterday, I made a worksheet for them where they had to match the right number to its word counterpart. Some of them really struggled, even though when I told them to write the word of the number out (before they got the worksheet), they were able to do it. I was confused.

I decided to create another activity to give them more practice, and it is one I will use during center time as well. It had me laminating during all of my break time today!

Basically, they had to spell out each word and place it with the right number symbol, they loved using their hands and the entire floor!

Sorry for the quality of the pictures, I left my camera at home today 😦

Anyone else willing to share number activities for kindergarten? I am all ears!

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Learn for Free from Stanford

I stumbled upon this link on FB the other day and knew I had to sign up. I’ve never taken an online class before, but this one is free and is sponsored by Stanford University. After reading more about it, I was immediately drawn into the course. This online course is open to all and will compose of final project where you and your team members will create a new learning model to cater 21st century learners and environments. It’s intriguing to think about creating a completely new model. Instead of complaining about our school systems, it’s time to find a solution to the problem.

I’ve always wanted to start my own school that would think outside of the box and revolutionize education.  So, here I am,  signed up, and not sure what this really means. It says the workload is only 4 hours a week. I hope I’m not in over my head. Class starts on October 15th.  Why don’t you join me and sign up as well? Maybe we could even form a team together.  🙂
You can sign up on the website:

Designing a new learning environment:  http://venture-lab.stanford.edu/education

Plus, there are other free courses available, if you are feeling super ambitious!

TEDEd YouTube Channel

I have always talked about what a huge fan I am of TED talks… I feel so behind. I had no idea there was a youtube channel devoted to educational TED talks until I was reading Jee Young’s latest blog post!

I just watched this talk on taking GOOD and BAD out of our vocabulary. You need to watch it, show it to your upper elementary students (heck, I might even show it to my kinders!) and tie it in with a lesson on how to add more descriptive adjectives into our writing.

Integrating technology into the classroom is vital in today’s world. Working at a school that doesn’t have laptops to check out, or iPads to use, doesn’t mean I can’t include technology into my lessons. These great videos are a good way to start.

What are some ways you integrated technology? Have you used one of these TED videos in your lessons?

Google Summit in Singapore

This weekend, I attended a google apps for education summit held by my school here in Singapore. It was pretty nice to have it hosted at my school campus! There were people from various schools in Asia here for the conference, plus a lot of amazing google presenters. Here are a few fun videos shown at our first keynote by Suan Yeo and some important nuggets of information from the workshops.




Two funny follow ups to that…

One of the workshops I attended was called Harnessing the Power of Youtube by Patrick Green, who is our middle school technology coordinator. Here is his link for the presentation:

Harnessing the Power of Youtube

He goes through the steps of how to create your own youtube channel and making your own youtube playlist! It was a really helpful and useful session. I really liked that he gave us time in the workshop to actually do some of the things he said.  So I updated my youtube channel profile and started subscribing to a few different educational youtube sites! Take a look:

Ms Kim’s Youtube Channel

One of the best ideas I heard today was using google forms as a way of assessing students. You can use them for short start-up/do now questions, and get the instant feedback. You can also use them for quizes and exit slips! I’m definitely going to try that with my students.

Learn with us by following the twitter #gafesummit and/or checking out the google summit’s resources pages. I have a few more technology related blog posts in my head to write this week! Stay tuned for more from the summit.

What are some ways you use google apps in your classroom?

Read Aloud Recommendation

This year, our schedule allows me to do read aloud everyday for at least 20 minutes, which has been amazing! I was really unsure about what book to choose as my first read aloud for my fifth grade class. In the past I used to do a lot of different fun, beginning of the school year type of picture books. After asking many different teachers and doing some research online, I decided to stick with my initial gut feeling about this book I had just read before school started.

This was a book that was causing a lot of buzz among teachers and students. I read a few different reviews on teacher blogs about it. It is a newly published book, by a new author, R.J. Palacio. It’s called Wonder and it’s about a boy August, who is born with severe facial deformities. He has been home schooled by his mom up until 5th grade, when his parents decide to enroll him into a private middle school. As soon as I started reading this book, I fell in love with August and was intrigued by the story. I love that the author also changes perspectives by telling it from different characters point of view.

The one reason that I was really hesitant about using this book for my fifth graders was that it was a longer book, about 300 pages. Even though the chapters are very short (a few pages, not too much text on a page), I was worried that it would take too long to get through. However, we are currently on week three, and at the halfway point. My students are always telling me that read aloud is their favorite time of the day! So many of my kids are loving this story, I’m so glad I chose it.

One of the core values of our school is compassion, and I’m hoping that we can really discuss in more detail what compassion is and looks like by using this book as a jumping ground. So whether you are an elementary teacher or not, I highly recommend you read this book. If you are a 5th grade teacher, make sure you get a copy for your library.

During the read aloud, I have students sometimes write post-it notes on different characters and what they are thinking. Here are a few of them.