Monday Made It!: Guest Blogger Guidelines, Birthday Flowers and more Shelves

I am linking up with   

Painting the small shelves in my classroom lead to my next project.  I took one look at the larger shelves and decided they needed painting. In my hurry to get done I forgot to take pictures of the before look, but trust me when I finish the last bit on the back of one they will and do look a tone better.

My second project involves my class blog. I really wanted each of my students to have their own blog, but our district isn't ready to undertake this. My solution is to have my students take turns being guest bloggers on our classroom blog.  I created guidelines for them to follow and example posts for them to look at.  Click on the picture below to get the guest blogger guidelines. Check out my class blog (Happenings in 4S) the week of August 19th to few sample posts.

My last project is that I created the birthday flowers that I will give to my students. I bought the foam flowers at our local Alco store. I would guess you might find them in the dollar bins at Target. I write the students name and birthdate on them with sharpies and tape them to fun pencils!

Structure of a Writing Conference

This summer I read "How's it Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers" by Carl Anderson. If you have not read this and need guidance on conferring, I highly recommend it.

One thing I found very helpful in this book was his explanation about how to structure a writing conference.  I took his structure and created a cheat sheet that I placed in my literacy conferring notebook, so that I can refer to it as needed.  Here is the link to it, feel free to use it, share it, or tweak it to fit your needs:

http://goo.gl/jhQRL1

Technology Projects

I have taken on 2 major technology projects this summer. 

1. Scanning all my classroom library books into booksource classroom organizer:

This is a program where you can use your smart phone or tablet to scan the bar codes of your books and they will be entered into a database on the web. The database can be accessed from any computer. Students search for the book they are checking out by it's name or author in the database and then check it out on the computer. In order to be able to scan the books you have to install the booksource classroom organizer app on your smart phone or tablet. Did I mention that this is free!

So far so good.  I have one box of books left to scan.  I really hope this will make it a bit easier to keep track of my classroom library books. I will let you know how it is working once we get into the swing of things in my classroom.

2. Changing all my bookmarks to Diigo:

Diigo is an app that you can use to organize your internet bookmarks.  One of the features I like about it is that you can mark web articles as read later. So if you want to read them but don't necessarily need to bookmark the page, you can easily access them. You can also highlight things on your bookmark pages and you can type notes on a sticky note on your bookmark pages. Not only do you bookmark your pages but you also give them tags or labels. Then when you are just sure you had a web page bookmarked on how to use a book to teaching good endings, but can't remember the page name, you can search Diigo for various tags or labels to see what you find.  

Have any of you tried either of these sites? I would love feedback on them or suggestions of technology you would recommend!

Part 2 of Classroom Library Reorganization!

 Now to discuss the checkout process in my library.  I had a sign out sheet on a clipboard.  Students remembered to checkout the books, when I reminded them otherwise not so much.  So first solution for that is mini lesson on classroom library prodigal. Here's how I am considering handling this.  My students will have color coded reading response journals.  Their journals will be do on certain days of the week.  The day your journal is due will be your book shopping day.  This will cut down on the number of students in the classroom library and at the checkout computers at any given time. Students will be able to check out 2 books from my classroom library at a time for a 2 week period for their book baskets.  Other books will come from our school library.

 Computers, you say? That is the next mini lesson I will be teaching.  I found this website called Booksource.  They offer a free classroom organizer. When I found the site a year or so ago they offered an app for Apple only. This app scans the bar codes on your books and puts them into a database. You can use that database for your students to check out books via your classroom computers and do a short review upon returning them.  The database will display guided reading level or AR level just to name a few.  This display is customizable by you.  

 Upon revisiting the site on Thursday I was elated to see that they now have an app for Android.  I have began bringing my books home from school, 1 box at a time, to scan them.  My goal is to have them all scanned, so that my database is up and running on the first day of school.  Wish me luck!

Reorganizing My Classroom Library

  Confession time:  My classroom library has always been an entity in my classroom, make that an unused entity in my classroom. After reading The Daily 5 by Gail Boushey & Joan Moser, I decided it was past time for this to change. The million dollar question was were to begin?  So I visited The Daily Cafe where I found a video about organizing your classroom library.  It clicked, made total sense.  
  At that time my library was a sad attempt at organizing books according to AR levels.  This organization or lack thereof lead to major frustration on my part, because the books where never were they were supposed to be.  Since no one including myself knew where they were supposed to be, this was not a surprising issue.
 I began making the change by visiting my local dollar store and purchasing plastic baskets.  Then I spent 4 hours sorting out my books by author, topic, or genre and created categories. Some sample categories that I created are Magic Treehouse, Sports, and Beverly Cleary.  I labeled the baskets and matching books with a number and sorted them into their proper place.  
 This all done, my goal is for my library to be the focus entity in my classroom not the unused entity.