Busy Busy Bee

So yes, I am aware that it seems like I have fallen of the face of the earth (or at least the internet). In the past 3 months my husband and I have painted 17 rooms, packed up a house, unpacked a house, and I have started a new job. I am at an elementary school in Springfield, VA and I couldn't be happier! All of the students, staff, and administration are absolutely wonderful. We had a fire drill the other day and I have never been more impressed. Over 700 students stood outside of the building in what seemed like dead silence. Absolutely amazing! It has taken a little while to adjust to my new environment full of construction workers and noises (our school is in the process of renovation). My year has also had an interesting twist when my class changed from a second grade class to a first and second grade split class. It has brought some new challenges to my day but SUPER organization has helped to keep me on track. My students work great with each other and we have a wonderful dynamic in our room. As you can tell, to say that I've been busy is an understatement (especially considering that I have an almost 3 year old at home too). Either way I'd like to rejoin the world of the internet and keep sharing great teaching ideas.

This year I have already come up with some great things on my own and learned some awesome things from my new colleagues! Today's share is from my new team leader who has been so helpful that I can't thank her enough. This year I put my color coded stickers at the bottom of my journals. This way my students barely had to pull their journals out of their desks to see which journal it was before deciding if it was the correct one or not. I have to say, I thought that I was pretty smart.

 Until I saw my team leader's journals. Without a doubt they were better than mine.

She had her students color the pages on the outside all the way around the journal so they didn't even  have to take their journals out at all. All they did was look inside and boom they could see the pink or green and pick the journal they needed! Genius. 

Of course, I then had all of my students color the outside of their pages too and now it's never been easier for them to find their journals. Thank you Ms. Navarrete for the super tip! Hopefully you can use this in your classroom too. Do you have a tip that helps to keep your students' desks organized? Leave a comment below!

-OneCrazyS

Back to School Sale!

It's that time of year where everyone is starting to go back to school! I have to go back for new teacher orientation next week though I know many of my friends are going back this week. To make this time a little easier on you and your wallet, I am throwing a SALE in my TeachersPayTeachers store! You can save 15% from me as well as another 10% from TPT. That's 25% OFF of a whole bunch of products. Check out a few that will be on sale: 

Originally $3 on SALE for $2.40!

Originally $3 on SALE for $2.40!

Originally $5 on SALE for $4!

Originally $6 on SALE for $4.80!

Originally $3 on SALE for $2.40!

Have fun shopping and I hope you have a great start to your new year!

-OneCrazyS

Classroom Library

Our move is COMPLETE (minus the unpacking of a million boxes). Thank goodness! Our new house is like our own personal gym complete with several flights of stairs. I should be in pretty good shape soon enough!

I am definitely excited to be in a new state, county, and school. Change is always a good thing in my world. I am even going to teach a fifth grade class this year! It will definitely be a different teaching experience but it should be tons of fun. I have to say that if I had to pick one thing that I will miss the most out of my old first grade classroom, it would be my library. My library was always something special. It was a place for students to sit down and get lost in a good book. For five years, my classroom library was in a tent. In fact it was in a sun tent (they are like half-tents that you take to the beach). It was something that new students were always excited to see. Here is my happy place:

I don't know what my new classroom will be like so my hopes of having a tent may be lost. However, I already have some new ideas! I just painted those bins in the back of the tent white. This year I will use them as bins for: Recommended Books, Seasonal Books, and Student Author Books.  I can't wait to get started! I know that we will have a great year!

-OneCrazyS

New School!

If you didn't already know, I am moving up and out of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. We are headed to Springfield, VA and we couldn't be happier! I officially have a new job at Springfield Estates Elementary School and I can't wait to get started. I already have so many new ideas to try with my students. I always put a large emphasis on the fact that our class is our "school family" however, this year I want my students to feel like the classroom is their home away from home. I want them to have an active part in making the classroom theirs. My idea starts with a white table (which I have to explain the background to first). My mom's friend Ms. Anita (who is my second mother), moved into her home in Florida and found a picture on her wall. She tried to remove the picture and realized that the person who lived there before her painted on the actual wall and then put a picture frame around it. The people before her called it the "Murial." Yes, the Murial, not the Mural. Anyways, everyone who ever came to her house was asked to paint a picture onto the Murial. I really liked this idea and I wanted to do a version of this at my own house. I had an old table from when I was a child and so I painted the entire thing white and then painted a beach background on the top portion of it. Whenever a friend or family member would come to the house they would paint a picture onto the beach scene and then paint their name. It was a fun tradition and it became a very interesting beach scene full of a dolphin, battleship, and even an airplane. 

I decided that it was time for the table idea to move its way into school. I took several pictures of it and then sanded and re-painted it white. At the beginning of the year I would like to have the students paint something on the top portion of the table and then paint their name. I have a Plexiglas piece that goes on top of that part of the table so we can use it without damaging our paintings. I have also drawn squares all over the rest of the table for the students to create a quilt like creation. I drew squares so no one would paint ridiculously large pictures that took up half of the table and so no one would paint over anyone else's art work. I will keep the table on top of a plastic bag and the paints and brushes inside of the table. I think the students will love the opportunity to be creative and help personalize their classroom furniture. We'll see if it works, I'll keep you posted!

P.S. - I am without a doubt upset to be leaving my students at Woodson. I will not be able to see them grow and change and say Hello in the hallways like I always do. I told them that they are more than welcome to write to me at my new school but at the end of the year I wasn't sure where exactly I was going. To any of them who are interested in writing to me I would LOVE to hear from you!! This is the address of my new school: 

Springfield Estates Elementary

6200 Charles C Goff Drive

Springfield, VA  22150

Please don't send any letters until after September 1st if possible (they start after labor day here). I truly look forward to hearing from you and I can't wait to hear how your summer went! Plus, I'd love to tell you all about my summer adventures as well! I hope to hear from you soon (: 

-OneCrazyS

Mrs. Soderstrom

Summer Birthdays Celebration

Every year I struggle trying to figure out what to do for those poor students who happen to have their birthday over the summer. Normally, I like to have a big class party where I make cupcakes and we sing and watch a movie for them. This year however, I had a much better idea. In case you didn't know, I love to bake! It's a sad thing for me though because no one in my house likes baked food. Not even my 2 1/2 year old boy! What's a sad baking girl to do? Bring baking to school of course! This year, I decided to bake our birthday treats as a class. Originally I was going to have us bake cupcakes but since I didn't want them working with raw eggs, I decided to use blueberry and chocolate chip muffin mix instead (where all you have to add is water).We used both of these yummy mixes to make muffin puffs (basically muffin cookies). Of course I couldn't just have them mix in the correct amount of water and be done with it, I let them experiment. We put more water in one mix than the other and made predictions on what we thought would happen. We also discussed what to do to make dough or batter thicker or thinner if we were following a recipe (this knowledge definitely comes in handy when cooking). We came to the conclusion that adding liquid to batter would make it thinner and adding a solid like flour or confectioner's sugar would make it thicker.

 First, I lined the cookie sheets with foil and sprayed them with cooking spray.

(The pans we used at school were smaller. I had to recreate this at home because I forgot to take pictures at school.)

  Then, I let each of the students put a blob of muffin mix from each bowl on the pan and then I put them in the toaster oven. (At school we put each of the different batters on different trays.) Don't worry if the blobs are too close to each other.

While the muffin puffs were baking, I wrote all of the students' names (with summer birthdays) and their birth dates on the board. I passed out colored paper and assigned 2-3 students a specific student from the board. We spent some time creating hand made birthday cards. 

Once I removed the golden brown muffin puffs from the toaster ovens (they only take about 5-7 minutes to cook), the students passed out their cards and we sang Happy Birthday. Then, we observed the different muffin puffs to see what happened when the batter was thicker or thinner. We also talked about why some of the muffins ran into each other and how we could avoid that if we ever baked them again.

 After that, I passed out the muffin puffs and juice. We had such a great time and I think the students who had a birthday over the summer really felt special. It was easy, educational, and tons of fun! I will definitely be doing this again next year!

-OneCrazyS

P.S. - Normally, I try to post something every week but over the summer I am going to try to post something every other week. We are in the wonderful process of moving which means fixing and painting EVERYTHING in the house. Oh the joys of moving!

What Teachers Really Do Over The Summer

Most of us teachers have been watching all of the funny teacher videos of "What Teachers Really Do Over The Summer." Ms. South organized the whole event and one day after school turned into a fun-filled costume show of sorts. Everyone came out in full force with their boas, horse heads, masks, wheelchairs, and wigs. It was a blast and I couldn't have asked for a better end to the year. Ms. South made a great trailer for the students and we all watched it on the announcements on Friday. The big day will be next week for all of the students to watch the whole performance in all of it's glory! I can't wait! She was nice enough to post it on YouTube for all to see. Check it out below and enjoy the show!

-OneCrazyS

The Magic of YouTube

Everyone knows the power of the Internet, but one specific site has changed the face of education today. YouTube is one of the most widely used sources for informal education. If there is anything you want to learn, just look it up on YouTube, and more than likely someone will be there ready to share their knowledge with you. Personally, I use YouTube all of the time to advance my own knowledge outside of professional development opportunities, grants, graduate classes, and the like. I am well aware that I do not know everything there is to know on any particular topic, therefore I am always looking for new ideas or a fresh take on an old idea. Some teachers may spend their summers at the beach, but honestly . . . I spend most of my time learning (just ask my husband). Last summer I spent several hours a day watching YouTube videos to learn how to create a blog, as well as the title, tags, and widgets for a blog. I stayed up late learning how to create professional looking teaching materials through the use of an open source program called Inkscape. I even learned how to film, edit, and publish teaching videos to share on YouTube. I cannot express my love and admiration for this site enough. Some people may spend their time watching cat videos or funny babies, but I use it as a free gateway to gaining knowledge. You know what they say . . . knowledge is power! It's possible that I spend so much time learning because I don't have any cable or public television service, nor do I want it. I truly see myself as a lifelong learner and I always want to acquire more knowledge about anything that I can; television is a distraction to this process in my opinion. I am an inventor at heart, which explains why I am continuously curious. I use everything I do as a learning experience and then I use YouTube to help me figure out how I can improve upon those experiences. More recently, I have been using YouTube to learn a new way of teaching. Some people may already know this, but soon I will be moving away from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. My family will be moving into the Springfield, Virginia area and we couldn't be happier. As a teacher in Somerset County, Maryland, I realize that many other counties (including Fairfax County, Virginia) use a much different teaching model than what I currently use in my county. I have taught in many different ways throughout my eight years of teaching, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages. The key to anything in teaching is to file away the successes for later use and to learn from the failures or challenges that have been presented to you. I never truly see anything as a failure and I discuss this in depth with my students. The only way to fail is to give up! If something does not go as expected or as you had hoped, then the only real thing to do is to stop and figure out what went wrong and how can you fix it to make it work better. I see students become upset and frustrated when they think that they have failed. I then explain to them that this is not a time to be sad, but a time to think: What happened? How can I make this better? They change, they immediately stop and their mental wheels start to turn. An inventor is not someone who is the smartest man or woman in the world, but someone who never gave up and tried something multiple times until they succeeded. Yes, I realize I have wandered away from my original YouTube discussion, but this was important to say, as so many teachers ignore struggling students instead of giving them the tools needed to become self-motivating individuals. Now, back to my move to Northern Virginia. We are moving to Fairfax County and with that comes new challenges and experiences. I have been on a few interviews and have learned so much from each and every one of them. I did not realize how different the actual classroom teaching model was in other counties compared to mine. The need to know immediately took over and I began doing extensive research into the way that Fairfax County teaches. I have asked questions and emailed the Elementary Mathematics Specialist in the county. I have learned about DRA2, Words Their Way, Guided Reading, Responsive Classrooms, and Math Workshop. I have watched numerous training videos and other videos of teachers in the classroom using these types of teaching models, all without having to go out in the rain. YouTube is simply a wonderful tool for any teacher who just wants to know more. After watching videos of teachers using these strategies in their classroom, I began using some of them in my classroom as well. I like to test and try things out before jumping into anything (if at all possible). My students and I have a wonderful relationship, and I have explained to them that we are going to be trying new things and they are more than happy to oblige. We now have daily morning meetings and use transitions to get from one place to another. We meet in small, leveled guided reading groups and work on individual skills based on their needs. We use secret passwords (e.g., stars with words) on our chairs each day to help us learn new word patterns at our individual level (stay tunned for this blog post later). We meet in small groups to learn specialized math skills, which are based on previous assessments. So many changes in so little time, yet I feel nothing but happiness. I see how happy my students are to greet each other and pick transitions. I see how much they have improved because of the more individualized instruction. Nothing makes me feel better than seeing happy children learning. I have started to wonder where has this model been my whole teaching career? I have always worked hard to have happy students who enjoy learning, but this was something different. This was a whole new way of thinking and teaching, and I welcome it with open arms. I know that there is still more to learn and I am excited to see what else my good friend YouTube has to offer. I know what I'll be doing this summer, what about you?

-OneCrazyS

Shaina Soderstrom