I do not know why I never used this before, but it is great! Riddle is an online tool to use for a quiz, personality test, opinion poll, interactive story, list, or survey. In this case, I used the quiz application. When trying to create a quiz, it was very easy to maneuver around the cite and create it. I want to keep things interesting and engaging in the classroom for my students rather than doing the same thing. A coworker introduced me to this tool, so I thought it would be good to implement it into my lesson as an exit slip. We are introducing Text Features for Unit 4 ELA. I used a five question quiz to gauge my students understanding. They had to answer: Fiction, Nonfiction, or Both. I pushed it out through Google Classroom, and students were very quick to catch on. They clicked on the link and were done with the quiz in less than 5 minutes. What I liked about this was the use of pictures. I was able to attach pictures to each question which was a great visual for all of my students. After each student took the quiz, they had to share their results with me. This is a quick way to see if I need to go back and reteach or if I can keep moving on. I am still trying to get familiar with this tool and learn more about it, but I would highly recommend incorporating this as quick assessments!
Remind is a great tool to use to communicate with parents. There is a free app for it, but you do not need to have it to receive or send messages. I use Remind to communicate with my parents weekly. If parents do not have the app, they will be receiving the message as a text message straight to their phone. The beauty about this program is that even though they are receiving it in this manner, it is not going to come from your personal phone number! This resource is a very quick and efficient way to send reminders or messages to parents. For example, we earned our class reward for tomorrow, Wednesday, March 14, and the students chose to have stuffed animal day. Instead of sending out an email, I sent a quick message to the parents reminding them of our special day tomorrow. If needed, I can also send messages to individual people. This way if I do not need to contact the whole class, I can select one or a few recipients and contact them directly. However, there can be some setbacks using this tools. The downfall to using this Remind is the immediate feedback. Since it is quick, some parents want your feedback right away and then might get frustrated if you haven't gotten back to them in a timely manner (not that we are busy or anything with everything teachers need to take care of throughout the day). I would highly recommend this resource to others!
We are just finishing up our Biography Buddies activity where students are interviewing one another and writing about their buddy. To wrap it up, we tried doing a wordle. My kiddos have never heard of this before, so they were excited to try something new. To start off, I should them how to input the information. To make a word bigger, you have to add it more times and if you want two words to be connected, you have to put a hyphen between the two words. At first, they were a little thrown off by this because the red squiggly line kept appearing (they know that means the word is spelled wrong). They started to get the hang of it as we went along though. Some kids would tell me, "Miss Johns that word is spelled wrong." The others would chime in saying, "No, you can't have any spaces if you want them together." It was cute seeing them remind each other that it is okay! Once I was done adding all my words, I showed them the finished piece. They were all taken back by it and thought it was amazing that they couldn't wait to get started! :) We filled out a generic organizer with information they would be including in their wordle. For example: name, family members, live, how old, favorite color and food, words to describe your buddy, favorite hobby, etc. Once they were done, they got started. I shared out the link with them via Google Classroom so they could access it right away. They really took their time creating their wordle and including colors they thought their buddy would like and picking a font that attracted their eye. When they had finished, they were so proud of their creation. They called me over and wanted to print it right away so their buddy could get the finished product. At the end of the school year, this would be a fun and engaging activity to talk about the whole school and create a wordle reflecting on the year we had! :)
|
Miss Johns1st Grade ArchivesCategories |