Quick Plot Review Chart Freebie!

A quick post - but I wanted to share something that I made tonight!

I needed something that I could give to my students and have them quickly review plot elements.  Since my school is concerned about my "excessive paper usage" (pft!) these are two on a page - save some trees.  (Or your school budget in my case!)

Lucky you - it's available for FREE at my TPT Store!

If you do download it, please leave me a comment letting me know! 

My BIG BIG BIG 2 Year Blog Anniversary party starts tomorrow (or tonight at midnight!).  Come back and check out the super awesome prizes you could win!!

Fanboys Poster

I've had this poster sitting around on my hard drive for awhile now, so I finally spruced it up and put it on my Teacher's Notebook account!  FANBOYS - it helped my 7th graders two years ago remember their conjunction words for the CST.  Plus, by memorizing these guys, it helped them with their independent/dependent clauses!

It's FREE for everyone - hooray!  Have a good Sunday!

ISTE Thoughts - Day 2

Now that I'm back in the comfort of my own home and not the rat-trap, hell-hole, worst. hotel. EVER. - Holiday Inn where my friend and I had to stay... I can happily give you my Day 2 ISTE report.

(Side Note... I feel it's my civic duty to tell you, my faithful blog readers, that if you are ever in San Diego and need a hotel STAY FAR AWAY from Holiday Inn on the Bay.  My friend had bed-bugs in her room...  I saw cockroaches running around the exterior of the hotel.... A shoebox was larger than my room...  Hotel Management was awful!  ::Shudders::)

Anyway, on to nicer things.

Here are two pictures I took from the view from the hotel.  Lots of great views in SD... 

For ISTE Day 2, I didn't go to as many sessions as I did on the first day.  There were a few that interested me for sure, but I had discovered that many interesting sessions were going to be available for "Video-On-Demand" starting today.  So, I can sit back and view those sessions from home.  I went to one fantastic session, though!  It was by Adam Bellow from edutecher.org.  He listed through so many great education websites that we can use in our classrooms.  For the list... you can check them all out at his edutecher website - HERE!

Also, his company is launching a Pinterest website that is strictly for education called - educlipper.org  I think he's on the right track with this website and it will be broken up into the sections we've all be creating on our own through Pinterest.  It's in beta, but check it out and sign up.

A view from the back upstairs patio of the San Diego Convention Center.  Beautiful.  I love California.

What my friend and I did devote our time to was the Exhibit Hall, since that wouldn't be around to watch later.  We sat through presentations from companies, got more free stuff and... we even WON a few things.  I mean, check out all this stuff!

My friend - WON AN IPAD2!  Amazing right?!  I'm happy for her, since she hasn't been able to get one yet and I already have one.  We both won cool stylus/presenter laser pointers too.  We were able to rock this American President game from All in One Learning.  Their program seems very informative about grading and linking back to common core.  If only our very NON-Techie Principal will go for it.  (He likes to let other schools take risks and then see if they work out before signing us up for things.)

Here's the pile of freebies from the exhibit hall on Day Two.  My husband tried to be excited when I showed him all this stuff... but I know you guys will share my joy!

Then, when I got home, I checked my work email and lo and behold.... I won a free school site subscription to Brain Pop!!!  Whoo hooo!  I'm SO happy because I think that's a great prize that my entire school can benefit from.

Then, finally... we were headed home.  My wonderful husband and son were able to come down and spend the last day there with me.  This is Liam when he gets a hold of my iPhone.  Goofy kid!

ISTE Thoughts Day #1

I. Am. Tired!

Today was the first day of the ISTE conference and my friend and I hit the conference with a vengeance.  We were there for the first set of sessions that started at 8:30am and stayed straight through to the last set of sessions that ended at 5:15pm.

...passes out from exhaustion...

Before I hit some highlights, I'm going to share a few pictures.  There's also a very FULL exhibition hall (that we did about half of), poster sessions with students (which we skimmed) and checked out the bookstore.

I got a free shirt for facebooking about this company!  Teachingfirst.com

eBooks on Demand!  Download for $1.00 each!

Interactive Maps Poster

The ISTE "Sails" Pavilion - The bookstore, blogger lounge and other hangouts were in this area.

Inside Ballroom 20cd...  Great because I finally had some room to breathe!

A collection of all my FREE stuff that I got in the exhibit hall.  I still have 1/2 the booths left to visit!

Cute Shirt!

Awesome canvas tote bags!

Conference Highlights...

Alan November - November Learning -- a pleasure to attend his sessions because he's always so thought-provoking!  He mentioned that we need to help our students learn how to accurately search the internet and not just use whatever junk pops up in Google first.  Also, did you know that your Google searches will change based on your geographical location?!  So, if I'm in Southern California, I could receive an entirely different set of google hits versus someone who might be searching from England.  That's important to consider.

Tammy Worcester - Tammy's Technology Tips -- Despite a few technology issues getting started, it was a really quick paced session that discussed a bunch of different ideas.  Check out QR Hacker - take student audio and make it into a QR code!

Google Certified Teachers SLAM - Again, another quick session that had multiple teachers share some quick Google Tips!

Cool Things I Never Knew About...

beta.ck12.org - Create free custom online textbooks!  The booth guys were really great and this seems like an awesome resource!


plickers - Do you want clickers for your classroom, but can't afford them?  Check out plickers - you hold up the card in a certain way in front of a webcam (mounted to shoot the whole class) and it will record your vote!  Awesome.

PollEverywhere.com -- Have your kids with smartphones or computer access vote remotely!  This is awesome and FREE for classroom teachers (if you keep the presentations small.)

And a big sparkly THANK YOU to all my newest followers!  108?  Insane!  I started this crazy little blog because I missed my teaching friends at my old (now current) school.  Thank you for listening to me and I will definitely be rewarding you all when I do my 100 Follower Giveaway.  (Sometime NEXT week.  I have to recover from ISTE!)

Binder Covers!

I was lurking around pinterest the other day (and I bet that I'm not the only one.... that site is addictive!) and I found these super cute covers at Kindergarten Works!  I loved them, but they were only made for the primary grades.

I decided that I could make up a few covers that would work for all of us at Middle School.

I made two versions - a "plain" version that will be easy to print and a "star" version that has a cute blue star background that I bought at KPM Doodles.  The plain version will be FREE for you to download and the star version is available at my Teacher's Notebook site for a $1.50, because I had to buy that cute background!

Star Version

Plain Version

I have a variety of other colors and stuff, so if you're looking for a particular color, just let me know and I'll be happy to make it for you! :)

Finally Treading Water...

Hello my Middle School friends!

I am about halfway moved into my new classroom at my new/old school. According to my school district, because I was a "voluntary" transfer I did not receive any prep days to move my classroom and to prepare for my new students. It's been a bit of a whirlwind since Monday 3:30pm, when I found out that I was moving into my new class on Wednesday.

In addition, I also switched content levels from 7th grade Language Arts/Social Studies to 7th grade Math/Science (and an EXTRA 8th grade Science thrown in! Eeeep!)

So... madness.

Luckily, my new students are VERY sweet and have been working nicely the past three days. (Except for my 8th graders, but they're another blog post.) That's a bit off my shoulders. When I get online access to their information, that will be another step in the right direction.

My new students have been telling me that they're very upset that all the other science classes have been able to do Lab Experiments and since they have had a sub, they've been left out. So I promised them that we would start some Lab Safety next week to prepare for lab experiments. I made these Lab Safety "Licenses" that I'll share with everyone.

Also, a shout out to Middle School Math Rules! and her great One-Step Equation idea. Her group lesson for solving Equations is in my plans for next week and I already kinda prepped them using colors in math today. I had my students take a colored pencil for their inequalities and start boxing all the key words (like, more than, less than, etc) in the problems to make their inequality words really POP! They seemed to enjoy doing something a little different.