Colorful Teaching
774 FOLLOWERS
I live in Maine and have been teaching fifth for the past nine years. I have my masters in education as well as a literacy certificate. I am currently teaching science and math.
Colorful Teaching
3y ago
I have been teaching my students to write narratives. Wow! They have some great imaginations. It just takes a little bit to shape their great ideas into stories. So far we've worked on Entertaining Beginnings and Elaborative Details.
I have two resources that I'm currently using to help me with this process:
1. The Most Wonderful Writing Lessons Ever, By Barbara Mariconda. This book goes step by step through the writing diamond and has helped me to get great products out of my students.
2. Empowering Writers Website is an awesome resource too. Here they have a whole narrative writing progr ..read more
Colorful Teaching
3y ago
Jen at teaching, life, and everything in between has awarded me two awards...
Thanks Jen! These are my very first woo hoo!!
Here are the rules for the 'One Lovely Blog Award':
1. Follow the person who gave you the award.
2. Link back to the person who gave you the award.
3. Share the love! Pass the award onto 15 new bloggers!
Rules for "The Versatile Blogger" Award:
1. Thank the blogger who nominated you.
2. Include a link to their site.
3. Include the award image in your post.
4. Give 7 random facts about yourself.
5. Nominate 15 other bloggers for the award.
6. When n ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
I am currently reading the book "Science Workshop Reading, Writing and Thinking Like a Scientist" By Wendy Saul in hopes to prepare for using in my classroom in the fall and teaching with the new NGSS Standards. Has your school switched over yet? Where are you in the process? We spent a lot of time on Marzano's Scales this year, and we've adjusted what we're teaching in each grade level. Next year for me I'll have some of the same curriculum and some new things.
Reading the first chapter of this book, gave me a lot of great hope. The book puts emphasis on what a ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
I've always struggled with managing supplies, but this year I decided to create these caddies at each work station (table group). In my classroom I have 12 work stations each with 4 desks. In the middle of each station is the caddy with all the supplies.
Each caddy is numbered and all of the supplies in it have that same number.
The caddy contains 4 rulers, 2 Calculators, 4 pencils, 4 pairs of scissors, 1 tape, 1 stapler, 1 box of crayons, 2 CD's, 4 dry erase markers, 12 colored pencils, bottle or glue, and 11 colorful ink pens. Outside the caddy is a glue sponge, a tidy tub and ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
I have been working on some new assessments for my classroom and decided to put them on TpT store so I could share them all with you.
Our school has just officially embraced standards based grading. We have been using 4-1 (Exceeds, Meets, Partially Meeting, and Does not Meet the standard) for a while, but also gave a corresponding letter grade to go with standards based grades. The letter grades made it so that no one fully embraced "meeting the standard." This year we got rid of the letter grades and are changing the mindset of our students, teachers and community.
Th ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
A passion turned into a resources I can use.... how exciting!
So I love to draw!!! But now I've found a way to take those drawing and incorporate them into my teaching resources digitally. That's AWESOME!
So, here's what I've been up to:
1. I found this great blog "A Turn to Learn," which gives you direction in how to turn your drawings into clipart.
2. Drawing! I do this anyway...
So with the combination of the two... I created some clipart... because it's the first (hopefully of many) that I've created I am giving it to you for free.
Let me know what you think ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
Whew what a busy week! It's nice to be back after April vacation but it's always the longest week. Before break we were dissecting frogs as a culminating activity on the human body. If you're not sold on dissecting... here are the top 5 reason on why you should do dissection in your classroom.
#5 Hands-on Learning!
This is the obvious one... students can apply what they learn about the human body and see it first hand on the frog!
#4 The Smell!
I know... I know this one doesn't seem like a reason to convince you! However... if you did any dissection in ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
Are you teaching force and motion in your classroom? I've been teaching at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics STEM Educator's camp this past week and this is my powerpoint from my class.
This powerpoint includes resources for friction, potential and kinetic energy, Newton's Laws, simple machines and more. Each topic/slide includes multiple resources and videos to use in the classroom.
At the end I've even included a force and motion car building project.
Hope this helps in your classroom ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
This is my first year teaching 7th grade and I'm in a fabulous place where I can grow and learn as a teacher. One of the things we are doing to engage our students is to have our students applying their learning. I start with a capacity matrix and end with a project to apply students learning. The first project that my team is doing is a film festival. Students are learning about both science and social studies concepts and have to make a 10 minute film to show their learning.
I'm not sure if you've used capacity matrix but it's awesome and really allows the learners i ..read more
Colorful Teaching
4y ago
I am currently team teaching in a large classroom with doors that slide open. My teammate and I have decided to leave our doors open all the time and teach teach the entire year! I love it and are kids are amazing! However there are some things about student management that needed some help. Although there are two of us we still wanted to give every student a voice. Another teacher in our building was using a number system with the dry erase board. However that required going up to the board every time you needed to switch the number. I decided to have some ..read more