To increase efficiency, when I am teaching very young children such as in kindergarten, I do this. After my lesson, I say, “okay, step one think.” I elaborate on what I want them to think about. I hold my finger up to my temple and tap it like I am thinking. I see the children imitating this when they go back to their seats from sitting at the carpet. Then I say, “Step two glue.” (or whatever I want step two to be.) I hold my hand out in front of me and lightly slap the back of my hand like I am gluing something down. The children do this with me. Then I say, “Step 3. add details.” I hold up b ..read more

Now, you all know you have markers that dry up. We have a community supply of markers in my room so, when one dries up, I have been asking students to put them in “marker heaven”…aka the trash can. The students find it amusing and it still makes me smile under my breath. More recently, I thought I might should save the almost dried up markers that don’t color so well. I remembered the “marker bots” we had made a few years ago realized I had saved the almost dried up markers for this. I exclaimed, “Oh no!” during one class and told children we needed to save them somewhere. One child said, “Ma ..read more

I promised you results from the strawberry jars a while back. While the strawberry jars did not stink near as badly as the rice jar experiment I did previously, they didn’t reveal quite as important a message in my opinion. You could again definitely tell a difference in the scent of the jars, but the inside of the jars looked very similar. When I started this experiment all of the jars had fresh strawberries, so it is certainly possible there could have been a difference in bacteria etc. on the strawberries. If I were to do this again, I would have used frozen strawberries to make sure this w ..read more

Like many of you I have been cleaning my room. Because of the last two years of germ hyper vigilance, I wanted to make sure everything was dust and germ free. With that, I used a Norwex cloth AND my Thieves household cleaner. Both of them knock germs out! The Norwex cloth is rather amazing because it sucks dust up and doesn’t just push it around. I’ve never seen anything like a Norwex cloth, and I keep one at school. Right before the first day of school, my principal came by and remarked how calming my room smelled! The great thing about Thieves cleaner is that you only need about an ounce to ..read more

Each time I begin a year, we practice these expectations. Number 1. We talk about how sharing materials could go badly–scattering materials, sharing germs, not everyone’s hand can fit in the container, etc. Number 2. We practice saying all of these rules several times so that students get accustomed to saying these words and have this tool in their tool chest of ways to interact with peers. Number 3. I let the students discuss how they will settle a disagreement. Most students arrive at Rock Paper Scissors as being the best way to solve disagreements. Students also say things like that they c ..read more

For grading pens there are many options, but I am going to tell you about one I used last year that I wished I had used before–Crayola fine line markers. These worked wonderfully for me to grade creativity tests in which there are so many components. The colors helped me keep track of each test part. Not only are they great for using because of their multiple colors, they are cheap in comparison to other pens. They can also double as colorful note writing pens. I enjoyed these more than flair pens or Vis a Vis although I have used both of those for grading also. I hope you scoop up a few extra ..read more