iPad for RTI

I'm lovin' my class iPad! (My wonderful husband bought an iPad for my class). Needless to say, I've been downloading apps like crazy.The first 30 minutes of the day I work on RTI. The iPad is a great tool for this.

 I found a couple apps  for fluency called One Minute Reader and K12 Timed Reading. The children practice all week to beat their time and do the last reading for me on Friday.

 Another way I'm using the iPad is for individual math practice or enrichment. Some students are working on multiplication zombies and some are on subtraction.

Students that need phonics can practice with the Phonics Tic-Tac-Toe.

I'm just getting started. I can't wait to try more. Do you have any tips for me about this? I'd love to hear more ideas.



Head over to Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried it Tuesday. I even downloaded the Spelling City App that she's talking about. :)

Five for Five and Freebies.

Happy Friday! It's Freebie Friday and I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday. Here we go.......

We wrapped our Johnny Appleseed/Tall Tales unit this week with apple treats. The treats were made by a few of  the parents. We had apple bars, apple muffins, apple cookies, and cider. Yum! We enjoyed the treats while watching animated versions of the tall tales we read.

Thanks to a parent(I have a great group of volunteers), we tasted apples and graphed our results in a pictograph. Our mode was the yellow apples.  You can download a copy of my tally chart and pictograph checklist by clicking the picture below.

                                                                                 

The children paired up to read tall tales. They wrote down examples of exaggerations from the stories. The children reported their findings to the class. They enjoyed hearing about each other's stories and exaggerations.

We learned the life cycle of the apple tree and dug deeper into the parts of the apple and their functions. To demonstrate the job of the stem, I put celery into colored water. They loved it. You could see where the xylem carried the water through the stem. They also thought the word xylem was pretty cool. I got this idea from Pinterest.





 I will end with a quote.



   

Prove It!

Supporting answers with details from the text is a hard concept for third graders. It takes lots of practice and modeling. I created a mini anchor for my students to glue into their interactive reading notebooks to help. The children refer back to the anchor now while answering questions that require supporting details.  It has really helped. You can download the mini anchor by clicking the picture below.
  

That's Tuesday's tip! Have a great week! Head over to Fourth Grade Flippers for more ideas from Tried it Tuesday.

 

 

Teach it to Learn It

 Welcome to Tip Tuesday!              

What's the best way to learn? Teach it! Research has proven that you remember 90% of what you teach or explain to someone else. You remember around 5% of what you hear during a lecture. So it makes sense that our students need opportunities to "be the teacher".

   I have my students take turns being the teacher everyday in math. After I model a new skill and allow time for practice, the kids partner up and take turns being the teacher. This past week we spent a lot of time on subtraction across zeros. The kiddos that were the teachers taught each step of the process to another student. It doesn't mean that mistakes weren't made, but that's okay. We learn from our mistakes also.

 I made teacher cards that I'm going to laminate and pass out to students that are to be the teachers. You may download a copy by clicking the link below.

 Enjoy your little teachers!

Link up your blog while your here and find some other great blogs :)

Blog Hop by Grade

Bloggers wanted! I invite you to link your blog up and find other fabulous blogs geared to your grade level. I did not forget about kindergarten or fifth grade. I'm working on a page for you also. You may click on your button below to link up. Happy Hopping!
                   
                                                                             

Five for Friday

 What a busy week! Happy Friday everyone. I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs for Five for Friday.

I'm lovin' the cute little number buttons you can download on their website.

 

We had parent teacher conferences Monday and Tuesday evening. Something I like to share with parents is their child's self-evaluation. I enjoy learning about the children's perspective on how they're doing and what they think of school. Here is my revised self-evaluation from the one that I posted last year. 

 

 Many of my children said through their self-evaluation that Reading Workshop was something they enjoyed about school! That was music to my ears.

                                                                        

 

We finished up rounding and moved to estimating sums this week. I concluded rounding with an activity called Scoot that I found from another blogger. The children scooted around the room from one task card to another. Each card contained a rounding task. They met with a partner when finished to compare answers. If their answers didn't match, they both went to that task card to determine the answer together. They did well collaborating with their partners. 

 

 I ended the week at a conference featuring of my favorite book authors on differentiated learning......Carol  Tomlinson! The title of today's conference was Differentiation and the Brain: how neuroscience supports the learner- friendly classroom. This is also title of her newest book. I will share some tips from this conference on my blog. She's amazing!

Finally, I want to give a shout out for the Breast Cancer Research Fundraiser at TPT during the month of October.   151 resources were donated for this project and divided into 7 booklets.They will be available October 1st. Proceeds will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. 

 Have a great weekend! 

Lovin' Learning Teams

 Hooray for Friday and Freebies! I'm going to end the week by sharing what I've been doing new in Math this year. I talked a little about this in my Tip Tuesday post. I've created learning teams in math to reinforce the weekly concepts. Each Friday, my students get into their learning teams and work together to completed an activity or game related to the week's math skill.


The children love it! I've set clear expectations for behavior and participation. Everyone stays on task and participates. The activity that the children did today in their teams was to roll and order numbers in the thousands. I found that particular fabulous freebie on TPT.

You may download a copy of my learning team sign below. I've also included my partners sign with it.

Enjoy your weekend! Stop back for Tip Tuesday. :)