Five for Friday: Spring Break Edition

Happy Friday everyone! This week the students were still on spring break for their second week while we were at school prepping and attending PD sessions! The good news, Apple ran some of our PDs!

I spent last week on a cruise ship with all my favourite people, what more could I ask for? As you know, I mentioned before that my parents came to visit me in the desert. Following that, we went on a cruise in the Mediterranean where my brother and my best friend also joined us! It was a lot of fun. We visited Spain, France, Italy and Malta. I had no expectations for Malta, and it turned out to be my favourite place!!! I will be writing a blog post ASAP on my trip and my family's visit. 

Family Selfie in Marseilles, France

 I was feeling super springy while we were on our cruise.. just about until we arrived back in the desert heat! All year my students have been writing letters to me in their reader's notebooks about what they have been reading. I found that about half of the students were finally grasping the concept, but it just wasn't working for the lower students. Instead, in my springy mood, I decided to create this reading challenge to get them excited about reading again for the final term. I am so excited for them to get started on Sunday, because I made 3 differentiated reading response choice boards where they can choose what activity they complete related to their book before they move on. It also has a fun colouring tracking sheet where they get to colour in one book for each book they have read. It also has a goal tracking sheet and reading log in two different versions. Plus, it's spring themed and cute! I can't wait to give it to my students on Sunday. Click on the picture below to check it out!

Spring Reading Challenge

One of the things we got to do while we were in Malta was put our diving certification to use!!! The visibility was amazing, it felt like we could see forever! The views were beautiful, but the only downfall was there weren't very many fish. We got to swim through some caves underwater, so that kind of made up for it. It was awesome! Here is a little video sneak peak. Turns out I have a really shaky hand underwater, so all the videos I took didn't turn out very well!

As mentioned, we had an Apple presenter for our PD yesterday. Our school apparently has all these iPads that we have not received yet because the teachers were not trained. So, this PD week we had some training. Hopefully we will get our hands on them soon! One app (available on apple products AND samsung) that I feel will change my life is called Plickers. Have you heard of it? I could not believe I hadn't!! You know all those check ins, thumbs up or down, green, yellow or red, etc that we do to check our students understanding? This app allows the students to use a card (which you could glue on to the back of their notebooks) and you can use your phone or ipad to scan the room! It gives you instant data and saves it for reports whenever you want to see them again. AWESOME! I can't wait to use this - I wish I had known about it sooner! If you haven't heard of it.. go. check. it. out! Click the picture below.

Plickers

With the students being out of the room for a week, I was able to capture some pictures of my classroom finally! (While it was relatively organized and clean :) ) Hopefully soon I will be able to update "My Classroom" tab on here and share some of my ideas and great products from other TpT sellers that I have used in my classroom. Keep an eye out! Here are a few sneak peaks:

Classroom Preivew

Bonus: If you have never heard of the Nearpod app (can also be used on a website), GO! Now. Or, yesterday. Especially if you have class sets of ipads. Life. Changing.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!