Eberopolis: Teaching Reading and Writing with Technology

Paperless Mission #9: Setting Up Your Class with Evernote

2013-05-14T16:09:00.002-04:00

This is the ninth installment in my Go Paperless! Challenge Series. You can check out the other entries in the series here. Also be sure to link up with my Paperless Challenge Linky! Mission #9: Set Up Your Class with Evernote Today's mission assumes that your class has easy access to technology. I teach in a 1:1 iPad setting, but I realize how blessed I am to have this and how few people -

Paperless Mission #8: Conduct and Archive Running Records (iPad)

2013-05-07T17:21:00.000-04:00

This is the eighth installment in my Go Paperless! Challenge series. You can see the other entries in the series here. Also be sure to link up with my Paperless Challenge Linky! Mission #8: Conduct and Archive Running Records At least once each six-week term, teachers at my school are supposed to conduct a running record as a guided reading level assessment. We use the Fiction Level Reading

Currently May & Life Updates (aka Why I've been a Bad Blogger)

2013-05-05T22:22:00.001-04:00

How could it possibly be May 5th already? And how could I have possibly neglected my blog for a week shy of a month??? Yikes! Things have been super busy in Eberopolis lately, and to start that big update and get back in the swing of things, I'm like the 400th person to link up with Farley's Currently over at Oh' Boy 4th Grade. Listening: It has been raining the past two weekends. The

Guided Math Resources

2013-04-12T09:08:00.000-04:00

I recently went to a workshop about guided math groups, and I have tons of new ideas that I'll be sharing in the coming weeks. I couldn't wait, however, to share a couple of the resources that I'm really excited about. First, is this book: Good Questions: Great Ways to Differentiate Mathematics Instruction, Second Edition is a resource that I was able to start using with my students as soon

Paperless Mission #7: Annotating Rubrics with GoodReader (iPad)

2013-04-08T14:19:00.000-04:00

This is the seventh post in my Go Paperless! Challenge Series. If you haven't completed the previous missions, be sure to complete those first. Mission #1: Gather Your Tools Mission #2: Build Evernote Notebooks Mission #3: Email Notes to Evernote Mission #4: Create Checklists in Evernote Mission #5: Organize Your Files in Dropbox Mission #6: Setting Up GoodReader (iPad) Also be sure to link

Paperless Mission #6: Setting Up GoodReader (iPad)

2013-04-01T21:21:00.000-04:00

This is the sixth post in my Go Paperless! Challenge Series. If you haven't completed the previous missions, be sure to complete those first. Mission #1: Gather Your Tools Mission #2: Build Evernote Notebooks Mission #3: Email Notes to Notebooks Mission #4: Create Checklists in Evernote Mission #5: Organize Your Files in DropBox Also be sure to link up at the Go Paperless! Linky. Mission

Paperless Mission #5: Organize Your Files in DropBox

2013-03-24T21:26:00.001-04:00

This is the fifth post in my Go Paperless! Challenge Series. If you haven't completed the previous missions, be sure to complete those first. Mission #1: Gather Your Tools Mission #2: Build Evernote Notebooks Mission #3: Email Notes to Evernote Mission #4: Create Checklists in Evernote Also be sure to link up at the Go Paperless! linky. Mission #5: Organize Your Files in DropBox I

Paperless Mission #4: Create Checklists in Evernote

2013-03-14T11:07:00.002-04:00

If you haven't already completed the prior missions, be sure to complete those first. Mission #1: Gather Your Tools Mission #2: Build Evernote Notebooks Mission #3: Email Notes to Evernote Also be sure to link up at the Go Paperless! Challenge linky. Mission #4: Create Checklists in Evernote I use checklists for everything -- keeping track of who has turned in assignments, what

Paperless Mission #3: Email Notes to Evernote

2013-03-09T09:03:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already completed the prior missions, be sure to do those first. Mission #1: Gather Your Tools Mission #2: Build Evernote Notebooks Also be sure to link up at the Go Paperless! Challenge linky! Mission #3: Email Notes to Evernote Now that we have our notebooks built in Evernote, we need to start putting things in them. One of the best ways to do that is through email.

Paperless Mission #2: Build Evernote Notebooks

2013-03-07T13:58:00.001-05:00

This is the second mission in the Go Paperless series! Be sure to check out Mission #1: Gather Your Tools. And if you're participating, be sure to link up at the Paperless Linky! Mission #2: Build your Evernote notebooks If you completed the first mission, you should already have an Evernote account. Evernote is going to be our cloud-based note-taking system. Before getting started on this

Paperless Mission #1: Gather your Tools

2013-03-04T11:23:00.001-05:00

This is the first post in the Go Paperless Challenge! If you're participating, be sure to link up at my initial post. (We'll have other linky's along the way to do some progress updates as well...) There are a few tools that you'll need to prepare to Go Paperless! Here's what I'll be using: Evernote I've shared my love for Evernote in the past, but this is a tool that has so many features

The Paperless Challenge Linky

2013-03-04T10:04:00.000-05:00

Do any of these scenarios sound like you? You can't seem to find the curriculum document you know you've printed 1,000 times, so you print it again because that will be faster than finding it. You've broken more than 1 plastic rolling cart because of the number of papers, books, and materials you've hauled back and forth from school. You hate grading papers because it takes you 5x longer to

The One and Only Ivan

2013-03-03T11:22:00.000-05:00

I try to read the Newbery Award winner each year, and this morning, I finished reading Katherine Applegate's beautiful story, The One and Only Ivan. I knew very little about the story going into it, but a few of my colleagues had been raving about it, so I had high expectations. The story did not disappoint. The One and Only Ivan tells the tale of a western lowland gorilla who lives in a

Currently March

2013-03-02T16:50:00.000-05:00

Really? It's March already??? February sure did go by quickly! I'm linking up with Farley at Oh' Boy 4th Grade for this month's Currently. Listening - my daughter has moved beyond her Yo Gabba Gabba! phase, and she is now obsessed with Elmo. I don't let her watch much TV, but I have to say -- there's something pretty cool about her watching a show that I used to watch (and love) when I was a

Phases of the Moon

2013-02-26T15:34:00.001-05:00

For the last few weeks, I've been mentoring a fabulous student teacher. She has been gradually taking over more subject areas, and later this week, she'll be teaching everything. I really enjoy having the opportunity to work with student teachers because they bring a lot of enthusiasm to the classroom, and they often have really creative lessons. My current student teacher is no exception.

Idioms aren't always a piece of cake...

2013-02-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

I've developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Common Core. I LOVE that most states are using the same standards now because it makes finding high-quality teaching materials that much easier. I also LOVE that the standards are set up in a way that makes it easy to see how a skill is supposed to progress from one grade level to the next. I hate, however, that I feel like I'm constantly

February Currently

2013-02-11T12:33:00.000-05:00

Hello Blog Friends! I have been MIA for nearly a month now, and I'm so frustrated because one of my goals for the year was to blog more consistently. But much like my weight loss goal, I am not giving up, and I'm getting right back into things. I'll just pretend that the past month didn't really happen. ;-) So what's been keeping me from blogging lately? Lots. And to make this laundry list of

Text to Screen

2013-01-20T15:12:00.001-05:00

Every six week term, I try to get my students to read at least 5 books at their reading level. In theory, they're supposed to take an AR test on each one and blog about two of them. This term, I decided to create a new requirement for my fourth graders: one of the books has to have been made into a movie, and they need to watch said movie after they've finished reading the book. You see, I'm

Free Lesson Planning Resources

2013-01-08T16:53:00.002-05:00

In ELA this term, we're studying poetry and figurative language. I have a few resources for this that I've used in the past, but I always spend some time at the start of a new unit exploring what's available online to see if it sparks my interest. There are two free sites that I always start with: Thinkfinity - This site, sponsored by Verizon, allows you to search several different websites at

Busy Weekend & Bathroom Break Freebie

2013-01-05T11:39:00.001-05:00

I feel like my two days with students last week were really just a warm-up to what comes next. Monday will start our first real week of the new term, and that's when I'm planning to implement some new strategies and policies in the classroom. I'm thinking about revamping a lot of what I do in my reading and writing block (more on that later), but I'm also going to be cracking down more on

Multiplying Fractions

2013-01-04T22:12:00.000-05:00

I had a two-day week with my students this week, and while it was hard for me to go back for such a short week, it was a great couple of days. It was one of those weeks where I felt reasonably well-organized, but also where my lessons were going well. This was especially true in math where I started my unit on multiplying fractions. Multiplying fractions is one of those topics that I was pretty

Paper Slide Shows

2013-01-03T18:18:00.000-05:00

When I talk about working in a class with 1:1 iPads, I frequently hear from other teachers about only having 1-2 iPads for the entire class -- if that many! I really do understand the challenges of having limited technology access -- it has been long since I've been there myself. Today I want to share a great classroom activity that can be done with only one iPad: making Paper Slide Shows. A

Bump It Up

2013-01-02T16:00:00.000-05:00

A while back, I was contacted by a teacher named Sheena about creating a custom order bulletin board for her. I agreed, but when she described what she was looking for, I was really curious. She wanted the title "Bump It Up," some arrows, and a few subheadings saying various things. I was dying to know what it was about, so I emailed her back asking more about it. Fortunately, she was happy to

New Year's Resolutions!

2013-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

Happy 2013 Everyone! I love New Year's Day. Much like the first day of school, there's something exciting about the promise of a fresh start and a clean slate. I typically tackle some New Year's Resolutions every year, and some years are more productive than others. I've found that when I'm most successful with my resolutions, it's because they're ones that I'm really motivated to achieve. In

What's Ahead 2013

2012-12-29T23:12:00.000-05:00

After a long day of travel, I am stuck in a hotel in Kentucky for the night with the hope that the roads will improve enough that I can make it back to Atlanta tomorrow. And as I was taking advantage of the free wi-fi to catch up on blog reading, I stumbled on Michelle's What's Ahead in 2013 Linky Party over at Making It as a Middle School Teacher. So here we go... Want to join in on