Narrative/Personal Narrative genre for MP 1 ELA. We have books that you may want to use pieces from to introduce and teach the units. Come check out our collection!

If you have any questions or concerns please let me know.

Flying lessons & Other stories (F FLY)

Our Story Begins (920 OUR)

Been There Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life (813 BEE)

Tip: STAR YOUR ORIGINALS! In Google Drive, single click on the file title and press S to star the file. This makes it a lot easier to find your documents, instead of student work, next year. Filter your Google Drive for files that are starred, this will remove from view all student work and non important documents keeping your Drive clean and organized.

Since Word central is no more consider linking Wordsmyth.net to your classrooms as a student friendly & appropriate online dictionary. Although you can use Merriam Webster (I suggest their Learners Dictionary )or Dictionary.com getting to a kid friendly definition takes more work.

Merriam- Webster Dictionary site provides weekly word lists for improving your students vocabularies. Find words frequently encountered in age-appropriate texts and books for middle grade students. Learn eight new words each week with Merriam-Webster definitions and pronunciations, plus a fun crossword! Please note Word Central is no more (site discontinued 6/30/21)

Create original poems by moving tiles around on the screen. Click the more words option for additional words to use. When your finished, take a screenshot to save and share. THe option for saving and sharing on the site links to Facebook and email will not work for students using our Google platform.

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HOORAY! Google has finally updated Google Classroom. You can now use Rich Text features - BOLD, Italicize, Underline, and add a bulleted list into your Announcements and Assignments on Google Classroom. These features are available as quick keys on both PC & Macs. Unfortunately you cannot add Rich Text features to the Private Comments.

For those struggling with student motivation and engagement try integrating Alice Keeler’s "Level Up Game” (Google Sheets) for assignments. It allows you to enter assignments from your google classroom gradebook and have students earn achievements for completing the assignments then they level up just like in video games. Take a look at her blog post regarding the process and let me know if you need help setting it up.

Discovery Education and Itron have partnered to create Conservation Station: Creating a More Resourceful World, a program that fosters STEM Investigations and encourages us to discover how we (you and your students) can conserve water and energy at school and at home. Some of the topics covered include water purity, solar energy and energy conversion. Take a virtual field trip and find educator materials.

Presented by the CDC a kid friendly site for information and webquests designed for students in 4th - 6th grades. Teachers can modify the materials to meet students’ learning styles and levels. The Quests can be used in lessons about health, social studies, and tolerance in society.

Physics Girl Dianna Cowern is an MIT graduate and YouTuber who shares videos explaining various physical phenomena. She worked in partnership with PBS Digital Studios channel Physics Girl until 2020 when she started her own channel. She also collaborates with other STEM-based YouTube personalities, including science communicator Derek Muller of the channel Veritasium and mathematics animator Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown.

Manipulatives are an essential tool for every math class. Help your students become active learners working with this collection of free resources organized by mathematical content.

Google recently announced several new products in their G Suite offerings. Now instead of 2, there are 4 options. It is important to remember that if you have the unpaid version (like we do), you want to look for the word Fundamentals. Google is going to rollout multiple upgrades during the next year- if it doesn't indicate Fundamentals- it will not be for our platform.

Our free edition G Suite for Education will be renamed to Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals.

Kristen Acosta from Edutopia has several ideas for using images in math (at various grade levels). It provides the perfect introduction for your visual learners.

Teach effectively and support meaningful learning with authentic resources by creating your own interactive learning experiences or infuse exemplars made by teachers and Smithsonian experts.

Black History Month

Science Engineering & Technology

Mathematics

Social Studies

English Language Arts

World Languages

The Arts

Health & Physical Education

Professional Development

How to Tech for Education has created an easy tutorial for you to follow and learn how to create fun activities using Google Jamboard. You can now insert images into Jamboard so students will not be able to move items around on your templates. Jamboard is a space that makes it easy to have kids collaborate in the virtual learning environment.

Here are some sample templates created by the teacher behind How to Tech for Education.

Most of you have more than 20 students in your class, Barbara DeSantis created a bingo board on google slides. You can also have the students create their own bingo boards. Try an activity using a Discovery Education or BrainPop video and ask them questions from the video. The answers are the keywords used for their boards. They will love it!!!

Gail Komm a Science teacher at Sayerville MS created a Bingo board you could copy! Open this file and make a copy- you will be on your way to your first game!

Brigid Duncan shares a slide template to help make station rotation virtual in her recent guest blog post. Here is a link to create a copy of the slides. Consider incorporating this as a weekly event and allowing students to select what they want to complete. Students are accountable (‘Fill your name in a blank box…”). There are only 14 slots- you will likely need to make two copies depending on your class size and how long you want the stations to last.