Beans & Cups!

Have you ever struggled teaching regrouping in addition and subtraction? Well, watch Jean Ann as she shows you a neat little trick using beans and cups!

StarWalk Kids Media

***UPDATE*** Check out Liz's comment below!!!!!

It is my goal to update this blog once a week during the school year. Sometimes I feel like Jean Ann and I are overflowing with information. Other weeks...crickets...*chirp chirp chirp*. That is how I felt last week. So, I didn't do an update, and planned on an AWESOME one for this week to make up for it.  Then, at a board meeting this weekend for the Illinois Reading Council, author Seymour Simon and his wife Liz Nealon spoke to us about their new project StarWalk Kids Media.

Now, Seymour is a noted non-fiction Children's author. His books are beautiful, filled with outstanding pictures, rich text, and even make me excited about topics I would normally force myself to read or teach. His wife is a former producer of Sesame Street and MTV (back when it was cool). Seymour joked that she was way over qualified to help out with this project so the only way he could get her involved was to marry her! So, when you put them together with other greats in the education world you get a great website.

StarWalk Kids Media is a website which allows teachers to access to interactive ebooks based on topic and reading level. 

For each book the site also offers lesson plans, linked to common core developed by guru's in the field like Linda Hoyt. (If you've done any reading coursework in the last decade you will have a book written by her in your stack)

Liz gave us a demo of how the site works, it seemed simple to navigate and easy to implement into a classroom. She answered questions and continued to take suggestions. 

So, check out the website, http://www.starwalkkids.com/index.php, sign up for the free trial, and have some fun with StarWalk Kids!

More Words of Wisdom from the Kid President

Beware...Stephanie is having fun with technology...

Ok. So for those who are really tech savvy...what I have learned is no big deal. BUT for me it is AWESOME! First of all, you can all now SUBSCRIBE to this blog!!!! Just type in your email address, prove that you are a human, and then you will receive an email notice every time I post on the blog. (Yes, I send out notices, but not for every post. "Ain't nobody got time for that!") 
Subscribe here---------------------->

Then, I also started a twitter account just for work ya'll! I'll be retweeting some great tweets from some of my favorite educators! If you have any suggestions on who I should follow, just follow me and let me know! If you are not on twitter, and have no desire to be on twitter (I understand, I started only to stalk celebs) you can see the newsfeed right over here! ----------------->

If you can't see it, then most likely your school is Fort Knox internet secured. Just check it out at home. You can see all my tweets and retweets without having to have your own account.

And then finally, in my following of awesome educators I've stumbled up on a blog called The Cornerstone, the author has some great tips, pinterest pages, teacher pay teachers pages ect. ect. ect. You should check her out and subscribe, especially when she has a post about the best teacher freebies!