End of the year wrap up

I don't know where the school year went but now it's suddenly the last week of school! I had high hopes for blogging more and it just didn't happen. Here is a look at my top 5 favorite activities/tech tools I tried during the school year and top 5 read alouds:

1. NEARPOD. Our technology integration specialist introduced me to this tool. No need to use the projector or Smartboard. Students view the lesson and interact with your content on iPads, computers, or whatever devices you have available. There are pre-made lessons or it's easy to create lessons. I created a "Google Like a Boss" presentation for my 6th graders and it was an excellent way to deliver the content and a fun lesson for all!

2. Powtoons: I blogged about this a lot and it took a lot of fine tuning but students ended up really creating some neat book trailers!

3. MN Star of the North Book Award. This was my first time having K-2nd participate in the reading and voting of this fairly new Minnesota kid's choice award for K-2. What a blast we had reading these books and doing different activities!

4. I Love to Read Month activities. While celebrating this month is nothing new, I tried some different activities than my usual this year. We had a book giveaway contest for International Book Giving Day, a book character hunt, and students made different displays. One of my favorite was where students made a Google doc with their favorite first line in a book, printed it off, and made a fold out flap where you read the line and the lifted the flap to see what book it was.

5. Coding was a part of curriculum at each school I was at in Media in some way this year. We had fun at the end of the year with these Made with Code projects.



Top 5 NEW Read alouds from the year:

1. Jangles, David Shannon. One of the Star of the North book! Fantastic FISH story...many kindergarteners and first graders asked Is Jangles real?
2. Loot, Jude Watson. Perfect end of the year, suspenseful read aloud for 6th graders. We didn't get a chance to finish it, but it hooked many!
3. The Terrible Two, Mac Barnett, Jory John. I seriously laughed out loud many times while reading this aloud to fourth graders.
4. The Book with No Pictures While really K-3 would enjoy this, I read it aloud to third grade and then they enjoyed creating their own page for their own version of this book.
5. Now I'm smushing in some of my favorite NEW books I read and recommended to others: The Unwanted Series, the False Prince, Natalie Stanford's Switched at Birthday, Shannon Hale's Princess in Black.


I have some new goals and new books to read for next year and I am excited about this new DK: Find out website Shannon Miller just shared. It looks really well done and fun!