Monday Made It: June 29

Our last day of school was in early June, but I only started enjoying myself last week.  I spent the week after school started writing curriculum for my district and trying to decompress from a taxing year.  My favorite linky in the summer is the Monday Made It series over at Fourth Grade Frolics.  It keeps me motivated to get a little bit of work done for the upcoming school year, but not too much.  Much of what I've been doing this summer is the necessary things - long range plans, unit plans, etc., but I have managed to do a few things that didn't require too much thinking. So, without further adieu, here's what I've accomplished so far.

Each teacher in my building is required to have a class website.  Last year, we moved over to Google Sites and it was soo much easier than anything else we had done in the past.  However, the most difficult thing to do is remember how to change headers and other things that pretty much stay the same all year.  It took a minute, but I got it.  Can you guess my new classroom theme by this picture?  

I used Power Point to create a background image and then was able to upload it easily to my site.  Look for a tutorial this week.

Along the same lines as #1, I made a desktop background for my school computer using the Fourth Grade Frenzy tutorial.  Again, I used Power Point to create this and saved as an image.  Fourth Grade Frenzy has an excellent tutorial for Mac users.  Aren't those little superheroes precious?  The ClipArt Queen did an amazing job!

Both of the above projects were done easily while my hubs and I were watching late night television.  Multitasking at its best!

Thanks to my dear blog friend Amanda, from Teaching Maddeness, I got a jumpstart on my planning for the new year.  Check out her planning series - it will make the start of your year so much smoother.  Planning is the bane of my existence, but because I sometimes get off pace due to excitement from myself, I am married to my Long Range Plans.  Amanda has made it so easy to adapt what you are teaching this year into her templates.

I started with the new 2015 standards.  Amanda shared this great template to use to organize standards.

Then I laid out my timeline for the entire year. Again, Amanda's templates!

 My favorite part was the calendar templates!  I plan on keeping these babies close!

  I then organized my units and combined all of the lesson plans.  Crazy amounts of work here!


The last thing I did was write a new engineering unit for my 5th graders that was embedded heavily with out social studies curriculum.

Part of my goal this year is to teach my students to be more intentional in their conversation.  I created job cards for our engineering units that include guiding questions for each role.  Hopefully, this will help my students understand how a conversation runs when working with others :)

Head on over to Fourth Grade Frolics to join in on the fun!