Five for Friday

It's Friday, so I'm linking up with Kacey from Doodlebugs Teaching for

We haven’t been in school since last Friday.  The weather all over the country has been really crazy.  It was just last week when it was fairly warm outside, and now we are in the negative temperatures.  

Not cool, Mother Nature.  Not cool.

One positive out of this weather:  You can't make snow cream without snow!  

Here's my recipe:

*A bowl of snow (about 8 cups)

*1 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk

*2 tbs. vanilla (more or less to taste)

*Milk to thin it out a little

This is a childhood favorite of mine, and I'm so glad I get opportunities to make this with my kids... Even if they say it's the "Most disgusting thing they've ever eaten."  Gotta love 'em.

We celebrated my sweet boy’s sixth birthday on Tuesday.  Instead of celebrating with sharing donuts and chocolate milk with his friends at school, we celebrated at home in our PJs!  My husband had taken off to volunteer as a Watch D.O.G. on P’s birthday, so he was off with us.  That evening, the birthday boy requested the Golden Arches for dinner.  Let’s just say, they may have served 5 billion, but yuck.  Anyway… It was his birthday, so whatever. :)

How was this six years ago???

It was a really great day at home with my babies, even if it does mean we will be losing our second week of Spring Break. :)

P said his favorite part of being five was starting kindergarten and going to Disney World.  Boy after my own heart. :)

You may know that I co-blog all about technology with my BFF at

Before Christmas, we had our head shots done, and we got them back this week!  Just in time for conference season!  

I blogged about it on Sunday night, but our school had our first Virtual/eLearning Day on Monday.  We had a snow make-up day from way back in November that we had to do on Monday, and our school board voted to allow us to try a Virtual Day, where students take their devices home to complete a day's worth of school work.  You can check out some of the pictures by searching for #scsd2elearn on social media.  

Since we wound up having a "Snow Week" with kids at home with their iPads, I sent out a challenge to students on Facebook.  I have always done this when we've had weather that causes us to cancel school, but having the kids at home with iPads opened up an entire new world of opportunity for us!

One of the challenges was to make a book in the Book Creator app about any subject they chose.  

Of course, my own child decided to make a book about the Indiana Hoosiers!

When/If we get to go back to school next week (weather isn't looking much more cooperative at the beginning of the week... Boo!), we will be resuming our President's Day study, which will lead into our Famous Americans Reports!  The kids will choose a famous American to study and create a report to present during our living wax museum.  Being out of school REALLY cramps the style of this project, but we will make it work!

By mid-week, the kids will have picked their study focus.  My little guy says he's studying Rick Flair...  His teacher (momma) said no!

The social studies lover in me LOVES this project!  

This year, I will allow students to choose the digital tool they want to use to create their projects.  I imagine most kids will choose Book Creator or iMovie to create the product, but one creation app I am going to allow students to use is My Create.  It's a stop motion animation app, and I can just see my kiddos wanting to use this app for this project!

We will also be using ChatterPix to create for this project.  I get excited just thinking about it!

Peek at My Week: Virtual Day and Presidential Fun!

I'm linking up with Deedee for...

Back in November, we had a snow day...  To make it up, our district was granted permission to test out a Virtual Snow Make-Up Day.  This will take place tomorrow!

We spent some time Friday uploading, downloading, and charging to make sure everything was set and ready to go... And then students nestled their iPads all snug in their backpacks with assignments to complete in lieu of school on Monday.

I know what you're thinking....  This could be disastrous.  Well, we had two practice virtual days prior to Monday's big event.  Out of my 17 students, every single one of them brought their iPad back, and only one did not complete the whole assignment.  In our district, only ONE iPad was not returned to school the following day. 

One.

That's pretty good if you ask me.

Here are my Virtual Day plans.  These were sent out to families on Friday along with the iPads.  

You may notice that we are using the Book Creator app.  A lot.  We big puffy heart that app in our kindergarten classrooms.  It's pricy ($4.99), but worth every single penny.  It has replaced paper for our reading notebooks, math journals, and many other class-made books that we do throughout the year.  For our Virtual Day, my team created slides in Keynote (you could also use PowerPoint) for each assignment.  We saved them as images, uploaded them to our Google Drive, and inserted them into a new book.  We uploaded the book into eBackpack (you could also use Showbie), pushed it out to our students, and they downloaded it to their iPads on Friday.  Easy peasy.  

Here are some example slides that my teaching partner, Goni, created:

As for the rest of our week, we will be studying all things Presidential!  Some of our reading material for this week includes:

We will be using the program MyOn to read all about Presidents.  MyOn is a virtual library with thousands upon thousands of books at all levels.  I created a bookshelf with quite a few great presidential books:

Our big project for the week will be creating President presentations in Book Creator.  Students will be partnered up to select a President of their choice and create a book about that person.  While these reports are going to be huge, they will lead right into our next PBL project, our Virtual Wax Museum!  Here are some pictures from last year, and you can read all about it here:

More to come on this project as it unfolds this school year!

Here are my visual plans for the week.

You can also check out my brand new mini pack.  Better late than never, right??? :)

Have a great week, teacher friends!