Linky, Linky, Linky!!!

I am linking up with 3 linky parties today!

1.  Positive Thinking Thursday with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings

2.  Throwback Thursday with The Teacher's Desk 6

and it will be my first time ever linking up with

3.  Technology Thursday with The Teaching Trio!

For Positive Thinking Thursday, I went through my "Quotes and Funnies" Pinterest board and found this quote that I recently pinned.   Sometimes I find it hard being 'me' and this quote is a great reminder to just be myself no matter what other people think.

Up next is a Throwback Thursday post about Technology in the classroom!  Last year I fell in LOVE with an app called OverDrive.  Here is an overview of the app and the link to my throwback post.

OverDrive is an app on which you can download FREE books from the public library to be read.  There are never any late fees and books get returned at the end of the 7 or 14 day lending period.  I really enjoyed using it with my class last year and will definitely use it again this year!

Check out my Technology/Throwback Thursday post HERE!!!!!!

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Tried and True & Positive Thinking Thursday

Today I am linking up with two fun Thursday linky parties!

First, I am linking up with the Teaching Tribune for her 'Tried and True' Thursday linky!

Then it's 'Positive Thinking Thursday' with Mrs. Laffin's Laughings!

This is something that I have tried and has proven true, and this post can also be considered a throw back Thursday post because I have written about it before!  In fact, it was my most viewed blog entry ever!  Check it out HERE!

CLASS DOJO!

It is an app that not only I love, but my students love as well!  It is a behavior management app on which you can give and take away points for positive and negative student behavior.  You can track students points anywhere, since you can have the app on your phone, ipad or computer.  You can give and take away points from individual students or the whole class.  Students get to choose their own avatars and parents can even track student progress online.  It was a wonderful tool for me last year, as I had a super rough class!  I highly suggest you checking it out!  It has proven itself to me as the perfect classroom management tool!

View my previous blog about Class Dojo Here!

Now a little somethin' for Positive Thinking Thursday!

I am enough.

~Jamie

So Many Things!

I have so many things I want to share this evening!!!!

Today and yesterday my district had SNOW DAYS!  Yesterday I got to spend the whole day at home with my precious baby and my sick husband.  He is feeling much better today but had 'the crud' the entire week.

Today I woke up and realized that we have parent/teacher conferences on Monday and Tuesday night and that I was completely unprepared because of missing school!  I met up with some of my coworkers and we had lunch and then went to school to get stuff ready.  I'm hoping that we actually get to have conferences since we are expected to get more snow Monday/Tuesday!

MY NEWEST PRODUCT!!!

I created a new product on TpT that I am super proud of!  It is a set of Task/Scoot cards that allows students to practice naming fractions, decimals and mixed numbers on a number line!  It asks students to find which letter best represents a given fraction, decimal or mixed number, as well as fill in the missing number, write a number that is less than a given fraction, decimal or mixed number, and MUCH MORE!  I am really excited to use it in my room!  If we wouldn't have had two snow days this week I already would've!  Check it out HERE!!!!!

On another note, I have found this AMAZING app called OverDrive!

It is an app in which you can add your public library to your account and E-Rent books from there for FREE!  All you have to do is create an Adobe ID and have a library card.  I have put it on my classroom set of iPads and so far my two students who have library cards love it!  I am super sad that only two of my students have public library cards.  I am going to get library card applications soon to send home with my students to hopefully encourage their parents to get them one!

The book I read this week on OverDrive is called Gone Girl, by Jillian Flynn.  It was an incredible read, I couldn't put it down.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, until the end! I cannot believe how it ended.  Blah.  I highly recommend it if you like crime/thriller/plot-twisty/adult novels!   Check it out! After I read The Confession by John Grisham, I am going to read another one of her novels!  Can't wait!

I hope everyone has a great weekend!  

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Positive Points Monday!

Happy Monday!  

Tonight I am linking up with Sarah at Permanently Primary for her 

Positive Points Monday Linky!

My positive points from today...

1.  My students have been working on writing a personal narrative from the point of view of either a mother, father, child, or single adult in one of the early colonies that settled in North America.  They have loved learning the stories of these people and how they lived their day to day lives!  When it was time to begin writing they did awesome.  They planned out their essay on one of my favorite apps called 'Popplet'!  It is an app that you can create a brainstorm map/idea web!  Love it!  Here is a pic of one of my students working on it today.

2.  Today I started off our morning by doing "Good Things".  I gave each student a post-it note that they could write one good thing that happened to them over the weekend.  They shared their good things and we put the post-its on my door.  It is one of the relationship building tools I want to continue to use through out the year.  Totally forgot to snap a picture, though! Blarg!


3.  I created my first (not super awesome, but it's a start) product for TpT!  It is a free download of a decimal BINGO I created.  I created it with 6 different color game boards and number squares with tenths, hundredths and thousandths.  If you want to check it out, click HERE!  I got the graphics from http://frompond.blogspot.com as one of her freebies!  Please remember that it is my very first product ever!  Like my page so I will be encouraged to create more products! I really enjoyed doing it.

4.  Last night as I was Pinteresting before bed I ran across this incredible article written by Dr. Fred Jones on EducationWorld called Rules, Routines and Standards in Elementary and Secondary Grades.  I was inspired to try out one of his ideas with my class.  My class still hasn't gotten down how to line up quietly and walk down the hall in silence.  The first time this morning that I had my students line up they were talking as usual and I nicely asked them to sit back down.  When they were all seated I asked them to line up another time.  Again, they were talking so I asked them to sit back down.  We did this 4 times and eventually they realized they HAD to be quiet before we could go anywhere.  I continued to do this the rest of the day anytime we had to line up and by the end of the day it was really working.  Not completely, but we had made huge strides from this morning.  I love this idea and plan on using it every day.  Check it out!

5.  DINNER!  I promised that I would start posting more recipes in the future so tonight I decided
to make a new dish and post about it!  It is called Easy Weeknight Creamy Chicken Alfredo and I found the recipe on a can of Progresso Recipe Starters! LOL!  It was very easy to make, but definitely seemed like it took more than the estimated amount of time (30 mins).  My husband, daughter and I loved it!  Click on the link and try it out for yourself!  Rich, creamy and simply delicious!

I hope that you guys had a great Monday!  

Leave me a comment! :-)

Classroom Accomplishments!

I have been working way too hard on things for my classroom lately and I thought I'd share them with you!

First off, I have fallen in love with iBooks!  The mother of a girl in my class gave me $60 worth of iTunes gift cards to use on our class set of iPads and I chose to buy books with it!  The only downfall is that the books can only be shared with ten devices, so the books are only on ten of my thirty iPads.  Oh well, it's still super cool.  Here are 3 of the books I bought...

The Sign of the Beaver (our classroom read aloud)

 The Homework Machine

 Diary of a Wimpy Kid #1

My kids are really enjoying reading on the iPads and I am glad that I've finally found a great way to buy books for them! :-)



I have been trying to implement math centers in my classroom lately.  Not during a specific 'center time' but during our remediation time.  I am able to let the students do the center activity so I can work with individual kiddos that need help.  Today we played a fun game where they had to compare decimal numbers, kind of like 'war'.  I am still working on my students working quietly with each other.  They tend to yell.  A lot!!

That's all for now!  It's time for this momma to Pinterest and get to bed! :-)

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Remakes! Pictures, Pictures, Pictures!!!!!

I have remade a couple of cute organization tools in my classroom lately and I want to share them with you!

***I love the border and numbers I got from two bloggers I follow, the 3am Teacher and A Cupcake for the Teacher!  Gotta LOVE freebies!!!!!!!!!

First, is my "Where Are You?" board.  My kids feel a real responsibility to make sure that they always move their number before they leave the classroom!  Love it!

Here is my "How Do I Get Home?" clothespin line! (without the clothespins on it!)

My number sticks! I use these for my classroom jobs and for my "Pick A Stick" bucket for when I need to choose a random student for something.

This isn't a great picture, but I got this set of drawers from a coworker and I have too many students this year to use them.  There just aren't' enough drawers for them!  But there sure are enough for me! :-)

I printed out labels for each drawer saying what is in them.  Love it!  No more scrambling around for my white out!

In a previous blog I wrote about the S.T.A.R notebooks that I was going to begin using this year!  I finally got all of the binders I needed and then got in my order of tabs!  I spent last weekend opening 30 packages, writing on 150 tabs, ripping them apart and sliding them where they're supposed to go!  It was a long process but well worth it!  My students are super organized so far and it's making life easier on them as well as me!

I also blogged recently about a board I made for our Meet the Teacher night! I decided to stop buying everything myself this year and to begin asking some of my parents for help!  Some of them actually decided to help!  I have gotten lots of extra paper, hand sanitizer and even iTunes gift cards for our class sets of iPads!!!!!

Here is a picture of it after Meet the Teacher!  Pretty good considering I teach in a school that is 90%+ below the poverty line...

And lastly, a picture of my beautiful sister and I!  We went to a wedding reception over the weekend and got to get all dressed up!  I'm so thankful to have her as my sister! 

(I'm on the left and she is on the right.)

School has gone SOOOO much better this week than last week.  Regardless of that, I am still super excited that the 3 day weekend is coming up quickly!

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Favorite 5th Grade Apps!

"Devices come and go, but progressive teachers who adapt will last longer than any device". 

-Andrew Marcinek

I saw this quote today posted on my edutopia.org Facebook feed and I absolutely love it!

I was very blessed to receive a grant for last school year that provided 30 iPads, 30 cases, a charging cart and money to buy lots of incredible apps for my students!  It was given to me by members of our school district's foundation and I could never thank them enough.

When we would practice skills last year in class I often had my students get out their iPads and open up a whiteboard-like app to help them practice.  I was very surprised when a few of my students told me they would rather use pencil and paper!  I never thought I would hear them say that when I asked them to open up their iPads.

When I saw the quote above, it took me back to that moment.

As teachers, we must be progressive.  We must allow ourselves to iPads.  Some students prefer using pencil and paper.  And some really enjoy using white boards and markers.  As the school year approaches, my hope for the upcoming year is that I will truly adapt to and cater to the way my students learn best.

I want to share with you a few of my favorite apps to use with the iPads I won with my grant!

EDUCREATIONS (free!)  http://www.educreations.com

You can do sooooo much with this app!  I have had my students create recorded videos where they can swipe through pictures they found on the internet and talk about each of them.  They have also created their own photos and done the same thing.  You can almost use it like Power Point.  My students created numerous Social Studies projects using this app.  We also use this as a whiteboard for practicing math and sentence structure.  Another thing I really like about this app is that it has pre-made videos on it that students can watch to help them understand a concept.  It is very easy to use and my kiddos love it!

CONTACTS (free, comes with the device)

This app comes already on your Apple device.  The main thing that we use this for is a digital word wall.  I have my students add 'contacts' (vocabulary words, people's names or terms that we are studying) and write a description of it in the Notes line.  It was perfect for making our classroom word wall purposeful and for helping students remember to spell commonly misspelled words!

EDMODO (free!)  https://www.edmodo.com

I am IN LOVE with this app and my students are as well!  It is basically a social networking site for your classroom.  As the teacher you can monitor everything your students post on it, which I really like.  The first thing you do is create your account and register your students.  From there your students can login and explore.  They can upload their own profile picture, post on the classroom wall and reply to each other's posts.  As the teacher, you can write posts and create polls that your students have to respond to.  You can assign classwork, homework, post links, and even assign due dates for assignments.  I often posted articles for my students to read and they had to respond with 3 facts about the article and one question for the author.  You can even assign homework with this app.  I found that my students who did not have a computer at home had smart phones in their home.  Students can download the app on their smartphone and do their homework on there!  LOVE this app!


Those are 3 of my very favorite apps to use with my students.  I will post more through the school year!

Like or leave me a comment if you'd like! :-)