Video Maker

I am so excited to be the Student Council sponsor at my new campus!  We have televised morning announcements, giving me the chance to advertise for the club in a new way: through video!  I had no idea how I was going to create an ad, and spent hours on youtube trying to steal someone elses work without any luck.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon Animoto, a FREE video creating site.  And when I say it was simple, I am not kidding.  I made two 30 second videos in about twenty minutes.  They already have slideshow templates to choose from and a huge library with music.  You just type in what you want it to say and it does the work! 

I don't think I will win any advertising awards, but they turned out pretty darn good:







I love this site so much, I am going to have to find ways to add it to my lessons, either by the students creating something or during instruction!

~Mrs. Scott

Youtube Converter

I recently discovered that my new campus has youtube blocked during school hours. I show videos with my lessons almost every day and sometimes teachertube just doesn't have what I need.

After searching the internet for hours yesterday to figure out how to download videos (youtube doesn't allow you to), I stumbled upon a website that will convert youtube clips to mp4's that you can save to your computer to show later. All you do is paste the url and hit convert! No account registration or cost!

Click here for the link

Character Movie Clips

We are teaching Cornell Notes at school this week and a coworker shared her plans for modeling the structure of the notes using movie clips on a site I'd never heard of. WingClips is an amazing (and free!) website with movie clips that "illustrate and inspire." There are hundreds of categories/themes on their page with snippets from movies that demonstrate the characteristic listed. The movies are current, relevant, and SAFE!

One of the vocabulary words my students learned today was camaraderie, and I was able to teach it showing clips from Forrest Gump and Coach Carter:



If the website is blocked at your campus, they also have a downloading feature, so you can save the clip at home to show in class. And as you can see there is also the capability to embed the video (great for powerpoints)!

~Mrs. Scott

Classroom Management Bingo

I'm BACK!!!

I started a teaching position in a new district and it has opened up tons of fabulous resources to learn about. And I have so, so, so much great stuff to share! If only I had the time to get them all on here, but I will do my best.

First up is actually an idea that was inspired by pinterest, a weekly bingo card to help with classroom management. I didn't find any online that said exactly what I needed it to, so I just made my own through excel. I thought I would save you the time and effort by sharing an editable version to meet your needs.

So here you go:

Click here for editable document

~Mrs. Scott

Book Trailers

Earlier this year a colleague and I attended a couple of ELA conferences. Both conferences spent a large amount of time talking about book trailers and how fabulous they are. We were sold by the time we left and thought we would try it as a lesson for our tutoring groups. Basically, book trailers are a lot like movie trailers: trying to get audiences interested in checking it out by giving enough of a hook without giving away the ending. It teaches almost every objective for our junior high students, but can also benefit elementary and high school students. By the time our project was complete we covered: plot structure, foreshadowing, inferencing, tone, mood, main idea, summarizing, planning, drafting, editing, point of view, and persuasive writing.

We introduced the project by first showing them some book trailers we found online:

http://philbildner.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byvAz25jFX8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5l3Tikc3O0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYp3YWoCM1s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQjcdiOvEyQ

Students used Photo Story to create their trailer and had no trouble navigating the fool-proof program that lets you upload and edit images, add music, voice, and text, and decide the transition between slides. Here are a couple of my favorites:

The kids had so much fun and really took pride in their work! The entire project took about 2 weeks (3 days a week for 55 minutes).

Below are the materials we gave students to get started. (Hopefully they download/print for you. I have never used this program before! If not, email me and I will send you the documents.)

Book Trailer Requirements

Book Trailer Rubric
Plot Structure

~Mrs. Scott

Valentine Themed Ideas

Here are some pretty awesome websites for your class to visit during the chaos that accompanies this sweet holiday.

Word Hearts - This site creates a heart-shaped word cloud. Would be great to brainstorm a list of things kids love or adjectives that mean love.
Valentine Word Drop - players must unscramble the words before they hit the bottom of the screen.


Heart Sudoku
My Money Valentine - Game is played like the online lemonade stand, but with an amorous twist

Starfall Connecting Words - elementary students can learn about connecting words while creating their own Valentines

Heart Writing - Don't let the foreign language throw you off when you enter the site. Simply type a paragraph into the box and choose "layout text" to create your own heart.
Counting Candy Hearts - reinforces number corelation in lower elementary

Plate Tectonics

Science is by no means my area of expertise, but I am helping to tutor students in the subject. I think being a novice in a subject works as an advantage sometimes, because it is easier to see it from a fresh perspective. This week we worked on plate tectonics.

Like always, I found a videos to start with. (Our district has an account with brainpop.com, so I showed that one first. If your district doesn't have an account, they need to get one, or you need to write a grant! They have bunches of videos, mostly aimed at the secondary level and are quick and a little funny.) The other video didn't have much of a lesson with it, but the kids were entertained:


The art teacher at my school was nice enough to lend some supplies to me execute my idea. I borrowed clay and we built boundaries. I love my kinesthetic learners!
They had so much fun with the clay!
...and each one had their own way to illustrate their understanding.
~Mrs. Scott