Good afternoon! I wanted to take some time to share what I’m teaching this week. When I’m writing this it is Monday after school. I think I’m going to have this go out Wednesday. Having had one day of this so far, I think it went pretty well and wanted to share some ideas with my fellow librarian friends.
For kindergarten and first grade, we are focusing on an unplugged coding activity which can be found for free here on TPT. With kindergarten and first grade, following directions can be a little tricky. It has been a challenge to get them to understand the directional arrows, especially in kindergarten, but I think activities like these are such good practice because it gets their little brains churning and starting to think about coding before we even get to coding on the iPad.
Second grade has been doing the Library Skills Cootie Catchers & Fortune Tellers which can be found on TPT for $5.95. This is an excellent resource and I don’t regret the $5.95 that I spent to get it. One issue with second grade is that they have a lot of problems folding it, so I typically spend the entire class period folding the cootie catchers for them. Which is fine, as long as they are able to use them. I will be doing this activity later this week during my first scheduled observation, so I’m hoping all goes well. I don’t care what I am doing during observations, it always makes me a little crazy nervous for them. I know that everything could be fine, but it still makes me feel a little “eek” inside.
My third, fourth, and fifth graders worked on this Digital Breakout that is also free on TPT. We have been working to get students signed into all of the many apps on their iPads and it has been exhausting. It should have been of no surprise to me that I’d need to sign students into the Google Slides app so they could access the first part of this breakout. Just make a note that students will need access to a Google account and it can save a LOT of class time if students are already signed into their accounts on their iPads (or other devices).
All in all, I think that this is a pretty good week. I’m looking forward to getting back on my schedule though. This is a very teaching heavy week for me. My older kids are in the afternoon and then I end the day with the littles. I’d really like to get back on a teaching heavy with the bigger kids, STEM stations with littles for a week and then vice versa the following week. I was really hoping things would have calmed down a little and that some of my technology would have been set up, but I’m still waiting on some of those things to get done. I can’t wait to have my library iPads ready so that we can start using some of our robots.