Common Core Standards

This past week I went to training for the common core standards that Tennessee will be implementing K-2 this school year. In addition to this, I have been taking a couple classes towards my Masters and in one class I did a powerpoint for Bloom's Taxonomy that I thought was a perfect fit.

As many of you know, the Common Core seem to be less standards but we are suppose to teach them to MASTERY! Doesn't sound so hard, right? One question was brought up about how long should you stay on a topic or how many different ways can you teach the same thing? I know there are some concepts that you can just exhaust to the point of hating, but I also know we are creative geniuses! We need to be teaching our students how to use their creativity too by using Bloom's Taxonomy in EVERY lesson while planning. It may sound overwhelming but it is really important. I know there are a lot of teachers out there who already use Bloom's, but I also know there are many who don't.

I think a good way to determine if a student has mastered one these new standards is determining what level of Bloom's they can demonstrate. If they can demonstrate all levels, they probably have a good grasp on the subject! Anyway, I am going to be working more this year to implement Bloom's in everyday planning but I wanted to share my powerpoint because I think it is important for all teachers to have a really good grasp of this topic!

Blooms Taxonomy Made Easy

View more presentations from Laura Davis.

I am a big technology person, so my favorite part of this is the links I shared for teaching at each level of Bloom's. There are so so many ways to implement technology while using higher order thinking skills. Take advantage...it might make your planning easier!

That is all for now! Hope you enjoy!

We are near the end...

We have almost made it to the end of this first grade year- it cannot come soon enough!! We are trying to have fun in first grade for the last couple of days. This afternoon we did a cute little art project that they loved and it helped me get rid of a few things.

I keep those big wooden blocks for rainy days (they love building big towers and letting them crash down...loud but fun). I have tons of them and some are so big I don't have any place to store them so they have been in the trunk of my car for a while (don't ask my husband how long...he could go on forever!!) So I finally got them out of the car today and decided to make a cute little momento out of them.

On each block I wrote "First grade is the building block to my education!" Then I put each students name and the date. When they came back in the room they were so excited to color on these pieces of wood. Hey, whatever works!! Anyway here are a few of them. I can't wait to do this again next year and maybe put a little more thought into it and use paint or something!

Anyway, I hope everyone out there in blog teaching world is a having a calm end of the year. It is almost over! Yay for summer!!

Have you tried WebQuests?

We go to the computer lab and play every once and a while (play meaning pbskids.org or starfall.com). Our media specialist designed a lesson with Google Earth that the kids loved so I am attempting something new this week. I have yet to ask my firsties to do a WebQuest, even though I know there are some fabulous ones out there! We just finished studying plants and we have some guppies in the room so naturally we should be learning about them. So I created a webquest...this should be interesting. I got some inspiration from this webquest. Which is cute and fun, but half the links didn't work...so I re-worked it and made a new "Fish WebQuest Journal".

You can visit my "Fishing for Knowledge" webquest by clicking here. All the links and documents are located at the webquest site. If anyone else tries I would love to know how it works out? I am cautiously optimistic about this idea!!