Another great resource! Dogonews.com

Here's another one!!

www.dogonews.com

Wonderful Resource!!

Hey Guys!

Check out this great resource.  It's called OSLIS! Click on the link. 

http://oslis.org/

Organizing for next year

Each year I notice a trend in my classroom. Students bring in supplies, I buy a ton of community supplies, and by winter break, our supplies are greatly diminished. We clean out desks only to find glue sticks missing tops or dried out, broken pencils with no erasers and chew marks. By spring break, we are using any writing device we can find and I am sharpening hundreds of pencils each weekend. This is of course in addition to finding all these things all over the ground. Needless to say, things need to change.

So, I had this brilliant idea to create pencil boxes with all the supplies students need, labeled with their number, that they will need to keep track of. If they lose them, dry them out or eat them, they will need to figure out how to get new supplies. Here was my process. 

First, I have been waiting all summer for some great deals on pencil boxes. Staples had them in sale for .50 each. I found a coupon for 20% off my entire purchase. They came out to .40 each!

I found 10 colored pencils for each box.

Wrote out their student numbers on labels and put them on the tops.

I know how hard my kids are on supplies, so I put packing tape over the top to protect them.

Then, I put three sharpened pencils in each box, each with their numbers on them. I figured I could give out three new pencils each term. If students need to sharpen them, they can put them in the sharpen basket and I can do that after school. (I would let them sharpen, however my sharpener cost $80.)

All these supplies will be in addition to the supplies they bring themselves to school.  I know students will be much more responsible with materials when they know there isn't an endless supply. We shall see!  

Hello! Welcome to Thankful for Third Grade!

That's Me!  Your new 3rd Grade Teacher

First off, my name is Allison Kreider and I have been teaching 3rd grade for 8 years now.  I love teaching 3rd grade.  When ever you talk to anyone about teaching 3rd grade, they always say that they loved their 3rd grade teacher and that is the only grade in elementary school they actually remember.  I say I love teaching 3rd grade because the kids aren't taller than me yet (I'm 5'1''), they still like you and they haven't hit puberty, so their hormones are still somewhat in check.  There are so many new experiences happening at this age and you are able to open the minds to so many new ideas and concepts. 

I have taught for 10 years in the public school setting.  I have taught kindergarten, 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades.  I have also taught graduate classes at the University and various technology courses throughout our district. I have also done a lot of work with school gardens and implementing STEM into schools. 

I love using technology in the classroom and am part of a target group of teachers piloting iPad mini's in our classroom.  We are going on our 3rd year of using 1:1 iPads, from using 1:1 MacBooks.  It has been somewhat of a transition from laptops to iPads, but we all transitioned quickly and students were excited to use a new exciting tool for learning.  We first began with a second grade teacher and myself trying to implement iPads, iPods and Macbooks into the classroom.  This worked, somewhat, but managing all three devices at one time proved to be very difficult, at least for me.  When funding became available, we shared our other tools with teachers in the building, and committed fully to iPads. Our second year of implementation, we added the other 2nd and 3rd grade teachers and had a team of 4 teachers using 1:1 iPads in our classrooms.  Next year, we will be adding our 4th grade team and sharing extra iPads with 1st grade.  This is so exciting to see our entire school transitioning to this new tool.

The hope for this blog to to inform parents and other teachers about the life of 3rd grade.  The all consuming, ever changing, technology rich, wackiness of Mrs. Kreider's classroom.  We also are going through another huge change.  A new building!  As we speak, bulldozers and a ton of heavy equipment is prepping our old playing field to build a brand new, state of the art two story building!  We are all so excited, but nervous about all the changes that will be happening in this next year.

I hope you enjoy following along on the journey!