Gonna Make You Sweat....

Hey Guys! It's Aly, from Just a Primary Girl! 

I am so excited to share with you some tips and tricks for Back to School night or Open House! I have a freebie along with a video tutorial. I also am giving a way my Don't Forget the Forms Bundle AND a winners choice from my store! More details below. 

I am writing today about back to school time in your classroom! I know when I try to prepare for back to school night, there are lots of things that I want to be sure to cover. 

Allergies, Curriculum, Scholastic Book Orders, Birthday Parties, Folders, Report Cards, Conferences, Homework, Signing up to Volunteer and while discussing all of that, being positive and remembering everything. 

I HATE looking at notecards! Are you are like me on this- you can seriously talk in front of your entire grade level of students, but bring in 5 parents, and immediately start sweating? I mean seriously, I wear something as light as possible that is usually sleeveless, and I make trips to my air vent through the entire night because I literally sweat five lbs off my body. I am not nervous, nor ill prepared. I just HATE speaking in front of adults. Even during my staff PD days. I can't stand it.

This coming from Miss Personality 1998. Yep - (enter silly freshman year of college pageant award)

cheesy I know, but I was such an outgoing not afraid of talking kind of girl back then. Now, forget it!

Anyway, I thought I would show you how to make a power point slide show to use for back to school night. I am going to include a template and my second video how to. (My first was a how to create your own printables in powerpoint) You can see that post here. I will show you how to make your slide show, but better yet, I am going to show you HOW to record audio slides to insert. I literally just hit play on my slide show at the start of the night. I tell my parents just how much I talk and that if I talked we would be there all night and no one would make their dinner plans. I let them know that they can stop me at any time to ask questions, and I hand them the slide show so they have reminders of what the slides said and they can take notes. I also stop during and add tidbits so they know I am human and really do talk a lot and these pre - recorded slides were simply to ensure they get the most of their 30 minute time. I also don't want to talk so much that I say something silly.

We do three separate times slots so it takes an hour and a half and we do the same thing all three times. Another reason that I love having this slideshow. My first year teaching, I had to present twice and I was hoarse by the end of the night. That stunk. 

Here is the tutorial on how to add audio to your slide show.
This is good for more than just your back to school slide shows. You could EASILY use it to put directions into a powerpoint for students to play games on the promethean board. You could also have students record messages into a power point show for mother's day. How cute would a Mother's Day Tea be, featuring pictures of your children, then BOOM audio too. CUUUUTTTEEEE.

It is HARD recording slides that are over 5 minutes. The chances of NOT stuttering or making a mistake is slim. So be nice my friends. 

Ok, so first up the power point. You need to figure out what are going to be the most important things you want to accomplish during your short time together? Is it that you need forms filled out? If you need forms, click here or the picture to see my back to school forms post for a VERY detailed account of my forms.

or you can click here or on the picture to see my packs in my store. 

I have a sheet that includes the most important forms that I need for my parents to fill out and return that same night. 

I talk about Allergies and Snack. Many parents think that cheezeits are a good snack to send in, and are sadly mistaken once they see we only allow fresh fruit, veggies or cheese. If your child doesn't eat those things, they go without snack. True story. I explain to them that if their child's safety was a concern, I would do it for them too. I also tell them that we get ants like no one's business and I just don't want food in our room. That makes the allergy parents feel like they aren't the only reason we have this rule. 

I speak from experience with my parents. I tell them about my son and him being an autistic child that has allergies. I tell them the importance of rules and kindness in my room. 

I also go into great detail and stop the slides to talk about scholastic book clubs. I tell them about our ipods in the classroom. This is when I let them know that we are happy to take donated iphone, ipods and MP3 players  that are no longer in use. I show them a quick way we use them and they are more willing to donate them at the start of the year!! I have never not gotten the $350.00 big bonus points reward since doing this. TRY IT. 

The great thing about the slideshow is that they have a hand out to follow along, and usually one parent fills out the forms while the other listens. Sometimes, they just fill out all the forms and have no time to truly listen. Which, sometimes, is nice - depending on the parent. 

I have NEVER had a parent really question anything. 

When making your slide show - if you want to include audio for a slide, be sure you save your audio files in a file that you won't delete. (You will see this in the video post as well!) Keep it with the powerpoint slide show because I have learned in the past that you need to keep them. I deleted them and then I had no audio when I pulled the usb to my school pc. Keep them together. Practice it before you do it that night. I didn't so it was a great shocker to find out that I had no audio and would need to talk in the spotlight without warning. 

I hope that this freebie will help you to create your own power point back to school night slides or hand out. 

Enter the rafflecopter to win my back to school bundle pack AND leave a comment below about your back to school night - whether it is how it goes, what you do, or what you are most afraid of. I KNOW you hate talking to those parents as much as me. #keepinitreal

I will choose one winner on Saturday morning to win something of YOUR choice from my store in addition to the rafflecopter prize of my Bundle of Back to School Forms



a Rafflecopter giveaway



Thanks for joining me for:

Click below to see Miss Nelson's behavior beads and win one of her awesome packs along with picking up a few freebies along the way.

Mrs. H.

Spelling in a Techno World

Hello, all! It's Andrew from Mr. First Grade... I wanted to share a spelling tool that I've been utilizing in my classroom for a few years now.  Last week, I had the opportunity to present at our district's technology in-service on Spelling City.  They told me that I'd have an hour and fifteen minutes to talk about the site, so of course I said "YEAH! I'd love to!" and then later, I went "Oh shoot... that's a long time!"  So I did some digging.  The more I dug, the more I found.  Like I said, I've been using it for a few years, and maybe you have as well, but I was BLOWN AWAY by how many features this site has.  Did I mention it's a FREE resource?

When you first sign in, you can create your own spelling/vocabulary lists by clicking on the LIST MANAGEMENT section.  I added all of the spelling lists for our reading series, as well as our sight words, and here's what my lists look like...

You can decide how many lists are available to students for practice by selecting YES/NO under the "published" column.  You can also import lists from other teachers if you don't feel like typing them all in yourself!  On the homepage, you can search for lists - I recommend searching for a title from your reading series, then going to that teacher's page to import all of their lists.  Once you import the lists into YOUR lists, you can also edit the list without altering the original one.  This was especially helpful for me because we add 3 sight words to every spelling list.  I was able to import someone else's Reading Street spelling lists, then go in and add just the 3 extra words.

Speaking of importing lists, here's where my favorite find comes in! Under the Teaching Resources page there's all sorts of goodies like sample lessons and useful word lists.  The word lists include word families with practically every vowel sound, digraph, etc.  There are science and social studies word lists broken up by grade and topic.  The math word lists are broken up by grade level and common core strand... And all you've gotta do is hit "IMPORT" and the words are plopped right into your list management page.  BLEW MY MIND.

When you click on a list, it will bring up all of the options for practice. There's a chunk of free games that students can play, which they love.  You also have the ability to print worksheets of your word lists.  I especially like the handwriting worksheets option... I have handwriting fonts on my computer, but these are automatically generated from your spelling list.  Love it.

There is an option for a premium membership, which works out to roughly $2/student, I believe... Our principal told us that instead of purchasing spelling books for us, which we don't really use anyways, he's going to get us all premium memberships.  *Happy Dance*  With a premium membership, you can add students and assign different lists and activities to different students.  For example, I could add my advanced list to Spelling City, but only assign it to those students who are advanced in spelling.  I could also assign extra practice, such as the "teach me" practice, to my ESL students.  Students can take the test right on the computer.  It logs their score for each test in your grade book, as well as their overall score.  You can exempt students from assignments if they're absent for a few days, AND you can re-assign things to students who need extra practice... I'm pretty pumped to have this for next year!

If you want to give it a shot, OR if you already use it and want to see what else you can do with it, check out their FAQ page.  It's got short videos explaining every aspect of the website!  I highly recommend it... My students love it, and like I said, we only used the free side of it!!

What do you use to keep your students motivated to practice their spelling words in such a technology-driven society?