One of my goals for this year with the Mustang Blog has been to find unique ways to showcase the happenings on this campus. For this post, I chose to challenge myself and share the info in an iBook as that is a tool that I have not used before. Below are the results of my efforts. The iBook can be opened on any iOS Device or on your MacBook.  

Over the weekend, I spent some time working on a step set that teachers could use when setting up a MAP test. Pages is usually my go-to app for creating such things because I love its ease of use. I was opening the document that I had started at school on Friday when I noticed a Sketchbook that I had been given earlier this year sitting on a nearby coffee table. It was filled with blank pages and that fact terrified me. Large blank pages are unsettling to me and I am convinced that there should be a clinical name for my phobia. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had stumbled upon a solution to both the creation of the directions and my fear of blank pagers. See the results below. I am not sure if it is better or worse than the digital version would have been, but I truly enjoyed the process. Thanks for indulging me!

The 2017-2018 school year is off to a fast and furious start and I have had no time to sit and put together a blog post so rather than radio silence, I decided to just share some artifacts of our first few weeks. Here goes!!!!

Lesley and I were asked by Kaley Coffield, a former EE teacher, to do a presentation on Sketchnoting at the Business Meets Creative Conference this last weekend. 

Mrs. Tinney noticed that a lot of her students were naturally attracted to drawing when trying to put their ideas on paper, so she invited Lesley and me to bring our Sketchnoting presentation to her Second Graders.

It is amazing to me that this year is almost over and if you have been on this campus for the last few weeks, you would never know that things were winding down. Our teachers have been filling each day with meaningful activities and in this post, I have tried to cover as many of those activities as I could. Enjoy! Happy Summer!

Ms. Higby sent me this copy of the poem project that her class has been working on. She used Keynote and the presentation itself is very well done, but the thing that impressed me most was the critical thinking and depth of knowledge that created these poems. During the writing process, students wrote to express their ideas and feelings about the piece of art they chose from the artist. Students were expected to write poems that convey sensory details using the conventions of poetry (e.g., rhyme, meter, patterns of verse, figurative language, etc..).All of the 3rd Graders participated in this project and I am including the link to Mrs. Ryan's newsletter that features poems from each of the classrooms. Way to go Third Graders!

Mrs. Ryan's Newsletter