Friday, November 21, 2008

Newsletter and Classroom Rules

This week I was able to finish two more assignments. The newsletter and also my 10 classroom rules.
It was really fun again to work in publisher and just find the layout and design that I wanted and be able to change the color and also the font to personalize it more to me!
In my newsletter I told how my class is going to be having a Christmas Party, and also how my students will be going to the Nutcracker. It was fun just to pretend, and I hope here soon I will be able to actually make a newsletter telling my students of the fun stuff we will be doing!!
Next in the newsletter I spoke about the students of the month and why they were chosen, and also I wrote about they would be learning next... Roman numerals. It was fun just to pretend. And finally in the newsletter I spoke about how we would be getting a fish and the start student would feed the fish on Monday Wednesday and Friday, and the star student could choose two friends one to feed the fish on Tuesday and the other to feed the fish on Thursday. Even though the whole newsletter was fake it was fun to think about fun things I could do in my classroom. And publisher makes things so easy to just put the information in and then call it your own!!!
I did the classroom rules in just a word document and that was super easy because I just clicked the icon to enable the numbers to come automatically and I was able to just type those in there... it was fun to choose clip art to go with the rules. It was a little corny but for the most part really cute. The last rule I had was: "no excuses that your dog ate your homework". All and all these assignments are pretty fun!

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Flyer

This week in class we went over the rest of the products that we will be doing in class...
On Thursday I did one of the projects that will go on my final project page in UEN. In publisher i choose to create a new page and then I choose to create a flyer. It was extremely fun!!! The first thing that I did was choose what layout I choose a really cute one that had snow flakes. Also in publisher i had the option of the color scheme that i wanted to use! The flyer that i created was for a Christmas Party. It was so easy just to fill in the spaces that were premade.
This will be SOOO useful when i am a teacher. It will save me so much time to just fill in the information. I also can't wait till I am a teacher and able to create actual flyers that will be real events for my students.
Also i started working on my newsletter. Again i am working in publisher and filling in the blanks!!

here is a link to my UEN site so if you would like you can see my fake Christmas Party flyer:
http://my.uen.org/c/portal/layout?p_l_id=PUB.78023.7

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Kidspiration!

This is such an amazing tool! There are so many amazing activities that can be done in this program. I am so excited to become a teacher just so I can have my students use the program.
As I explored the program there are different sections. There are sections for reading, writing, math, science and social studies. And in these sections the students can either create their own activity or work on an activity that is pre created.
This was the most fun that I have had in a long time!! Even though I am not a student I was having so much fun creating ven diagrams to do word webs and then in the math section there are all sorts of shapes to create equations with!! It was so excited to see my work come together and it was so easy! That was probably the best thing about Kidspiration... It is extremely easy to maneuver around the program and one can create just about anything! There are sections where the students could just write up a story and then make that story into a diagram of events. It was so neat, even to me, to play with this amazing tool!
Because Kidspiration is so easy to work in, it will be so nice for students of all ages. There is even a section in the program where there is a dictionary. And for those students who don't feel like creating their own work, there are examples already done!! And it wasn't just one example there were a lot! But I really think that the students would LOVE to work in this program just as I loved playing with the Kidspiration.
In Kidspiration it's not just math and writing. There are social studies as well. Now I believe that that will be a harder subject to teach the students. With kidspiration they can create their own project or look through the premade projects and do them. It was interesting to see the projects that were premade. And then when I was looking at them it was so easy to see how they had made them!!! It was exciting to see my work come together and also to see that I could create something fun. I think my future students would love this program. It will be a constant adventure because countless things can be created!!!!