Five for Friday!

Hello lovely friends!  It has been such a long time since I've visited the blogosphere and I must admit I have really missed sharing ideas, chatting with followers and reading about all the wonderful things happening in other classrooms.  I hope you won't mind if my Five for Friday this morning covers more than a week?  I need to catch up. :)

My plans for Spring break this year involved staying close to home, getting my house cleaned and organised, making a heap of resources for my kidlets and having afternoon snoozes.  Instead, I booked a last minute vacation and spent some time in the Hawaiian sun with a couple of friends!

We stayed at Waikiki and enjoyed long days of beaching, eating, drinking and shopping.

What a treat to have a whole week to relax!

After a public holiday on Monday I had a short week with my kidlets.  We got straight back into the swing of things and did some number revision in Maths groups.  You probably know that I am an advocate for getting little learners up and moving whenever possible, so we played Gone Fishin'!  Using a magnetic rod we caught numeral and number word fish and matched them up.  Next week I'm going to use the ten frame and tens block fish in number line activities, and we'll complete some recording sheets as well.  This week, though, we just had fun casting a line! :)  

I love, love, love all of Marsha's resources and we used her 'Constructing Numbers' pack this week, too.

Loved hearing the kidlets sing the relevant line from Harry Kindergarten's Numbers in the Teens/Twenties songs to remind themselves about groups of ten and extra ones.

We had lots of fun in guided reading this week... although we only spend a small amount of the time playing a game I know that it's my kidlets' favourite part of our time together!  Depending on the needs of each group we worked on different skills.

'Magic E' practice.

Working on letter recognition and common sounds.

It's official - we have a new favourite GoNoodle brain break!

Dancing Robots has been put to the side for I Like to Move It, Zumba style!

If you could see into my storeroom at the moment you would most likely faint from shock.  It is a giant mess!  Had to spend some time yesterday afternoon sorting out resources that I should have put away properly weeks and weeks ago!

After sorting and rubber-banding everything back together I popped all of our word family resources back into the concertina file I keep them in.

Each word family has it's own labelled pocket with all of the master copies of worksheets kept in a plastic sleeve.

I keep the laminated display and activity cards in a ziplock bag - it's so easy to take out the whole bag to use during the weeks we are learning and revising each word family.  I usually use laminated envelopes to keep my resources in, but this pack from Marsha needs a whole filing system of it's own! I really need to buy some more of these concertina files to keep sets of worksheets in - it would make my life so much easier if everything related to the same concept was in the one place. :)

I hope you have had a wonderful week and are enjoying some weekend time relaxing and resting!  I'm off to do the same. :)

What's New with GoNoodle?

Hi all!  Popping in very quickly to share some fun GoNoodle updates.  

Just in case you're not familiar with GoNoodle, here's a super quick explanation: this site will become one of your all time favourite classroom management tools as soon as you use it! :)  GoNoodle is a clever site that allows you to create an account for your class (you can even have multiple class profiles if you need to) through which you can access all sorts of Brain Break clips.  You know that giant list of YouTube links you had saved, or that Pinterest board you've filled with videos to use for those moments during the day when your kidlets need to wiggle? Yep, you won't need to worry about them anymore.  Your class gets to choose a GoNoodle 'champ', who grows bigger and stronger (and cooler!) as you use the Brain Breaks in your classroom.  After a while, your champ will 'max out' and you get to choose a new one. Here's our current champ, McPufferson:

I was already in love with GoNoodle, but when I logged on in the last week of holidays to see what clips were new my devotion grew even stronger.  Guess what?  You can now add your own YouTube clips!  Although the selection already in the GoNoodle catalogue is pretty darn good, there were a few songs and dances that my kidlets loved that weren't on there.  Here's what the screen looks like when you choose 'YouTube' from the menu:

All you have to do is click "add you own YouTube brain break" and paste the URL of the clip you want to add.  Easy peasy!  I added a heap of videos, and not just the 'get up and boogie' type!  I now plan to use GoNoodle for movement breaks, as well as for those Brain Breaks that work as a teaching tool too.  There's so many ditties I use for maths especially - so they were the first ones I added, closely followed by 'Chicka Chicka Boom Boom' and lots of Learning Station and Harry Kindergarten videos that we love to sing and dance to.    As I added them, I marked them as a favourite so they are even easier to find.  Now when I choose my 'favourites' tab I see them all there (along with any of the original GoNoodle videos I'd marked): 

Another great new feature is that your champ now moves up levels based on the number of Brain Breaks you have watched, rather than by their number of minutes. You can see in the first picture above that we are just one clip away from levelling McPufferson up!  This is great if you find that you only have a few minutes in the day to have Brain Breaks, or if you only see groups of children for a short amount of time in the day.  It makes the levels come around a whole heap faster which keeps the kidlets super excited to watch their champ grow.

I use GoNoodle every day - it is seriously awesome for re-energising kidlets when they have been working hard, to provide a learning opportunity during times (like fruit break) that would otherwise be idle chatter, for a few minutes of calming down, or even just as a fun treat.  Of course, we still do lots of screen-less singing and finger plays and I think the kidlets like them even more now because they are such a contrast to GoNoodle.  I love to hear the cheers of 'Yay! A Brain Break!!' when my kidlets see GoNoodle on our IWB screen. :)  

Do you GoNoodle?