Incentive Scratch-off Cards!!

I am a huge advocate for rewarding positive behavior, but I don't want to spend the money on maintaining a "goodie box" of candy, pencils, erasers, etc. all year long! I would much rather reward students with something fun and class oriented. I have given out homework passes before, and those work well, but this year I'm trying something new -- Incentive Scratch-Off Cards!

First, I made each of my cards using Microsoft Word. I could have made them prettier, fancier, and more colorful, but I'm a fan of simplicity sometimes! I managed to fit 18 on a page and printed them on white cardstock. I chose incentives that I can use for any of my classes -- since I teach two different grades and courses. I chose +5 pts on a Quiz, Vocabulary Pass, Classwork Pass, and Lab Pass. The best part is you can totally customize the options for your classroom, regardless of grade level! You could make rewards for treats like computer/iPad time, choosing their seat or group, front of the line, etc. So many options!

I cut out each of the cards using my handy dandy little paper trimmer (what would I do without that thing, seriously...). I then covered the reward portion with scotch tape. I could only find the satin gift-wrapping type, but experiment and see if other types work! You could also use clear contact paper or packing tape. Notice I only covered the portion with the reward, not the top heading section.

Next I had to mix a very specific concoction (insert sarcasm) of dishsoap and acrylic paint - I tried to use about 1 part dishsoap to 2 parts paint. I'm not sure it matters, but I used Palmolive original green dishsoap. I used boring grey paint, but you could really use any color! Mix them together, but not too vigorously or it makes a lot of bubbles.

Paint over the taped section of the incentive cards. Only the paint on the tape will scratch off. Don't worry if it doesn't cover perfectly with one coat! I didn't want to spend the time making them into perfect little designs, but you certainly could! Give them a few minutes between coats and keep adding coats until you can no longer read the words. It took me three coats.

Let them dry completely and try one out! How awesome is this? I think my kids are totally going to love them -- and I didn't need to buy any special supplies!

I plan on giving them out as rewards for winning games, staying on task on those particularly difficult days, or doing something awesome in class. I really want to make sure these are rewards for ALL my kids, not just my "A" students!

Let me know if you are going to try this out too! Endless possibilities for all grade levels!

Customizing My Erin Condren Teacher Planner for High School

UPDATE: This blog post outlines the older layout for Erin Condren Teacher Planners! I will be writing a new post soon about their updated version - it includes almost all of the customization described below, so I still highly recommend it! 

If you are interested in purchasing your own Erin Condren Teacher Planner, use this link and get $10 off your first purchase! 

The video below includes an updated walkthrough of the planner and how I use it for secondary science!

This post is a long time coming, so bear with me as I give you all the details! I finally finished customizing my Erin Condren Teacher Planner for the 16-17 school year. I ordered it in May so I knew that I would have time to customize it and use it over the summer. I could not be more thrilled!

I loved this planner as soon as I saw it, but realized that some of the sections were really geared toward elementary teachers or teachers with a small number of students. I began searching for blog posts about customizing the teacher planner and I found TONS of amazing posts about how elementary school teachers customize it for their needs, a few about how middle school teachers use it, but very few about using the planner for High School. Us high school teachers need fun planners too! I consider myself a relatively creative person, so I decided to tackle this challenge: Customizing an Erin Condren Teacher Planner for High School!

So much of the planner is already perfect. Some of the things I did not customize are the monthly layouts and notes sections. There is a tab for each month, a two page monthly spread, and three notes pages for each month. Perfect! I already made use of some of the notes pages at a recent PD session!

The sections I don't find useful for high school are the attendance section, grid paper, checklist section, and Birthday section. Luckily, I have an amazing idea for each of these! The video below has a quick overview of the changes I have made!

All the customization was done with washi tape, stickers (some included with the planner), double sided tape, and regular paper from my printer.

We don't celebrate birthdays in class, or we'd be celebrating all the time, so I decided to change the class birthdays section into a long-term To-Do list and an area to keep track of books to read, items to order, and ideas for the future. It will slowly fill up during the year and will be a great place to look back to in May when we are wrapping up. The stickers on this page are from the back of the teacher planner! I may end up ditching the two-toned look and just put straight washi across. I haven't decided yet.

The attendance section isn't very useful for me, because we take electronic attendance. I use the electronic attendance constantly, so I don't want to make a paper version. I decided to change my attendance section into an Email/Contact Log for parent contact. Although I keep copies of all the emails I send, they get filed away into a folder. Parent emails can be obscure and it gets easy to lose track of the dates you emailed and whether the parent responded. The attendance log already has a column for check marks -- perfect for checking whether a parent responded. There are also columns for name, date, and reason for contact. 

The grid section seems pretty useful for me, especially for seating charts and data tracking. For me, we change seating charts all the time and my classroom is an odd shape due to science benches. It didn't seem feasible for me to use the section that way. I have around 150 students, and about 10 students who enter or leave throughout the year. Our data tracking is already online, so I am going to stick to that. I decided to use the grid section for a Behavior Log and Intervention tracker. As the adage goes, 20% of your kids cause 80% of your problems, so for each class, I usually only have a handful of trouble makers. I plan on using the grid area to track their "bad" days and what we tried to do to fix it. If I end up meeting with the parent or counselor later, I have a quick place to look back and reference what has occurred in our classroom. Luckily, the grid pages are decorated but not labeled, so no customizing needed!

I love the layout of the lesson planning pages -- the days are horizontal and the preps are vertical. I love that each day is a different color and there is plenty of space for me to write without having to miniaturize my handwriting. There is room for seven preps, but most high school teachers don't have that many. I have two and a half preps -- Chemistry, Biology, and an ESOL section of Biology. I call the ESOL section a half prep since we are covering the same material and will be doing some of the same activities, but some of the plans will be modified. I didn't need seven sections for lesson plans, but I wanted to use up all the space that was provided. I thought about what other types of things I normally write in my planner throughout the year -- meetings, conferences, To-Do List, Reminders -- and knew there had to be a way to incorporate all of that. This was my solution!

I used thin solid colored washi tape to create four different sections. Two of the sections are two columns wide. This is where I plan on putting my lessons for Biology and Chemistry, since those are my main preps. The first page has three columns total, so I will use the first column for Biology and the single column for ESOL Biology. The second page has four columns total. The first two are for Chemistry. The last two columns are for To-Do lists and Meetings. I am super excited to start using this section. I love being able to have everything I need for the day in one spot.

The checklist section is basically a gradebook -- which is grade for elementary teachers who only have thirty kids. It doesn't seem big enough to keep track of grades for all 150 students I see for the entire year. I decided to use this section to record assessment data. By the time we take our first tests, most of the schedule changes are complete and my rosters are more stable. At the semester change, I may have a few students switch, but most of them stay the same. I plan on tracking mastery data for standards and assessment scores. I am keeping a row at the bottom to track averages. This is going to be super handy when I am sitting in an IT meeting and trying to remember what student tests looked like. It also allows me to record their raw score and curved score for interims, EOCs, and other curved tests we give.

So far, I could not be more ecstatic about this purchase! I will be using my planner during the summer for summer school, meetings, conferences... but I will keep you all updated if I make any other changes once the school year begins!

Update: Two weeks into the school year - AND I'M IN LOVE! I have kept everything the same minus a few additional stickers and washi scattered around. The best purchase -- Highly recommend high school folks!

If you are interested in purchasing your own Erin Condren Teacher Planner, use this link and get $10 off your first purchase! 

Blog Challenge: Day 16

If you had one superpower to use in the classroom, what would it be and how would it help?

I would, without a doubt, want the ability to read student's minds. There is so much going on in their little teenage brains and some of them aren't great at communicating yet and don't know how to effectively let an adult know. Wouldn't it be amazing to read a kid's mind and know why they are grumpy?

For my "trouble" kids -- and I use this word lightly, because I don't think they have bad intentions! -- it would be so helpful to know what their true motivation is. Is it something at home? Are they trying to hide a secret? Some kids don't open up easily, and it would be so great to have this information to try and help them cope with whatever life is dealing them.

For my shy kids, I would love to know what's going on their heads that they aren't brave enough to say. I have some pretty energetic classes, and I know my shy kids feel like they get lost in the bustle of class sometimes. Being able to read their mind can help me to support them so they know that I do care for them, even if they aren't the ones getting my constant attention.

If superpowers were real, it would be career-changing to be able to read minds. Do they know the material? Read minds. Are they actually engaged? Read minds. Are they having a bad day? Read minds.

SO MANY POSSIBILITIES.

What superpower would you choose?

Blog Challenge: Day 15

Name three strengths you have as an educator. 

This is hard. Not because I think I'm the best at everything (I'm not) and not because I think I suck at everything (no professional should feel this way), but because it's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I think I'm good at and what makes me succeed at my job.

#1: I love these kids. 

You can't be a teacher and hate kids. If you do, you need to find another profession. Regardless of age, the students are literally the entire reason you are in the building with the job of teaching them how to grow, learn about life, and one day graduate. It's a pretty darn important job.

Of course, there are tons of kids that drive me crazy. There are kids that exhaust me every single day and that I could complain about for far to long. But for every one of those kids is another kid who adores you, loves your class, and wants to confide in you. Sometimes its really hard to tell what a kid thinks of you, so I try to make sure every kid feels recognized and important in my class. You never know what will turn their day around. At the same time, I never know what a kid is going to do to turn MY day around.

I feel like I am genuinely invested not just in them learning science, but in them growing up and becoming little adults. I think it is one of the things that my students appreciate about me and its one of the things I love most about my job.

#2: I get crazy ideas.

I am the crazy person that will be taking a shower and get an awesome idea for a new lab and I will jump out and quickly write it down so I don't forget (this actually happens, my husband can vouch for it). Unlike most teachers, I love the planning and creating part of my job. I am rarely satisfied with using something from someone else. I always want to make sure that what we are doing in class is easy for my students to understand and meaningful. I completely love coming up with new "lightbulb" moments for my kids in class. Sure, not every single idea is like this and sometimes I get ideas for things that I never even get to use, but I feel like my creativity and planning is one of my best attributes as an educator.

#3: I speak up 

Staff meetings and instructional team meetings can be so frustrating sometimes. Some people want to rush through everything so they can go home and the meeting feels forced and unproductive. Other people want to give a million anecdotes and pull the whole meeting off-topic. It can be frustrating for sure. I'm a pretty laid back person, so I usually sit and quietly take notes, but when there is something I feel really strongly about, I definitely speak up.

This is especially true for areas I feel passionate about, particularly science literacy and writing. I volunteer and provide ideas for classroom literacy as often as I can because I feel its extremely important. In the two short years I have been at my current school, I have been able to create a niche for myself that the administration is definitely noticing. I am becoming the go-to person for questions about science writing and I absolutely love it. It is always nice to feel necessary, especially in a huge school like mine, but it is even more rewarding to feel necessary to something you feel so strongly about. That never would have happened if I had never spoken up and made my thoughts known from the very beginning.

Blog Challenge: Day 14

What is feedback for learning, and how well do you give it to students?

This is an area I struggle with FOR SURE! In an ideal world, my classroom would operate more like a series of conversations than a sequence of events. I try my very best to communicate with students in a relaxed way to help them understand and to explain, re-explain, and explain again. I have realized that talking doesn't work for all students! My auditory kids do great, but they needed other ways to show their learning.

Enter: Interactive Notebooks

Notebooks give us visuals to add to our conversations. We do puzzles and sorting to help the kinesthetic learners. How in the world do you give all those different kinds of kids feedback?

I typically grade notebooks on test days; however, I try to create several "check-ins" throughout the unit to see where the students are at. Sometime the check-in is sort of impromptu and I will check their notebook before they pack up to leave. Other times, I check them after school without them knowing, leaving notes, stars, and stickers for them in their notebook. For check-ins I usually just look at whether they are keeping up and will check an assignment from that day, like a short writing prompt.

For example, when we were about half-way through our Evolution unit, I gave them a diagram that had an example of natural selection with rabbits and foxes. It had pictures, but very little explanation. We had some time left at the end of the day, so students had about 15-20 minutes to write at least six sentences in response to "How is natural selection related to the diagram?". Simple. Almost no planning on my part. They could look through their notes and review what we had talked about so far. It took me very little time to read their 6 sentences, and I wasn't reading them for grammar perfection or for completeness. I just read them to see if they were grasping the major concepts. Did they mention the slower rabbits dying but the faster ones surviving? Did they say that the faster ones could reproduce? Did they say that they could pass on the gene to be faster? Kids who did a good job found underlines for the awesome sentences and stickers showing them they did a great job. Kids who gave me limited answers found comments like "Why? How? Define?" We talked about it in class the next day and they could revise their answer.

Of course I use tests and quizzes to provide more formal feedback, but I feel like that by the time we get to a test, they (and I) are ready to move on. There has to be little bits of feedback along the way. I'm working on being better at providing that feedback in multiple ways -- written and verbal.

Suggestions always welcome! What types of formative assessment do you use?

Blog Challenge: Day 13

Name the top edtech tools that you use on a consistent basis in the classroom, and rank them in terms of their perceived (by you) effectiveness.

As much as I love integrating technology into my classroom, it is one thing I find extremely difficult to stay consistent with week in and week out. I feel myself getting bored with certain tools. If I'm getting bored I know my kids are certainly bored! There have been a lot of tools I have used briefly (EdPuzzle, Class Dojo, Edmodo...) but I have not used those on a consistent basis. I'm only going to list tools that I use regularly and that my students are currently familiar with.

SmartNotebook

I am fortunate enough to have a SMART board in my room and I use it on a daily basis. The Smart Notebook software in particular, is fabulous for our interactive notebooking. My students and I are now in a routine: If I write, you write. Your page should look like my page. I set up my Smart Notebook page to look identical to their notebook page -- I place pictures and diagrams where they should go and approximate their size. When I write notes, students can easily see and place their notes accordingly. My favorite part is that I can easily save it as a PDF (Print to PDF to be exact) and post it to my webpage. I date all the documents so students can easily find anything they missed from a day they are absent. It is an absolutely wonderful tool for interactive notebooks!

Effectiveness rank: 10/10!

Document Camera

If the Smart Notebook has one downside, it's how difficult it is to color diagrams. Color coding text is simple, but coloring diagrams becomes difficult. I have tried using the pens, highlighters, and there are just so many problems with getting colors to look correct. It became frustrating to both me and my kids. This year I was able to get a document camera through a grant from our PTSA. The document is very simple -- it plugs into a USB on my computer and I can project the picture from my computer onto the board. It is so helpful to use the document camera when coloring as students can much more easily see where and what I am coloring. It's also great for showing directions for foldables or more complicated gluing in our notebook.

Our district also utilizes GradeCam (which I will discuss in a moment) but the document camera works hand in hand with GradeCam that makes grading tests and quizzes cinch!

Effectiveness rank: 8/10 -- sometimes the picture is too dark or fuzzy, but it gets the job done!

GradeCam

Our district utilizes online tracking for all our common assessment data. A new tool they introduced is GradeCam. It allows us to print "bubble" sheets for tests and quizzes and grade them instantly with our LadyBug document cameras! It's so fantastic and such a time saver! Although I don't use this option often, since I don't often give multiple choice assessments, it makes grading 150+ tests so much easier. It also has fantastic data aggregation options that are extremely helpful when we meet as an instructional team. I highly recommend using GradeCam if you can!

Effectiveness rank: 10/10!

D2L / Class Website

Our district uses D2L as our class website platform, and I utilize on a daily basis. It is all customized with our calendar, notebook pages, resource links, study guide answer keys... it is simply a must in this day and age. My kids know what I will say if I hear What did we do yesterday? CHECK THE WEBSITE! It really cuts back on the paper shuffling and helps teach my ninth graders responsibility.

Effectiveness rank: 10/10!

CamScanner

The last edtech tool I want to mention is CamScanner. It's a free app for your phone. It typically has a subscription, but if you're a teacher you can get it for free! It allows you to utilize your camera as a scanner (hence CamScanner... haha...) and you can scan everything from single page documents, to packets, to pictures and diagrams. Once you take a picture of it, you can edit it to the correct size and color and then you have so many options for how to share it. My personal favorite is to upload it directly to your Google Drive. It uploads very fast so you can get your document quickly.

My favorite thing to use this for is answer keys. I like to post answer keys for my students when they have a study guide, so they can check their answers and work at home. For chemistry when we have a lot of math problems, it is very time consuming to type the answers and much easier to do them on paper. I fill out the answer key, CamScan it, upload it to Google Drive and then I can post it on the class website, print it out, or email it to another teacher. So handy and useful for so many things.

Effectiveness rank: 10/10!


What are your favorite edtech tools? What is the next thing I need to try?

Blog Challenge: Day 12

How do you envision your teaching changing over the next five years?

In the next couple of years, my goal is to eventually teach all Biology courses and really specialize and hone my strategies for that course. In this coming year, I am going to be teaching a section of all English Language Learners (ELLs) for Biology and I am hoping to focus on developing strategies I can use not only with that class but with my other courses also. 

This year was the first year I used interactive notebooks and I am hoping to perfect those in the coming years. I think it provides so many opportunities for students to interact with the material and really evaluate and think about their learning. 

I am in a constant battle to become more organized, so hopefully over the next five years I can find organizational ideas that help me keep all of my student supplies and teacher supplies organized. 

In terms of teaching, I hope that over the next five years (and further than that) I can come up with ways to keep students engaged with the material. There are portions of every unit that I find are hard for students to stay focused. I also want to continue to add variety in my classroom, where every day isn't the same. Over the next five years, I want to really work on integrating technology into each unit as well as engaging labs, group work, vocabulary work, and writing. 

This is a huge task, but over the next five years hopefully I'm able to take some baby steps to creating units that use a variety of strategies and create meaningful experiences for students. I feel like right now a few units are great and a few units are not. 

As an educator, I hope to take on more of a leadership role for our Biology instructional team. It's an area I'm very passionate about and I would love to facilitate meaningful collaboration with my other colleagues because I feel like that would really improve my teaching in the classroom.