What's Developing: Brainy Bottles (A Hunt for Words)

Today, I want to share one of my favorite DIY classroom tools. I made these last year after seeing bottles in my mentor's classroom. As soon as I saw them, my urge to craft and create was awakened. I could think of tons of categories to make for the bottles, especially since I taught so many grades. This is exactly what I'm sharing with you today. You will also get a glimpse into my hoarding tendencies and love for the Neuro line of drinks. I digress.

I call these Brainy Bottles, and my classes have used them to find words and strengthen their language arts skills while experiencing a touch of kinesthetic learning. These are wonderful for centers and for partner work. The possibilities are truly endless, but I've created bottle sets for antonyms, synonyms, verb usage, homophones, rhyming, and plural words. For extension exercises, I have the students write sentences using (blank number of) words from the bottle or write new word pairs.

I get tons of inquiries on these perfectly eye-catching bottles when we've packed them up for conferences. I don't remember which came first - the love of the drinks that came in the bottles or the bottles themselves. They have certainly served a purpose for Brainy Bottles. NEURO DRINKS is the line of drink, and hopefully you can find them at your local convenient or grocery store. Any bottle will do, though, but I couldn't resist the colors of these.

Here is the link I used for coloring the rice. HOW TO DYE RICE. I prefer the neon food coloring colors over the primary colors, and for these bottles, they were a perfect match!

I'm putting up this freebie today for synonyms. I will put up complete sets soon. Keep your eyes peeled as I hope to run a contest so that one of my followers can win a full set, already-made! I love the drinks so much, that I have bottles waiting to be won!! Seriously, you have no idea how happy my husband would be if I got rid of a couple sets.

Happy crafting, and I hope you find uses for these bottles for years to come. You only have to make them once! I can't wait to hear how you do.

What's Developing: I Used an Adult Word

These extra inclement weather days allow me to share more with you. Putting these posts together make me miss my students, but I hope they're getting to play in the last bit of snow before it all melts away. I am sharing one of my favorite reward and incentive bulletin boards. I came up with this one day when a fifth graders told another one, "You better finish your homework. He is already cross." Cross? I asked her to verify what the word meant, and she told me upset and angry. I was thrilled! She was taking chances with new vocabulary she learned in reading or another class. I decided to reward this risk-taking behavior in a cute way, using a play on words. By taking risks in their social language, I thought she should be honored, and I was determined to make a big deal of it. After all, we make a big to-do about things we don't like all the time. That student inspired the I Used an Adult Word Wall. Whenever I hear students attempt a word beyond their reading level or their language proficiencies in an organic way, I tell my student to "Get a Ticket!" to their delight. We fill in the ticket and highlight them on the class board. After last year, I took down the tickets and made a Hall of Fame booklet that hangs on the wall next to the bulletin board. Students like to refer to these for new words, and I think having their picture attached gives them a lot of pride! Building confidence is one of my favorite things! To date my favorites are from my first grader who told me his dream about a teleporter and one for fifth grader who told me about levitating in a video game. =)

I've added these simple forms to my Google Docs drive for the sharing. Yay for FREEBIES! If you think this would be a great thing to add to your room in this new year and approaching testing season, feel free to download your own copy by clicking on button below.

Just because I was ready to give my board a little aesthetic oomph next year, I create a graphic copy as well. If you want a little more pizzazz, I've put a file on Teachers Pay Teachers. This is different than the Docs file. Click on the cover to go to my TPT store.

What's Developing: Oh, Snap! Symbaloo

This bit of organization heaven is my labor of love. Now, I warn you, there is a whole lotta information jammed into this one resource. For those of you who are not familiar with Symbaloo, it is a website that is basically a docking point for all of your bookmarks. In Symbaloo, each page or tab is called a webmix. These webmixes can remain private, or as in this case, they can be shared and searched. Currently, the Symbaloo webmix I'm sharing is just one webmix I've saved.  I have a personal webmix that I use as my default Homepage that has my favorite news, financial institutions, blogs... any link that I use frequently.

I learned about Symbaloo while attending an ESOL conference. They demonstrated ways to search and add webmixes, but I wanted to create my own. So if you don't find use for the one I've created, you can search for any and all kinds of webmixes that have already been created on any topic (Think Pinterest, but for website bookmarks).

Now, let me walk you through mine. I needed a better way to organize all of the websites I was learning about, all the sites shared with me, and ones I observed teachers using in the classroom. I also needed them well organized because bookmarking was not working for me. Organizationally and visually, bookmarks were a mess, especially with a work and personal computer.

This is the resulting webmix - a color-coded elementary education collection of websites. I've created this one to be mainly geared toward reading/ELA for ESOL students, but remember, most anything that involves scaffolding, media, student-created products, and games will benefit all students. Clicking on the image will take you directly to the Symbaloo link I've created. Each website has a small description on it, and I have color-coded as follows:

• Red - Reading / Online Read-Aloud
• Blue - Teacher and Lesson Planning Resources
• Purple - Upper Level Bloom's Taxonomy / Student-Generated Sites
• Yellow - Games
• Green - ELL, ELA, Grammar
• White - Social Networking, Media
• Gray - Assessments

You can use this as a jump off for you own Symbaloo, adding or deleting websites of your choosing. I know that Symbaloo has been a life-saver for managing websites for me. As a teacher also interested in blogging and photography, I'd lose my head without it. If you already use Symbaloo, I would be honored if you added this as a tab to your existing collection. I hope you find some interesting websites and that Symbaloo is a tool you feel you can use!