Welcome Back!

Welcome Back to School! And welcome to Seventh Grade!! After only a few days with my new students, I know we are going to have an absolutely, amazingly awesome year! How do I know this? Well, I’m a teacher. I just know. 🙂  If you’d like specifics about how I know it’s going to be a fantabulous year, let’s start with Our Rights and Responsibilities.

To begin our year together, I asked my students to answer the following question: What are your rights and responsibilities in our seventh grade classroom? They worked on their lists individually at first, and then they discussed and added to their lists at their table groups. While they were working in their groups, I started asking students to write some of their ideas up on the ActivBoard to share them with the entire class. I think you’ll agree that, so far, my new students have some great ideas! Here’s what we have so far:

Our Rights

We have the right to…

• learn in our own way
• read what we want to during silent reading
• ask questions
• be creative
• wear anything [that follows] the appropriate dress code
• have recess twice a day
• pray
• have water at our desk
• say the Pledge of Allegiance
• choose our own supplies

Our Responsibilities

We have the responsibility to…

• keep our books in good shape
• respect our teachers
• manage good grades
• know right from wrong
• stand up for our friends
• stay safe
• do our schoolwork
• be reverent in church [I know a certain math teacher who will love that!]
• listen to the teacher
• show up on time
• keep our desks and lockers clean
• pay attention in class
• stay organized
• write in our planners
• use our rights appropriately
• assist our classmates
• treat classmates with respect

The idea behind creating these lists was to start thinking about what our three main class rules should be for this year. Yesterday, each group had to synthesize all of these rights and responsibilities into three possible rules. On Monday we will vote for the top three and those will be our class rules that we all agree to abide by this year.

One item worthy of note: I found it amazingly awesome that every single one of the notecards the groups handed me contained the word “respect”!

So, do you agree with me now? It’s going to be a wonderful year!!

 

P.S. The video at the beginning of this post is a Google Search Story that I created to welcome my seventh graders to a new school year.

Model Your Town

Calling All Sketchup Fans! Google is having a competition just for you! The 2012 Google Model Your Town Competition is currently accepting submissions from anyone who is 13 years or older.

Fame, fortune, and oodles of respect await you. (Ok, maybe just oodles of respect.) All you have to do is use Google Sketchup to create a model of Pleasant Hill. It doesn’t even have to be the entire city; how about just downtown? You might want to begin by seeing what previous winners have created: Previous Competitions. This video shows the 2010 winner talking about the model he created of his town, Barranco, Peru.

This video shows examples from the top five finalists of 2010:

The submission deadline is March 1, 2012, so get started today!

 

P.S. If when reading the first line of this post you read “Sketchup” as “ketchup,” this competition is probably not for you. 🙂

Great Google-y Moogle-y!

As I’ve mentioned in class, there has been a significant re-design of our documents list in Google Docs. I spent some time today trying to figure out where everything is and how to work with the changes. My first stop was, of course, Google. Their Getting Started Guide is quite helpful in getting to know the changes to our documents list. When you get to the page, you’ll see the following:

Simply click on one of the three panels and you’ll be provided with an explanation of how to work with the revised Google Docs. Once I become a bit more familiar with the changes, I’ll make a short screencast that will explain the changes a bit more thoroughly. Until then, please don’t hesitate to ask questions.

Uber Coolness!

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but I’m so sad that we don’t have school tomorrow! I won’t be able to share my amazingly good news with you in person. Ah well, I guess I’ll just have to blog about it.

Great Google-y Moogle-y!!

So, guess where I’ll be going in July! Oh, yeah…that would be the Googleplex in Mountain View! I’ve been accepted to attend the Google GEO Teacher’s Institute. I can’t tell you how excited I am, but at the same time bummed that I won’t be able to share it with all of you. I’m sure to learn some amazingly cool stuff (yes, I said “stuff”!) about Google Earth, Maps, and Sketchup, all of which will come in very handy in the fall when I put you back to work!! 🙂

I hope you all are enjoying your first few days of summer. Read any good books yet? If so…why haven’t you posted them?!! I’m trying to decide which book I’ll read first: The Magician by Michael Scott or A People’s History of the World. Hmmm…

By the way…what do you think of your lockers now?

Looks pretty cool, eh? I’m sorry I couldn’t get all of them up there…y’all did such a wonderful job on these murals. One more thing…whose is this?!?!

It’ll be in lost and found! Can anyone guess what I was trying to do with this photo?