New Learnings

I've recently taken up learning sign language and as a way to practice I started using it in the classroom when speaking to my students. At first this was solely for selfish reasons. I wanted to hone my sign language skills, and there is no fear when practicing in front of kindergarteners. They love everything I do because they are five and everyone loves their teacher when they are five. In addition, by learning some signs and finger spelling my students would be able to communicate and connect with those in the Deaf Community, who often feel isolated from the hearing community. We have a couple of deaf students at our school and a few that are hard of hearing, and I felt that it was important for my kids to be able to communicate and include these students when they interact with them.

Even though my incorporation of sign language into daily classroom activities was for my own reasons I have since found that it is an incredibly useful teaching strategy. My entire career I have worked with ELL kids, so I am constantly talking and teaching with my hands. However, by using sign language, instead of random hand movements coinciding with what I am saying now it is consistent signs and movements that represent the words that I am speaking. Even if a kid doesn't understand that words, he or she may be able to gather understanding from the signs. Sign language helps to create a bridge for those learning English.

Sign language is great for all learners too, not just the ELL. Sign language is a visual and kinesthetic language. By teaching the ASL alphabet my students now have a visual and hands-on representation of letters. Also, a lot of the time teacher directions are solely oral. By simultaneously signing while I give directions it helps to give an extra support to my students in understanding what they are expected to do. One way I have seen that this has been helpful is during assessments. In Kindergarten all assessment are performance based and are given one to one. At the beginning of the quarter I gave my students an assessment on comparing numbers. My expectation was that a lot of students wouldn't do too well on the assessment and I would have to reteach the concept later on and retest a lot of the students. During all of the lessons a majority of the students struggled with the concept. Comparing numbers is a difficult concept for little minds and they especially struggle with the meaning of "less" when comparing numbers or quantities. To my surprise most of the students in my class got a 100% on the assessment. When I reflected on the results afterwards I realized that the difference between administering the test this year and lasts years was that this time I signed all of the directions. I couldn't help but wonder if the extra support of using sign language helped my students be successful.

Sign language also is a great strategy for classroom management. I love using nonverbal cues in my classroom. It keeps the noise level down and minimizes interruptions. For years I have taught my kids to ask for water or to use the bathroom using signs. When they want water they hold up a "W". When they need to use the bathroom they hold up the finger spelling for "t" and rotate it back and forth (This is the sign for bathroom/toilet in ASL). My goal this year is to be able to give my students a simple set of directions using only signs. By omitting verbal directions and only giving signs students are then forced to "listen" with their eyes. Let's face it, a lot of us "listen" to directions without really listening. The same is true with Kindergarteners. However, when communicating with signs you HAVE to look at the person. It requires a lot more focus on the "speaker" to understand what is being said.

Learning sign language and teaching it to my students has been one of the best things I have done for my students. Not only is it a beautiful language, but also it is a great teaching strategy for multiple reasons. Most of all though, I believe that it will help my students to become more well-rounded human beings.

Gotta Catch 'Em All!

With "Pokemon Go!" being such a huge hit right now, I thought it would be fun to do a Pokemon theme for my classroom. I wasn't sure at first if it was something that my upcoming Kindergarteners would be interested in, until I was reminded by colleagues that I had some very Pokemon-obsessed kids in my class last year. (Oh how quickly we forget!)

There is little out there in the worldwide web that I could find that was Pokemon themed for a classroom. So, I created my own and decided to share it so others who are interested in "cashing in" on the Pokemon craze can have these resources too :)

The first thing a teacher needs is cute nameplates for student desks! I even downloaded the Pokemon font to use. It worked well for the numbers, but decided to go with a more "regular" font for the letters. This is Kindergarten after all... don't want to confuse anybody!

  Next comes the name tags. These will be places in to badge holders with kids to wear.

  

I needed new bathroom passes for this year too. In previous years when kids went to the bathroom they placed a little figurine on their desk, one for boys and one for girls. That helped me to see that someone was already in the bathroom (because I forget!). The little statues that I have been using are falling apart and this seemed like a good opportunity to "renovate" this idea. I created Pokemon bathroom passes. I will print these out and tape the girls' one to a pink cup and the boys' one to a blue cup. This will be my new visual to remind me that I already sent someone to the bathroom. Since I teacher Kindergarten I have two small bathrooms in my classroom. I will cut off the word "pass" on these, and then attach them to the bathroom doors as well.

This year I wanted to trade out the "junk" in my treasure box for some cool (and free for me!) coupons for the kids. In light of this year's Pokemon theme I decided to make Pokemon cards with prizes attached. Now kids can earn points and try to collect them all!

 

At our school we started doing a "Warrior Connect" each day. It's a way for the kids to check in first thing in the morning and gives us an idea of how everybody is doing. (It also gives the kids an opportunity to see how their teacher is feeling each morning!) It is supposed to be a 1-5 check in, with 1 being the worst and 5 the best. For Kindergarten I start with a 1-3 check in. So, I made a Pokemon themed poster to help the kids tell how they are feeling each morning.

 

 The thing that I am probably MOST stoked about is my Class Dojo (online classroom management tool) this year. I discovered that you can upload your own pictures to be used for the kids' avatars! Click on the "settings" icon in the top right corner of your class. Click on a student and then click on their avatar (like you are going to change it) From the drop down menu choose "Create new set". Then you can download whatever pictures you want. (And they don't even need to be Pokemon!) I went to the Pokemon Database and downloaded the pictures that I liked. I tried to choose ones that were small and cute, cause this is Kindergarten after all! And then I uploaded them all at once to ClassDojo. I now have 45 Pokemon characters in holding to assign my kids. And one of "prizes" they can earn is to change their Pokemon character (see above). 

Here is the link to download these materials: Pokemon Classroom Materials  If you want to use the Pokemon font you will need to download it to your computer. You can do that here: Pokemon Font

Enjoy!!!!

Educational Songs

After 6 years of teaching the second year Kindergarteners and then looping with them to first grade I am back to teaching regular, old Kindergarten again. It has been a crazy year so far! I love my class, and we are all finally getting into the routine of being in school, but it is exhausting! Those kids have SO much energy. I swear, they never get tired!

With 24 high energy students GoNoodle has been my saving grace. I love it! It is an awesome website with lots of brain break videos for kids. They have everything from Zumba, to camp songs, to yoga. And the best part... it's completely free! 

One of my favorite components to GoNoodle is the YouTube channel. You can save youtube videos straight to your GoNoodle account. Under the YouTube channel on GoNoodle, just click on "Add Your Own YouTube Video". Then, copy and past the URL of the YouTube video. And you're done! I've found lots of great educational song videos that I saved to my GoNoodle account and play with my class every day. Song and movement is such a great way to learn!

Here are some of my favorite videos we use in class...

Math:

Phonics:




Following Directions: (The kids are always begging me to do this one!)




We use these videos and others from GoNoodle every morning to start our day, after every morning recess, every day after lunch, and any other time the kids (or I!) just need a break! I'm pretty sure we could do this for 6 straight hours at school and the kids would STILL be full of energy!

If you live or work with kids I would definitely recommend that you check out GoNoodle, and don't forget to add your own videos too!

Phycronutrients!

This summer Kory and I have taken up a new interest in watching food and health documentaries. We've watched quite a few this summer; some we liked more than others. The most recent one we watched was "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead". It's about a guy from Australia who goes on a 60 day road trip of the US while doing a 60 day juice cleanse as an attempt to heal an autoimmune disease he has by consuming solely fruits and vegetables. It is a great documentary and I highly recommend it! (It's on Netflix!)

Kory and I were so inspired by this documentary that we decided to give the juicing thing a try. Since we are just starting out with juicing we didn't want to spend a ton of money on one, though we know you get what you pay for. But I've learned a thing or too about getting great deals when shopping! We found one that had high ratings and was reasonably priced at Target. However, I found that it was like $20 cheaper online than at the actual store! (The woes of living in Hawai'i). We tried to order it online using ebates (why not get some cash back on it!) and then just pick it up at the store later that day (and save on shipping!). Unfortunately, it was out of stock online, and even though we wanted to just do a store pick up, it wouldn't let us order it on online. I was pretty ticked off. The good news is that Target does price matching! So we just went back to Target, grabbed the juicer, took it to customer service and said we wanted the online price. Bada bing bada boom! We just got ourselves a high quality juicer for under $50!

Okay, enough of my tangent on bargain shopping...

We love our juicer! We tried to do just juice for a couple days. It was really hard. For now we are just using it to replace a meal instead of all of our meals. Like for breakfast today! My favorite is apple, carrot, and beet. It is SO good! I also found that juices with beet were also the most filling!

Kory's go to now is apple, carrot, and celery. 

We tried using cucumber in our juices, but found it to be really overpowering. Kory even tried bell pepper and onion in his one time. (Meh!) He is much braver and much more experimental than me!

I have to make one more tangent here... We are composting the fibers left over from juicing, and yesterday I found this little guy IN the compost box. 

So among other things I have now added placing a lid on the compost box to my to do list today. 

Juicing can get expensive, which is why we got our produce at the farmers market and Costco. (Apples, carrots, celery are all dirt cheap at Costco!) And after seeing how costly juicing is on a first hand basis it makes us all the more glad that we have our JuicePLus+. It's so much cheaper than juicing all the time and we still get all our phytonutrients and micronutrients. Or as Kory has dubbed them: phycronutrients!

Time for Thai!

The one thing we are not short on here in Kona is Thai food restaurants. They remind me of taquerias back in California... They're everywhere. For me though Thai food was always the last choice when it came to eating out. In the past 7 years while living here I think I've only eaten it once. However, Thai food is one of my husband's favorites, and over the past year of being married to him it has slowly become a favorite of mine too.

I have fallen in love with the spicy, peanuty, coconuty flavors of their curries. And my husband loves pad thai! So, we decided to see if we could make it ourselves! For this we turned to Pinterest (of course). Our criteria was EASY. Neither one of us like to hassle with tons of ingredients. The recipe we used can be found here: Quick and Easy Vegan Pad Thai

The noodles for pad thai are the best! We just soaked them in hot, boiling water for about 15 minutes. 

Then we sautéed up some garlic and tofu. My husband likes his tofu in tiny bite size pieces, so chopping that up was his job. 

He also helped squeeze the limes for the sauce. Add in some peanut butter, soy sauce and sriracha and you've got a mighty fine pad thai sauce!

Mix it all together in a skillet and you've get some quick and easy pad thai! I garnished mine with a little green onion, cilantro, and chopped peanuts. 

This recipe made so much that we have plenty for dinner tomorrow too! Homemade thai leftovers, mmm mmm! This recipe was so easy and so quick we will definitely be making it again soon. Next on the list... Panang Curry!!!!