The bubble map seems to be the hardest map for my kiddos to grasp because the bubbles have to contain ONLY adjectives or adjective phrases. Students tend to want to put any phrase in the bubbles (and you'll see a lot of "bubble maps" like this floating around the web).
As excited as I was to have students making bubble maps I was equally excited to use this Word Cloud generator from abcya.com.
We took our bubble maps to the computer lab and came out with a neat little piece of art for our classroom. Below are some screenshots that show just how easy this program is to use. This is a word cloud I made about my pup Lily.
Don't they come out darling!!
During my one month hiatus from the blogging world, I went for the last two days of my Thinking Maps Training of Trainers course. So excited to say I'm officially "certified" to train teachers at my school in the use of Thinking Maps. We just need to purchase our teacher binders and schedule a training date. Yay!
I was originally interested in bringing Write From the Beginning (the writing component of Thinking Maps) to our school, but found out that schools had to implement Thinking Maps prior to being allowed to purchase the writing component. I was a little bummed, since a school-wide writing program is really what we were looking for.
I have to tell you, I am SO thrilled that we have to bring the Thinking Maps to our school first. The 5 days of training that I received was incredible. Seeing the possibilities for increasing student engagement and rigor was so exciting. I've been slowly introducing Thinking Maps to my 3rd graders and I'm excited to start pushing student thinking with the use of the maps.
I'm also excited to share some snapshots of ways that we're using Thinking Maps in class. If you've never heard of Thinking Maps I suggest you visit the Thinking Maps website and watch the intro video for a taste of what Thinking Maps is all about.
Here's a Tree Map (used for classifying) that we created as a class before students even knew what a Tree Map was. Prior to the Tree Map we created a Circle Map (used for defining in context) to brainstorm what students thought the class rules should be. The tree map helped me show how all of their ideas fit into the 5 classroom rules from Whole Brain Teaching. It was a perfect beginning of the year lesson!
Woah, I blinked and a month flew by! People are starting to ask what happened to my little blog, so I figured Farley's Currently is a nice first post after my month hiatus. Thanks Farley for all the fun!
I found a $10 iTunes card in my wallet the other day...wooohoo... and bought the Tim McGraw single as well as Cassadee Pope's "Wasting All These Tears" and a Taylor Swift's songs from The Hunger Games...I've wanted those for a long time and just never got around to downloading them.
I've talked about getting a laptop for a long time, but I just couldn't justify spending the money on a Mac, but my sweet darling husband (who has less of a problem spending money than I do!) surprised me with the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. It's awesome. I L-O-V-E, love it! We just read Clementine in class; can you tell, hahaha.
Totally bummed I forgot a whole stack of papers in my classroom. Good thing is I only live about 5 minutes from school so I'll have to zip by real quick and grab them. I might have a rough time motivating myself to do that though, we'll see.
Yep, my husband has not had a job to go to since the government shutdown. So ridiculous. To avoid any political debates, I'll suffice it to say that I really want him to have a job on Monday.
My stinkin' Scotch laminator died. I'm so sad. Kind of frustrated too because I haven't had it all that long. I thought it would last longer. Anyone else have issues with the Scotch brand laminator? Any suggestions for a different brand?
My trick probably isn't a trick to many of you, but when I found this out about the Blogger app I thought it was the coolest thing ever. In the past when I would take pictures on my iPhone or my iPad I would email them to myself and then download the pics into a file and then upload them to my new posts. SO time consuming! Then I downloaded the Blogger app.With the Blogger app on my phone and iPad, I can create a new post and put the pictures from my camera roll right into the new post and save it as a draft. I usually don't create the whole post from my phone or iPad. Then when I'm ready to do the actual writing of the post, I can go to my computer and ta-da, the pictures are already there in my draft. It has saved me SO much time! The Blogger app doesn't have the greatest reviews, but I've used it a bunch and have never had a problem with it...knock on wood.
Sure felt good to make a mark in cyber-space once again. Visit Farley and check out the long list of Currently posts...beware: you might get sucked into your computer and not be found for hours!
During my one month hiatus from the blogging world, I went for the last two days of my Thinking Maps Training of Trainers course. So excited to say I'm officially "certified" to train teachers at my school in the use of Thinking Maps. We just need to purchase our teacher binders and schedule a training date. Yay! 
