Sharing a video with your kiddos can be a fun and engaging part of any lesson. We do want to be safe when we share though! First, PREVIEW, PREVIEW, PREVIEW. We always want to watch the video before we ever show it in a classroom. Unfortunately, there are videos that look "child friendly" but they are not! Also sometimes when a video ends there are ads or suggested videos that come up at the end. These ads and videos may not be appropriate. You can use Safe Share TV to safely watch You Tube videos. It's easy peasy to use... just input the You Tube video link and Safe Share generates a safe link to the video. When you use the link the ads and suggested videos will not appear at the end. Love it!
So this year my district has started standards based assessment/report cards for grades K-5. I'm no longer in the classroom so I have watched from afar. I've seen tears...I've listened...and I've coached as well as I can with little experience in this endeavor. However, with a semester under our belt and some time to reflect I really see the benefits of standards based teaching. No longer are we bound by a curriculum. We pick the best from the curriculum we have and use our professional judgement to add,add, and then add more to our lessons. We have freedom now which opens up so much for our students!!! It also allows our teachers to be creative and engages our students. It's exciting to watch! We by no means are experts but we are so much better at it now then we were on August 5. Can't wait to see how good we are at it by May 23! Recently, we did some planning with each grade level and mapped out the 3rd nine weeks. When planning we found several gaps between the curriculum and what was expected in the standards. So...being the instructional partner that I am...I began searching for additional items to help teach these standards. Because first grade is my comfort zone I started there. I really couldn't find what I was looking for so I created something for them and wanted to share with you guys too. :0)