It's not secret that I love Capstone Interactive eBooks... if you've been in my library for more than a few minutes, you have probably heard me talk to a student or staff member about them! How can you not love professionally narrated eBooks that have an unlimited number of simultaneous users? Note: I am not compensated by Capstone in any way - I just love them THAT MUCH!!! My amazing school has a substantial EL population. How lucky that Capstone has a whole section of books called "Hello/Hola!" These books include books written in Spanish, and even some dual language books! Here' s a quick video I made on how to use the Capstone Library: I knew after reviewing the phenomenal titles that we had available through WCPS that I had to test them out with my EL students... I set up class time with our awesome EL teacher, Mrs. Phillipson, and her students. The books were a hit! The students were able to listen to professionally narrated books read by native speakers in their home languages. They felt "seen"... a critical step in their development as learners and English speakers. Every single student was able to find multiple books that they wanted to read. When it was time to close up for the day, the students groaned and didn't want to leave. THAT is the hallmark of a successful lesson! If you have Capstone Interactive eBooks in your library, what are your students' favorite titles? Drop a comment below and let me know - I'll get it for my kids, too!
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BreakoutEDU is a super fun, engaging way to teach or review content with your students. If you've never heard of it, let me explain... I'm sure you know what an escape room is, right? Someone locks you in a room for an hour and you solve a series of puzzles to get out of the room. Well, a BreakoutEDU box is exactly the same idea, except instead of breaking out of a room, you have to break INTO a box!
The company BreakoutEDU sells official boxes. It's $150 for one box and a one year subscription to the site. The Breakout site includes over 800 premade lessons and activites that you can use with your students. I love the idea behind BreakoutEDU, but unfortunately I cannot afford to buy 4-6 boxes that I would need per class, nor the $50 a year renewal fees to maintain access to the site. Teachers are poor! So what to do, what to do? Make my own, of course!
Making my own boxes was pretty simple (and WAY more cost effective!). Off to Amazon I went, searching for the following items:
I also found gold locks with keys and combo locks at the Dollar Tree... you can find quite a variety of different types of locks with a little searching! I was able to make 4 boxes for about $100, which is pretty great. I'd recommend that you have a max of 6-8 kids per box, so depending on the size of your classes and how you integrate them (as a center or as whole group), you'll need to figure out how many boxes you'll need to work for yourself. Lock Tips
I made some mistakes that ended in locks being cut off with bolt cutters... don't make the same dumb mistakes I did!
BreakoutEDU Lessons
Now, where to find the lessons? I highly recommend that you start by using a pre-made box/lesson. To build your own lesson takes a lot of time and planning. Using a pre-made box will also help you understand the mechanics of how the boxes work before you attempt to build your own!
There are numerous Facebook groups for Breakout Boxes by searching. There are ones for Librarians, English Teachers, Elementary teachers, even Breakout Espanol! Here's a sample of a FEW of the groups that are available... there are many more than what you see here!
If you would decide you want to plan your own, I recommend using this planning guide to help you backwards map your locks and clues... download it here:
Other Resources
There are lots of fun resources out there for BreakoutEDU Clues... check out this list from BreakoutEDU. Don't forget to verify that all the links are unblocked for students on your network... student devices may be filtered and block the content.
SO - what BreakoutEDU boxes will you do with YOUR students? What successes (and failures!) have you had? Drop a comment below and let me know! I'll update this blog soon with pictures from a BreakoutEDU Box I did earlier this year with my 8th grade students in February. It was an amazing success! April was National Poetry month, and this year the library hosted our first-ever "Blackout Poetry" contest! Blackout poems are created by taking a piece of text and blacking-out words so the poems are left. Here's one I did as an example: The page is from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I had a copy come in that all the pages were falling out... so I sacrificed it for this project. I sent the directions out to our ELA department, including this awesome resource from Scholastic. The student submissions were amazing! The winner was Brianna N., for her poem below, entitled The Mirror. Here are some of the other student submissions! I am so proud of my students and their creativity. Do you want to take your class on a field trip but don't have the funds? There is a solution - Google Expeditions! Our friends at Google have developed a wonderful tool for education that allows you to travel anywhere in the world via virtual reality. Are you ready to travel?? What You'll Need:
Let's begin! First, you'll need to sign into the app with your Google credentials. Then you'll be asked to select "Be a Guide" or "Be an Explorer". Teachers should be guides, students should be explorers. NOTE: Students can "be a guide" on their own time and explore all the awesome expeditions that are available! Guides, or teachers, will select which Expedition that they want to lead the Explorers on. For this class, the teacher selected an expedition to Mount Everest. The students had been studying Everest in her 7th grade social studies class. Students can "Join" the expedition from their devices. Once they have joined, the teacher can begin the expedition. Each expedition has a series of scenes to show students. The scenes are 360 degree photographs. Students can swipe the screen or physically turn themselves and their devices to view it. Below is the teacher screen. In this image, the teacher is showing and discussing with students the circled image. She can see that the students are looking - each smiley face represents one explorer! The teacher can even circle, highlight, and draw on the pictures to capture students' attention and highlight important details that they may miss. Each scene includes background information, several objects to point out, and even differentiated questions to prompt discussion among students! It's amazing! Check out this video that I took while the teacher was leading the lesson. It shows you how the iPad moves and what the students saw during the lesson on Everest. Google expeditions gave our students a whole new viewpoint on Everest. We frequently overheard "WOW!" and "This is so cool!" while the students were exploring Mount Everest. Here are a few photos of our students enjoying Google Expeditions! Expeditions isn't just for social studies... there are expeditions for almost any subject! Science, the arts, famous people... just search within the app and see what you find! Tour the International Space Station, check out a coral reef... examine a human body, view Mount Rushmore, walk among ancient ruins! The possibilities are endless!
How will you use Google Expeditions with your students? Comment below and let me know! I'll do almost anything to "sell" a book to a reader. It doesn't matter if it's a student or adult, old friend or stranger in the grocery store - I'll try my best to be a #bookdealer and find that one perfect book for a reader. Thanks to Pinterest, I took every student at SPMS on a date with a book - several books - in February! BAHAHA! It was epic and amazing and FUN! I started with an overview of what speed dating was and how it worked... the kids were horrified at the amount of social interaction dating required:
Ahh, youth. Next, I went over the "Mrs. Hurley's 6 Rules for Dating" which (mostly) apply to both humans and books!
Then we moved into the speed dating area: Complete with red tableclothes, LED candles, heart decorations on the tables, vases with fake roses (shout out to the Dollar Tree for all the decorations!)... I even turned down the lights to "set the mood"! But by far the worst was the music. I streamed some of the worst covers of the world's cheesiest love songs. Some of my favorites were:
To be clear, I enjoy some of these songs... but the covers were AWFUL. And I blasted them as loud as my speakers would go! The students had 3 minutes with each "date". At the end, they had to rate their dates and write some notes about the date and why they gave it the rating that they assigned it. Click HERE for my rating sheet sample - this one was for 8th grade. Feel free to copy and remake as needed. Below are pictures of some of my kids mid-date. It was SO MUCH FUN! Hands down probably one of the most loved activities I've put together for my students! The best part was setting up those "second dates"... here is just one sample email I had from students immediately after classes. I received over 100 hold requests for books that were "dated" during this activity! One book had so many holds that I ordered 3 "emergency" copies (in addition to the two I already had) sent from Amazon and processed them the next day to put them in the collection... there were more than 15 requests just for that book!
It's important to note that not all of the books I put out were brand new. Many of these were great titles that I noticed weren't circulating. I am happy to say that all of those books are really feeling the love now! I even "sold" some of these books to staff members - some of whom weren't ELA teachers! They fell in love just by walking through and wondering what in the world was happening in the library... and they left with a hold on a book they couldn't imagine life without. YES. What books would you put out for your students? Comment below and let me know!! If you haven't seen Google Cardboard, you absolutely HAVE to check it out! Virtual Reality is still relatively new in education; however, the implications for its use are staggering. Imagine being able to take a class of students to the top of Mount Everest, to the Parthenon, to the nesting grounds of emperor penguins... it's incredible! With a pair of VR Googles, students can use a phone to visit these locations and thousands more. Not a social studies teacher? Neither was the MATH teacher who told me about this cool activity she had in mind for her students... she was teaching the Pythagorean Theorem. Here's a refresher in case you haven't had middle school math for a while: The activity had the kids taking a pretend flight on "Pythag Air" to famous world landmarks and using them to calculate the missing side(s) of the triangles using the Pythagorean Theorem. They had an airline ticket to record their answers: Here are two examples of the activity. You can view the rest of them HERE at the TeachersPayTeachers activity: So creative and fun, RIGHT?? Way better than just solving a bunch of problems on a whiteboard! As the teacher was describing the activity, I saw the perfect opportunity to use our VR headsets... the kids could go on a virtual field trip to the locations that they studied! Needless to say, it was a hit. The kids were floored by how awesome the places looked in the headsets! For this particular group of high-needs learners, any new an exciting way to engage them helps. Kudos to Mrs. Rhodes for her great idea! Are you ready to take your kids on a virtual field trip, too? You'll need:
Where will YOU go with your class? Comment below!
Teaching summer school can be a challenge - many kids are loathe to give up their summer fun to come in to school and work. I knew in order to keep the kids engaged that we were going to have to do some really fun activities... enter Makey Makey! Makey Makey kits are super popular in our Makerspace! If you have never heard of these, check out this video... you'll fall in love, just like we have! PRO TIP: Makey Makey kits are available through the Scholastic Resource catalog if you have book fair money to spend! The students were challenged to design and build a video game controller. We followed the engineering and design process, outlined below: I started by giving them a brief tutorial on how the Makey Makey kits work, and we reviewed the basics of electrical circuits in the process. I supplied them with the kits and other materials to use to make the "buttons" on their controllers: water, playdough, aluminum foil, water (in petri dishes), and of course they had each other to use as well. You can also use fruit - pretty much anything that conducts a mild current! The kids used the Makey Makey App website as well as some flash-based old school video games (Super Mario, Super Mario 3, Tetris, etc.) More advanced coders can use Scratch to create their own games to work with the kits, too! Here are some of their creations... I'm so proud of them! Do you think you could use Makey Makey kits in your classroom? Comment below with how - I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Published in 1993, The Giver is one of the most critically acclaimed dystopian-future literature stories ever written. It is often used by middle school ELA teachers, and it is one of my top ten all time favorite books! Needless to say I was VERY excited when our 8th grade ELA team told me that it is a book they study with their students. Integrating my media curriculum into the ELA teacher's curriculum can be a challenge. I want to support and extend what they are doing in the classroom, but I also have my own curriculum that needs to be taught. For this lesson, I saw the perfect opportunity to teach the students about copyright free image search with Creative Commons. The students were at different places in the book as we began the lesson, but all were able to be successful with the lesson! We began by discussing important events and symbols in the book. Students listed an apple, ribbons, a bike, a sled, pills or medication, a baby, stuffed animals, and more. First, students searched on GoodReads.com for quotes from the book. They selected one that they felt was important. Next, they went to Creative Commons and searched for an image that went along with the quote and that showed the theme of the story. Finally, they used PicMonkey to assemble their picture and text. Some students chose to change the font or bold the words that were critical to their artwork. PicMonkey allows users to edit photos without an account and share without logging in, so it was perfect for the short period of time that we had with each group. Below are some of the results - I was amazed! The students really understood the theme of the story, and they were able find copyright free pictures! Win-Win! Could you do something like this with your students? Share below, I'd love to hear your ideas!!
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About the AuthorHi! Welcome to my blog! My name is Christine Hurley. This is my 17th year of teaching - I've taught Kindergarten, 4th grade, elementary media, and now I am in my 6th year of teaching middle school media! Archives
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