Eric Jensen

I will be attending "Teaching with the brain in mind"  with Eric Jensen all week long.  Today was Day 1 and it was amazing.  Last year I attended "Teaching with Poverty in Mind" and I used a lot of the strategies that were given to me and I had such a successful year with all the brain breaks, changing mind sets, calling attention to students, rewards, etc.  I can honestly say that this has changed my whole way of teaching and I am excited to see what this week holds for me.   Today was pretty much all about the brain and how it works.  We were able to "magically" learn/memorize all 14 of the key principles for learning just by having some simple triggers.  The 14 principles are uniqueness, labels & properties, emotions, attentional & input limitations, adaptive & flexible, rough drafts, prediction, environments, body-mind integration, malleable memories, perception/not reality, social conditions, developmental stages and meaning making.  It is so interesting to see how the brain functions and I can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store for us.  Here are a few of the posters that were posted.

 This is so true!  Repetition is important and students should be the ones being active in their learning.

Great Posters for the classroom and especially to put up while doing staff development.

Emotional States can change and I will post more about that later.

I'm making one of these for the classroom!

I'm putting this up as well

Currently

Here is my first Currently item which I got from Farley who has an awesome blog!  Go to the following link to get yours!

http://ohboy3rdgrade.blogspot.com/

More tidbits of me

This is my wonderful most awesome Co-Teacher Mr. David Nungaray and myself.  It was such an amazing experience working with him in the 2011-2012 school year.  It was a year to remember and our kids were absolutely the best!  David is a Teach for America Alumni now that he was with us for two years.  David will now be working and mentoring more new Teach for America Corps members this upcoming school year.  We are going to miss him a lot but I know we will keep in touch and I wish him the best.

Towards the end of the year my class and I had the privilege of working with Doc Edwards and The Edwards Aquifer Authority on a video about the Edwards Aquifer titled "History of a Rock Star".  My kids had a blast filming the video, they told me they felt like real "Rock Stars", especially the last day of filming when they brought in a live rock band and the kids got a chance to be groupies and Bum Rush the stage (Bum Rush?  I think that's what you call it).  I can't wait for August when the video is released.  I will try to figure out how to post it here.

My first blog attempt

I opened this account in January but was never too sure if I should do this until now.  I'm a rookie at blogging, but I thought I would give it a try.  Now that I have been off for 4 weeks, my days are starting to blend together and believe it or not I am so ready to start school.  There is only so much of daytime television that I can handle.  I'm reading three books at a time and can't commit to just one right now. So this is what my crazy yet boring summer is like.  Don't get me wrong I'm enjoying it, we need this break so that we can be ready to run full speed ahead when school starts.

I've been going crazy on Pinterest just pinning away all the great ideas that I can find for my classroom.  So far I have way too many pins so now I need to slow it down some more and actually put those into action. After this 4th of July week I'll be putting my plans into action and also posting lots of pics.  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY EVERYONE!!