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Showing posts with the label YouTube

12 Days Before Christmas Break (BONUS ACTIVITY) - Best Christmas Pageant Ever

I use to love reading The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson to my students.I forgot about it until a Media Specialist friend told me she is teaching students to sketchnote using the novel and sent me her notes for the first chapter (see below). It is a timeless classic and one that has a lot of online resources for teachers. There is free 24 page novel guide on TpT ( http://bit.ly/34HPMuf ) with discussion questions for every chapter (TIP: Download and save it while it is free. I have found that often TpT free items get moved to paid ones). YouTube has the full length 1983 movie based on the book that students would enjoy as well ( http://bit.ly/2LafyQf ). If you have never read the book give it a try this holiday season!

Test Prep - TDA Writing and YouTube

It is that time of year where classroom teachers are in full test prep mode. We are about six weeks out here in South Carolina and a big concern in a lot of our schools is the TDA part of the test (Text Dependent Analysis). The TDA part of the test requires students to analyze a piece of text and respond to a prompt that where they have to pull evidence from the text to support their writing. Great idea, and certainly brings in those higher order thinking skills, but it is also a lot for students to process particularly if this is the first time taking the test or they are struggling readers and writers. I definitely feel their pain but sadly that doesn't make the test go away. This leaves me trying to think of ways to get these struggling students writing and reading as often as possible. Luckily the test uses shorter reading passages so I try to pull high interest articles off the internet, ReadWorks, Newela, Writable, Teachers Pay Teachers, etc - pretty much any place I c...

Favorite YouTube Channel (K-2 Teachers)

One of my favorite YouTube channels is Kidtastic TV . The channel has a ton of Disney (and other) storybooks read out loud with the words highlighted on the screen as it is being read. If you have a "Listen to Reading" center this would be a great resource for you. You should pay attention to the length of each video when considering using them. Our district does not block YouTube videos for students (they are filtered through a clean video search filter) so they can be easily incorporated into a listening center with a QR code (we use this extension in Chrome to generate quick QR Codes). If students don't have access to YouTube you can use a YouTube Downloader ( click here for instructions on a quick and easy way to download videos from YouTube). Downloaded videos can then be uploaded to a Google Drive account where you can create a QR code or get a link for students. This is definitely more time consuming, downloading and uploading speeds c...

YouTube - Downloading

In a previous post I talked about how I download videos from YouTube using a YouTube downloader (I followed that up with another post on how to download videos another way). Someone at the FETC conference in Orlando, FL taught me that I can download videos from YouTube yet ANOTHER way by simply typing an ss before the y in YouTube. This has been much easier for me! (step-by-step directions are in the pictures above)  I use downloaded videos as part of my lessons. Having them downloaded allows me to upload to our Promethean flipcharts or PowerPoint presentations (it also takes out the annoying ads before the clip). I can also upload a video I want students to view into Edmodo or Google Classroom.