No Shhing Here

It's been ages since I've blogged (the whole having babies thing), but now that the oldest is off to kindergarten, I'm finally finding a little wiggle room in my daily schedule to do stuff I love. Like blogging. My new adventure for this fall is trying the Breakout trend. Educational Breakouts have been popular for a few years, so I'm a little late to the game. Over the summer one of my very favorite English teachers decided they wanted to try something new to change up their teaching routine, and since Breakouts were filling my Pinterest feed, we collaborated on designing a Breakout for her classroom. After digging into the whole process with her, I decided I was grooving on the concept, and planned my own Breakout for my library orientation activity. The results? Breakouts are awesome. This is the MOST engaged I've ever seen my students. I've had MANY of them tell me how much fun they had and ask if we could do it in other classes. Above: I LOVE watchi...

I don't know about you guys, but orientation is one my least favorite times of the year. I love meeting all the new kids, but I hate repeating the same thing over and over and over. With 5 eighth grade teachers, I do the same exact presentation almost 30 times each fall. Orientation requires a lot of talking - I have to convey loads of information, so even though I try to mix in other activities to keep everyone interested and intersperse some hands-on learning, I'm still exhausted by the end of the day. So, two years ago, I smartened up. My goal was to create a library orientation activity that didn't result in permanent laryngitis. I had a class set of iPods at my disposal, so I developed a library iPod tour. Using my iPhone and iMovie, I recorded 1-2 minute clips about each section of the library. Students move from station to station around the library. At each station, they watch the corresponding video on the iPod about that zone. After viewing the iPod video...