Creating a Listening Center with an iPad

If you have an iPad in the classroom, you can create a listening center for your students to listen to read along books.    The trick is to buy a headphone splitter, which will allow up to five students to plug their headphones into one iPad.  You can even plug a second headphone splitter into one of the headphone jacks of the first, adding another four headphone jacks to your initial five.  I ordered mine on Amazon for about ten dollars - highly worth it, considering it just multiplied my iPad usability by five.  

Where before only one student was using an iPad to listen to a book on CD, now I have five students utilizing a single iPad. Even if you have a set of multiple iPads for your classroom, this still frees up iPads for other students to use at a different center. 

I've found a bunch of books with read along CD at the Dollar Tree last year, and all I did was put the CD in my computer to download it onto iTunes (I created a Read Along playlist just for books on CD), and then transferred my iTunes playlist onto my iPad the next time I synced up.  The kids know to go to Music on the iPad, and then look for the book title they're reading.  

Another fantastic feature of using the iPad as a Listening Center, is that you only need ONE copy of the read along CD.  Once you've put the music file on your computer, you can put it on all of your class iPads. 

Since there's five kids on one iPad, I did have to coach the kids on waiting until everyone had their headphones on, and their books open and ready before the group leader pressed Play on the iPad.   (I learned this lesson very quickly, after several students started crying that the rest of the group had started the book before they were ready.)

There are a few books with CD at Scholastic Book Clubs this month that I'm thinking about ordering... Now that I've nailed down my system for Listening Centers, I'm eager to start building my Read Along library!

What about you, readers?  How do you work listening to reading into your day?

Favorite Things ~ Erin Condren Planners

I want to start sharing all of my favorite finds with you, readers, and here is a biggie: Erin Condren Life Planners and Notebooks.  And because I just got an email from her about a big sale, I decided this was perfect to start with! 

       

I love everything Erin Condren!  I have the Life Planner (which I use for my personal life schedule), as well as the notebook with calendar insert, which I use to keep track of school events and deadlines, along with blogging ideas, lesson plan units I want to write, and miscellaneous teacher ideas I want to keep track of. True, they're a little pricey, but if you join her email-mailing list, you can just wait for one if her awesome promos (like right now!). I just got the above email this afternoon.  If I didn't already have the one (okay, two!) I'd be taking advantage of this new promo tonight!  Full disclosure: if you like to write a lot for each day, (like a lot), you might find this format a little limiting. (That's why I have a whole other notebook for my teaching schedule and notes, separate from my personal Life Planner.)  But the covers are soooo beautiful, it's easy to get past. I mean, it even looks pretty sitting on my night table next to my Sprite Zero!

Okay, I can't wait to share more of my favorite things!  Until next time!

I love the Phonto iPad app!

One of my new favorite iPad apps is a (free!) photo-editing app called Phonto.  It lets you write text over photos, in a bunch of different colors and fonts.  This app will also let you put a background color behind the words (like I did in white), and rotate the words (like I did on the second photo, along the left-hand side).  I had some fun practicing Phonto's options by writing labels all over some pictures of my classroom.  

I'm still looking for a good photo collage app though... I've tried a few but haven't liked any of them that much so far.  I just downloaded Pic Collage, but I'm not in love with it.  It's difficult to zoom/resize the images once you put them in the squares.  But don't worry, followers!  You'll be the first to hear when I find the one that works for me!

Bribing my kids with Netflix

When I was earning my teaching credential, I would have told you that my classroom management was based on positive reinforcement and intrinsic rewards.  It was an idealistic, politically-correct point of view that I still believe, but sometimes you need more than praise to keep a class in check - because there will always be those students for whom misbehavior is its own reward!  So what do you do when you have students who would rather follow their own directions instead of yours?  You bribe them with a reward that's more appealing than crawling on the floor and untying classmates' shoes during your math lesson. And that reward's name is Netflix.

I initially signed up for Netflix so I could binge watch TV during my Christmas break.  But I happily discovered that there are some really great educational cartoons under the "Kids" section.  My students' favorite is "Word Girl," a PBS Kids cartoon.  Each episode features at least two great vocabulary words that are used over and over in a context that makes them easy to understand and remember. 

So now, instead of giving the kids table points like I was doing previously, the entire class works to earn points as a whole.  Each tally mark on the white board stands for one minute of a Word Girl video.  Anytime the kids start getting too rambunctious, I tell them that I'd reeeeallly like to give them more Word Girl minutes, but I can't until everyone starts listening and doing a better job of following directions. They snap right to attention!  At the end of the day (or the beginning of the following day), I set a timer on my phone for however many minutes the kids have earned, and play an episode until the timer goes off. The best is when the kids are left hanging, and can't finish the episode, because then they're that much more eager to earn more minutes so they can finish watching!

But how do I justify showing videos in class? you may ask, even if only for ten-fifteen minutes a day?  My next post will be on how I structure my vocabulary lessons around the Word Girl videos, so that even my kids' reward time is instructional.