STUFF!

We are teachers. We like STUFF. I’m going to take the opportunity to present some items that can help you with your Common Core integration and some that are just plain old fun.

When you are looking for items for teaching, a great place to start, of course, is Teachers Pay Teachers. Besides my store, there are other great teacher stores with items that can make your teaching to the Core a breeze. Case in point:

• Aileen Miracle is a popular TpT seller with a great product for kindergarten:
  Teaching Common Core through Music-Kindergarten. The kit can be used by both music teachers and classroom teachers and includes language arts and math integration with singing and movement. 

                                   

• Cori Bloom’s listening activity, Love Songs Music Listening Activity provides great writing opportunities for grades 2-3. Students have the opportunity to write and journal about the songs they hear.
  

                                   

• I Am Bully-Proof Music provides many songs on character education, which are great segues writing 

   and critical thinking on facing life’s challenges as a kid, such as Einstein.    

     

• Tracy King is no longer known just for her great bulletin boards. She now has a wonderful exit ticket packet, which is an easy way to complete formative assessment.The packet includes tickets on assorted music objectives. Makes assessment more simple.

  

• Highlighting one of mine:
  The Subject/Predicate Activity Game is a fun way to reinforce the LA objectives of sentence forms, while incorporating creative, higher order music/movement thinking. Students group together to form whacky sentences that can be creatively performed through vocalizing, movement…..for the rest of the class to guess!
  

                                            

Throwing in one more fun activity: my blogger friend Lindsay Jervis at The Pursuit of Joyfulness invited us to post about our favorite manipulatives. Well, I can get a little weird about that. When I want my kids to use something in a tactile manner, I often connect it with movement or games. One of my favorite activities is a note identification game popping balloons in Smartnotebook with a Koosh ball:

Good thing Smartboards are tough! (Games will be coming up in the store in the future.)

I also learned a great ball bouncing activity from my Level III Orff training at VanderCook University from Jean Hersey. The activity involves handballs, kids in a group, and numbering. 

The kids in each group are numbered, but they cannot be numbered in order. For instance, Kid 1 should NOT be next to Kid 2. Playing a work with a strong downbeat (I used “Thriller” by Michael Jackson), each student bounces the ball to the student with the next consecutive number. Sounds easy, right? Not when you start adding balls to the groups. <insert evil laugh here>. I took my fifth graders outside last year with my trusty sound cart and let them go. I think I got all my handballs back…………

Thanks to all of you who participated in the comments about your requirement documentations and activities on Common Core. The insight is wonderful. I love hearing from you! I feel it is important that we understand what is going on from state to state so we can help each other out.