What I learned at school today

Tagxedo does everything that Wordle does... and  a little more. It allows you to  use shapes and words to create word clouds with a little extra style. There are many preset options for quick creation but everything is editable and customizable too. You can save your work in a variety of formats or share online. My favorite Tagxedo feature allows you to upload your own images and lets you create word clouds using them.  Here is my Twitter profile picture that I made using Tagxedo. Aren't I lovely? Kids could us this feature to make an "All about me" style poster using key words. Or they could use a picture of a famous person or animal and use words to describe them. Looking for an idea for a great mother's day or father's day card? You can use one of the many built in shape templates to make a word cloud full of compliments. With my grade 1 students we have done this as a group activity. We have brainstormed words for our fathers and picked a few shapes a

Don't get me wrong. I think what those young boys did in Nova Scotia was amazing. Standing up against bullying takes guts and they did make a difference that day. If you don't know the story you can read about it here :  Inspite of this I have a real problem with the what Pink Shirt day has become. I want to tell you a story about what I saw last year in my school.  It was Pink Shirt day. Students were all decked out in there pink gear (many shirts had been bought specially for the occasion) one of my little guys came in to my class a little late, looked around and looked down at his shoes. I watched as everyone turned and waited for him to take off his jacket so they could see his pink shirt. He wasn't wearing a pink shirt. Suddenly he was surrounded by 4 or 5 students. "Why aren't you wearing pink?"  "You have to wear pink today!"  "Don't you care about bullies?" The Pink shirt message had not gotten through with those kids.  

I'm a big believer in partner talk time. My students get a chance to discuss new ideas, teach each other new vocabulary, read with a partner and work together often during the day.  With little ones making partner groups can be tricky. Ask 6 year olds to find a partner and you will quickly see who is friends with who, who no one wants to work with and who really really wanted to work with someone who doesn't want to work with them. I tried pair generators on sites like the one on Superteachertools   and they can be great at times but give you very little control of your pairs and also are a little boring for the kiddos at times. One of the best ways I found to create truly random pairs (that I can still control a little) is match-up cards. Match-up cards are sets of things that come in twos. Students have to find the person who has their match-up card pair. That person becomes their partner. Examples of match-up cards: Uppercase and lowercase letters  (I have A