Hi Everyone,
It has been a long school year.  I tried to post, never happened; I tried to get more of my TPT creations in my store, never happened.  So, what happened?  Common Core and a new grade level.  Don't get me wrong.....I loved teaching 2nd grade.  I learned so much.  I took careful notes, made products for my classroom (that I hope you will find useful or inspire you to create your own), identified areas that I could improve like data collection (what do you do with the all the data you've collected, what's useful), worked and re-worked center rotations, created task centers, learned how to use the Promethean Board for more than just an anchor chart, got parents really involved, tweaked my behavior chart, and got my students involved in their learning using interactive notebooks.

After taking a much needed break when school was over, I took part of my vacation to reflect on my year and start to make some decisions about what I want my next year to look like.  I am in the process of creating my 3rd grade map.  Wait!  Did I mention that I'm LOOPING with my students to 3rd grade?  Well, I am!  And, I can't wait!

For those of you who have looped, will loop, or want to know more about looping.....I'll be dedicating most of my future blogs to this subject.  What have I done so far this summer?

I have my kids on kidblog (http://kidblog.org).  We started using kidblog, as a center, in our classroom.  Students learned to create new posts, answer their classmates' and my posts, respond to book club questions, work in different author groups and discuss topics (I provided).  Now, we are using it over the summer to keep up with each other.  I'm also posting challenges and encouraging them to respond to each other.

I also created student accounts on http://www.reading-rewards.com.  This is a great site that allows students to track their reading, online, total individual reading goal minutes, as well as, classroom goal reading minutes.   There is even a place for parent notification so that they can validate student reading.

In our classroom, we used Scootpad (http://www.scootpad.com/) in a center and I piloted it to try homework assignments.  We'll be using this feature more :-)  .  Because this site is so user friendly, I set up two accounts. One for the classroom work, and one for the summer work that I wanted students to work on. It gives WONDERFUL data!  The data is common core aligned, you can view it by student, concept, standard, classroom.....you can print graphs, differentiate by grade levels (concepts or standards), and print individual student information for conferences and as a back up for data notebooks!  It is a HUGE help and I love it!

Well, that's enough for my newest post.  I would love to hear from you.  If you have looped in the past or will loop, please let me know what you love about the process.  If you use the above sites, I would love to hear how you use them in your classroom, if not, check them out!  You'll love them.

Happy Teaching Everyone,

Kimberly
www.theteachersworkspace.blogspot.com
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/The-Teachers-Workspace

P.S.  I haven't added my new items yet, but check back soon for my beginning of the year packet, some freebies, and center ideas/products.