As I begin the process of setting up my room (our custodians completely empty our rooms every summer, so we have to spend a large portion of time rearranging furniture, but it's TOTALLY worth it because our rooms are SUPER clean!), organizing my materials, and my favorite part - decorating for all the new smiling faces that will enter my room this year, I am getting more and MORE excited about all the WBT aspects of my classroom! One of my favorite areas this year is the Genius Ladder I've positioned at the front of my room. I perused some of my favorite blogs and combined ideas from two of my favorite WBT teachers in the blogosphere:
Pinetreelia and
Deanna Schuler. I used Deanna's whiteboard idea, with Pinetreelia's printable Genius Ladder Kit (which you can snag for yourself for FREE on TPT!) to create an AMAZING display in my room! This completely grabs your attention and focuses the kids on the task at hand.
From Pinetreelia:
From Deanna:
How it looks in my room:
Because I am very techno-oriented in my room, I knew I needed a way to incorporate this display with all of my electronic teaching gadgets. So, I have made for you several PowerPoint slides, also available in jpeg format, which you can insert into your own PowerPoint, Mimio, Promethean, or Smart presentations. You can grab your Freebies in
my TPT store!
I also included a "graphic organizer" for students to record their genius paragraphs a little later in the year. We will start out doing the Genius ladder completely orally, then they will have the worksheet printed out on cardstock and housed in a page protector so they can record their ideas with a partner in a wipe-off format, and finally the will be used for formal and informal assessments periodically throughout the year.
Enjoy!
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