I'm Back!

Oh boy, thanks for hanging in there with me - a family emergency has kept me at sick kids for the past few weeks so I've been away from blogging.  I'm happy to say that everything is good and hopefully returning back to normal! Including my teaching posts!  So are you a super teacher?  If so, I have a tool for you!

Have you heard of Super Teacher Tools?  If not, it is a website that allows you to make your own games like classroom jeopardy and millionaire, but that's not the reason that I have posted about it today.  I love the classroom management tools.  Specifically, the random group generator and the random name generator.  If you have access to a whiteboard in your room, the kids go INSANE when you bring this tool up on the board!  The only time consuming part of this is that you need to spend a few minutes typing in your class list.  Once you have done that you can save your list and when you return to the website, you enter in the number that they give you when you saved your list.  In an instant, it will bring up the random generator and if you need to put kids into groups you just select how many kids you want in a group and it does it all for you.  Of course, it doesn't factor in who is absent, BUT, you can make up for this yourself.  Anyways, the kids loved when I would bring this up and they were more apt to accept their groups because there was no conversations about why did I have to put so and so in so and so's group!  The random name generator was great when I needed a volunteer.  Same thing, the kids didn't feel like they were being "picked on" as so often is the case in the middle school grades!  I saved my number on a post it and taped it to my laptop for easy reference.  Sometimes I would even have the kids set up the group generator for me.  Here is a look at these wonderful resources below.

                        If the student is away, you just click the next arrow and someone else comes up!!

So what else is awesome in my teaching life right now?  Well...my best friend at school was declared surplus, so I was afraid she was leaving our school, but she just found out that she is returning as the grade 8 teacher! Awesome!  I now have a co-planner :)

Hope you are enjoying the sunshine wherever you are!