I was going to post this last night but could not pass up the opportunity to join in Farley's linky...so it got bumped to tonight.
I want to share with you these waaaayyy cool teacher "toys" I got in the mail this week. These talking points are so much fun
Basically you have a 10 second message you can record on them, then when you press them they playback the message. I could see mountains of ideas using these and of course I could not wait to use them, so our first activity had to be a whole class activity so that we could ALL use them. So I recorded a question about bullying on each recorder then each group of 5-6 children had to discuss the question and record their ideas or experiences on a piece of paper. Each group was given a coloured Sharpie so we could see what ideas belonged to which group, the only "rule" was that they were not allowed to write something that had already been written. Here are some pics of them hard at work.
You can see the talking point in the middle of each table
Here is some of their ideas of "Can you think of a time you or someone else was bullied, what happened." They only had 5 minutes at each station so their responses were quite short, however the discussion preceeding was amazing!
This little boy is writing down what you could do if you saw someone being bullied. As you can see each group had a different coloured Sharpie so it was easy to see what each group had contributed.
I was so impressed with the amount of discussion these talking points created and it meant that those kiddos who usually get left behind with having to read were able to make a meaningful contribution without worrying about their ability. I plan on using them in Daily 5 next, oh my goodness the possibilities are endless!
The other really fun teacher "toy" I got in the mail a couple of days later were these babies
It is a homophone game called Double Duel, but I really just wanted it for the buzzers, hehe. Each buzzer makes a different noise and the "caller" read the clues to what the word is eg a fathers male child and a bright object in the sky, the student has to answer and then spell the hompohones. We had a blast with these but be warned...they are loud! We also had a group quiz in the afternoon about their knowledge of our Austalian unit we have been studying this term. I also put it into my Working on Words Daily 5 box.....any guesses if it was popular!
Well that is it! I have to say they were not all that expensive and I got them from Amazon.
I have had to have some stern words with a frown about making sure that we treat them gently if we want them to last for more than one game and only one student had to leave the game out of 25, not bad odds really.