Brenda Mendoza

Technology

Following a Blog

Teaching Addict Blog

When I started this assignment I felt overwhelmed by all the blogs I found. I am a second grade bilingual teacher at Greenman Elementary. I however was really upset when I couldn’t find blogs for bilingual teachers. I mean I found blogs about ELL topics and standards. I however couldn’t find fun blogs that depicted a bilingual classroom with various different activities. I started thinking that I wanted to create a blog dedicated to bilingual teachers. So with all the knowledge that I’ve learned in this course I will be able to begin that journey. I still had to do my assignment so I started looking for blogs on second grade. I found a wonderful blog called Teaching Blog Addict.

                Teaching Blog Addict has various topics for all grade levels. I found it extremely helpful that all these other blogs were directly linked to together. Teaching Blog Addict is a community of teachers, home educators, parents, grandparents, mentors, and tutors. This site provides bloggers and readers direct access to the most incredible teaching blogs. Through this site I found various ideas that I found useful for my classroom.

                One of the ideas I found was a sight word game. I do focus the first part of my ESL block on the 2nd grade dolch sight words. The game includes cards with sight words. The game included cards with bugs and each of the bugs had a sight word. In the cards there were a few words that said, “splat” and that means you’d have to put your cards back into the bag. So it’s a very fun idea for practicing sight words.

                Another idea that I found very effective for classroom management is called Pom Poms. My students love to converse while I’m speaking.  So Teaching Blog Addict had a great idea. I decided to change up how my kids can earn their free choice on Friday.  This is how this works. I have four groups in my classroom the blue, red, yellow and green team. Each group has a bucket and when their caught being good or staying on task they earn a pom pom, but the twist is that if they aren't behaving or talking whatever it is then I get the pom pom.  Basically their goal is to have more than me by Friday and they get their free choice Friday!  So I have yet to fully implement this strategy. The blog explained that having them compete against the teacher seems to make the difference. The students don’t want the teacher to beat them. The students just say, “pom pom,” and they are suppose to get quiet really quick. I hope to have this strategy fully implemented next year.