Our Indiana Buddies!

Friend~Not only has the blog world been amazing for me but my students are so benefiting from all it has to offer:)  One of their very favorite things is their new online Buddies in Indiana.  We have paired up with Mrs. Lewis from Rocking Teacher Materials and her class of 2nd graders.  We are just getting started but we have tons planned from virtual buddy reading to writing snail mail to each other 

We are just getting started and it took us 2 sessions for everyone to meet.  (We only meet for about 20 minutes.)  We have a standing date at 9:30 a.m. every Friday morning.  You should see the excitement on my student's faces where they hear the Skype ring tone on the computer going off:)  Here are a few pics of our first meeting and introductions.  We called the students up one by one and they met their Indian Buddy!  We also shared songs and our classroom favorites.  The cool thing is we are both using The Daily Five and also Spelling City!  So we had lots of favorites in common.   If you do not use Spelling City with your class be sure to check out the video below.

Here are some shots of our first meeting!  All I needed was Skype, a webcam, and a mic.  We use our smartboard but Mrs. Lewis doesn't have one:(  So she uses her computer.  Either way it works great!

I also have been working like crazy to bring more activities into my Writing Center for my kiddos.  They are loving all of the different options and I adore all that they are doing.  This week I introduced my Roll a Story.   I have a fantastic parent volunteer that comes every Thursday and she works to put together lots of my newly made centers.  This week she got our Roll a Story going.  Look how cute it turned out.  

My students visit this center and grab the basket of story dice and a folder.  I added the directions to the front and the sheets inside.  They simple pick 6 story starter dice.  They can choose from story starters, characters, settings, and actions.  There are even editing dice for them to use at the end to check over their story.  They record their dice with words and pictures in the order they will appear in their story and the next sheet is a basic writing sheet with a place for a picture and words.
You can download a free sample of the sheets by clicking the image below!

Happy Friday!