Mas Rusli

As you may have heard I'm moving up from first grade to SIXTH grade. I'll be teaching Media Literacy and Video Production. Yup. No more primary for me :( I'm a little sad, but also a little excited! I'm sure as the school year moves closer I'll be MORE excited! Stay tuned for the middle of July! For the time being, I'm going to share with you an activity I've been working on. I LOVE interactive notebooks. However, they take up a lot of time and a lot of paper and a lot of glue. I've got to spend lots of days training my firsties on how to properly cut and paste the activities in their notebooks. This activity is one that I've had in my paper interactive notebooks for awhile, but I've moved it to a digital platform! Check it out:  There are letter tiles off to the side that the students click and drag to build short a words. After building a word, they type the word in the table, drag the letters back, and do it again. When they are finished, I...

I have one more day left with my kiddos this school year! Man, it has been a fantastic year. Full of lots of energy, growth, firsts, and amazing activities! I wanted to finish up my School's Out series with ways that we celebrate and remember our learning form the year! Does your school do Awards Programs? We do! Each grade level invites parents and we present awards such as A Honor Roll, A/B Honor Roll, Perfect Attendance, Most Courteous Boy/Girl, Writing Award, Reading Award, and so on. It's a really nice program, every student gets recognized, and the parents get to see the kiddos walk across that stage proudly! Back in the classroom, we do our own little awards ceremony for Accelerated Reader and brag tags. I look at alllllllllllllllllll the data that AR has compiled throughout the year and assign kids awards such as Most Quizzes Passed, Highest Passing Rate, Most Certifications Achieved, and things like that.  I also make certificates for the most brag tags or the most boo...

Welcome to part 2 of my School's Out for Summer series, It All Must Go? Do you have to pack up everything and take down everything just to unpack and rehang everything come August? Yeah, me too. (If not then I applaud you and I'm jealous of you!) So after ten years of doing this year after year, I have developed some fast tips for myself that I would love to share with you! First, packing up the kiddos. You've shared your classroom and your supplies and your ideas with your students for 10 months. This has resulted in a lot of stuff. There's writing portfolios and projects, craftivities, drawings, other artwork, etc. They've also collected things in their little desks or seat sacks or book boxes. Not everything will fit in their book sacks nor should it because they're 6 and they only have 6 year old backs and muscles. So we start to gather their things together in one spot. I went to our local Trader Joe's and asked ever so nicely if they would consider don...

  Hi guys! This series has been a long time coming! I am so excited to finally begin! I don't know about you, but my school year is rapidly winding down. It is coming quickly to a close and there is still so much to do. I wanted to share my process for closing out the year with you as well as some ideas for the last day! First up, It's May/June. The kids are done. You're done. The school year is almost done. You are just trying to get everybody to dismissal and stay sane! Not to mention all the other stuff you have to do that comes from admin like data. So what do you do to maintain control while you finish up the paperwork? I have spent oodles of time throughout the beginning of the year to get the kiddos trained in navigating the classroom centers independently. So by now they have it down pat and could probably do it in their sleep. So I put out reading and math centers from all year that the students can choose to do. Some of their favorites have been time and money cen...