You Oughta Know About...

It's another "You Oughta Know!"  

I was planning to share with you about something my kiddos and I have been working on lately, but I found something else that I'm sure you've heard a little about.  So this You Oughta Know is a "two-for-one."

So for my original idea was..."You Oughta Know about these great books to use for Writing!"

Click the picture to take you to one of the books pictured

If you're like me, you are constantly searching for some books to use with your lessons.  Of course I have my "go-tos" for certain concepts, but every once in a while I stumble upon some unknown gem of a read aloud.  Our last focus in writing was for our 2nd graders to write short stories that had beginnings, middles, and ends.  One of my colleague (who sometimes says her Adult ADHD is a blessing), was snooping around the library one afternoon and stumbled upon the "Share a Scare" one and it was perfect during the Halloween time.  We used it to write our very own scary stories.  Well then I discovered the many others.  They are from the WRITER'S TOOLBOX series and there's a bunch of them.  Each of these books is two-part.  They tell a story and have a sidebar of "tools" writers should use when writing that sort of text.  The books says to read the story first.  Then go back through and read the story along with the "tools" or ideas they give to the writers.  My kiddos loved it and they were so eager to share their scary stories and show what tools they used.  So now we are focusing on Poetry.  I hit up Amazon and got the collection of ones for writing we focus on and away we go.

This one also inspired us to put together a Poetry Project.  I created it and it is called, "I'm A Poet & You Know It!"  You can find your own copy here or by clicking the picture below.

My 2nd share is about this:

Have you heard?  Have you seen it?  Have you read about it?

Well -- if you haven't, what are you waiting for?  This is the most fun way to get your kids interacting with information you've taught.  My hubby (7th grade History teacher) was creating one for his class one night and he showed me how it works.  We literally got our reluctant teenagers down stairs to play late one night.  They ended up having fun even though it was about TX history (grumble, grumble).  Kahoot lets you create a quick review that can be done interactively with student's own devices or laptops or whatever technology you've got.  They log in with a pin, create a nickname so they can keep track of their scores, and compete against others to get the best score with correct answers and speed.  I created one for the first time yesterday and we used it to review our Science vocabulary right before our assessment.  Here are some pics of the fun:

 There was a picture of them celebrating after the answer was shown and the the scoreboard was displayed but it was so blurry because of the amount of excitement that was in the room.  They LOVED it!  They didn't even want to go outside for recess when it was over and they asked if they could do one each day!  

What?  

They are ASKING me to review content?  

Yup!  It's that powerful.  So if you don't know about Kahoot!  You oughta!  Stop by https://getkahoot.com and find out if this can be your little tool to get this reaction.

Keep reading to check out more "You Oughta Knows" from a bunch of wonderful people below:

An InLinkz Link-up